Practicum Reflection

As a student at Lenoir Rhyne in their Online Teaching and Instructional Design certificate program, I am required to do a practicum. This practicum is evidence of the ability to use the material learned throughout the program in a real virtual environment.

My practicum started off at North Carolina Virtual Public Schools (NCVPS). Here I participated in half of a 16 week program where I learned the ins and outs of teaching at an actual virtual school. This was a very informative 8 weeks. I learned about the importance of constant communication; we were required to learned how to create the most effective class announcements that were to be posted daily. I learned about the importance of anonymity; it is imperative that teachers keep there students identity anonymous due to the child identity protection laws. I also learned about creative commons. As educators, we tend to reuse a lot of material that has previously been created by someone else. That is why it important that we understand what material has open rights to share, use, and build upon. Otherwise we may end up in a lawsuit when we genuinely may or may not have had any idea we were in the wrong.

The second 8 weeks of my practicum was held at my current place of employment; North Carolina Connections Academy (NCCA). NCCA is a public charter school that is 100% online. I started working with them in January of 2018. It was an amazing experience. I was able to use the material I learning in my program as well as through my internship with NCVPS. We had to ensure we had constant communication with out students through use of webmail and phone calls. We were also required to hold Live Lesson (LL) sessions at least once per week per course. Fortunately, I only taught one course, math 1. One of the major issues that I ran into as an instructor at NCCA was getting all of my students to attend the LL sessions held on Wednesdays. As a department, our most successful session was the one session that we made mandatory by attaching a quiz grade to it. Although we had major success with this, we are working toward finding ways to achieve the same success without taking away the flexibility that an online course offers.

I plan to remain in the virtual world for the rest of my life, if I can help it. I thoroughly enjoy teaching online. I am excited to see what more I can learn as I continue to expand my knowledge of online teaching.