Welcome

Online Learning Cafe´

Welcome to the Online Learning Cafe´: Liberating & Transforming Education through Online Learning.

Have you recently started teaching online? Are you looking for advice, suggestions, activities and tips for teaching online courses? Are you a university professor, adjunct, junior college professor or K-12 teacher seeking guidance about teaching online? Are you looking for practical solutions and information you can use right now to improve your online courses? If this sounds like you, Welcome to the Online Learning Cafe´.  I hope this blog provides you the support you need to create and deliver terrific online courses.

Online Learning Cafe´seeks to be a practical guide to designing and delivering solid online courses.  My recommendations will be based upon valid theoretical ideas and real world experience.   In this blog, I share my views based on over 8 years of real world experience as a full time online teacher.  I have made a ton of mistakes and I have had some successes teaching online courses.  I am eager to help and learn from others about how to teach online classes effectively. So grab a cup of coffee and get comfortable. Let’s talk about how we can transform education and improve the world through online teaching and learning.

Over the last 8 to 10 years, I have had many questions and have made many mistakes teaching courses online. My students and colleagues can testify to that.  I am slowly learning from these mistakes and how to teach, design and deliver online courses more effectively. Apparently, I’m a slow learner and I have discovered I can learn most effectively by sharing with others what I am experiencing.  Through this blog, I hope to share some of my own real stories direct from the front lines of my online teaching experiences. I hope that you can profit from my mistakes. I hope we can share our journey together as we seek for authentic and creative ways to improve student learning through our online courses.

Just to be up front, as this blog grows, I plan to slowly, professionally and unobtrusively convert this into a commercial blog site to pay the bills.  I will add affiliate text links to books, magazines, ebooks, and eventually discrete ads related to teaching online courses.  I will not overwhelm the site with ads.  The primary goal will and always will be to share content about online teaching and learning. My goal is not to get rich off of this enterprise, but to gain some compensation to save for retirement which hopefully is a long way off.  Hey, the recession hit my 403(b) retirement fund pretty hard and I have to take up the slack somehow.  :-)  Over time I plan to provide a free newsletter about teaching online courses and market other professional products that I plan to create and sell through this site.  Who knows what the future holds.  I am just getting started and I invite you to come along.  I promise it will be worth the trip.

Cool Beans

Is it time for a coffee break yet?  Just one sip…aye, what a fine brew this one is–just flown in from Colombia and freshly ground for my favorite web cafe′, Panera Bread located in the heart of suburban Plano, Texas.  Plano, Texas…now that’s another story for another time. :-)

Now that’s out of the coffee bag, let’s get back to online learning…

I have been frustrated, challenged and discouraged about how to set up my online courses, interact with students online, manage the sometimes huge workload of online teaching, work with students with a variety of learning needs, balance my online teaching demands with my duties of my traditional brick and mortar university and balance my large workload with my personal life. Yet, I love every minute of it. In my over 25 years of university teaching experience I have never been so challenged, stimulated and committed. I have a passion for online learning, designing and delivering online courses. Many would say I am driven or obsessed by it. Frankly, I love it. I think it is probably the most stimulating experience of my entire professional career. It is perhaps the most significant defining moment of my career.

I have found some solutions that work for me and I continue to look for even better solutions for designing and teaching online courses. If you are just getting started in online teaching and are creating your first online course, I would love to hear about your situation, try to provide answers to some questions and learn together how to teach online courses more effectively. If you have been teaching online for awhile, I would love to hear about your experiences designing your own online classes—what has worked for you, what hasn’t, what questions you still have and the purpose and vision you have for teaching online courses. I invite beginners and advanced online teachers alike to join with me to figure out how to use this new learning technology effectively.  Come on in!  Get a cup of coffee and let’s talk about online learning.

So let’s get right down to it. The purpose of this blog is to construct a vital learning community that provides much needed and often absent dialogue and guidance about the realities, challenges and ultimately, the rewards and benefits of online teaching and learning for K-12 teachers, adjunct faculty, as well as, full time college and university professors.

But this blog is not about online learning for its own sake; it is about transforming education and helping students learn more effectively. It is about emancipating teachers and students to break out of the restrictive boxes that confine us and keep us from discovering positive learning solutions. It is about education reform so that the next generation can transform and truly emancipate our society to solve and address the major injustices and problems of our world. The future of education is promising. I have never been so optimistic about the ability of education to transform our world for the greater good.

The stakes are high! The rewards may take a while to come back to us. Eventually, if we stick with it, I believe this sometimes long painful journey to learn how to teach online effectively will be well worth the trip. Subscribe to this blog, make comments and join with me to discover and learn creative, meaningful and compelling ways to teach online.

Again, Welcome to the Online Learning Cafe´–Online Teaching & Learning for the Online Instructor

Diane C. Gregory, Ph.D.

dianegregory@onlinelearningcafe.com