Teaching History Online to Today's Community College Students

Abstract

When I began working toward a Ph.D. in twentieth-century U.S. history in 1996, I saw my future self as do, I imagine, many graduate students training as college faculty: lecturing, chalk in hand, to a group of note-taking students. Or, perhaps, seated among a group of enthusiastic young adults who have come to college prepared for the rigors of higher education and arrive at class daily with their assignments complete. Th e reality of my personal experience has been quite diff erent, infl uenced largely by the increased use of technology in the college classroom and the growth of online learning. Teaching U.S. history to community college students in the twenty-fi rst century, I have discovered, necessitates a fl exible approach to students’ learning styles and a willingness to embrace technology in both the on-campus and online classrooms. My journey into the use of technology in the classroom began simply with a computer and a projector. No longer did I “just talk” at the blackboard; I moved beyond telling the students what I wanted them to learn to also showing them. For each lesson, I displayed artwork, photographs, or maps to illustrate the key points. Th ough I have no quantitative evidence that my students’ work improved, I sensed immediately upon adopting this practice that the classroom atmosphere was changed for the better. A political cartoon from the War of 1812, for example, could be the foundation for a class discussion on British military relations with Native Americans. No matter if no one in the class had noticed the image in the textbook: I had placed it in front of them during class, and its presence alone fostered discussion. I embraced the use of technology in the classroom as a powerful tool for learning: a way to address diff erent learning styles (such as visual, verbal, or auditory) to reach students who might have tuned out more traditional modes of lecturing. Still, I never anticipated that one day I would be teaching entire courses online. Nor did I imagine a day when my students would have the capacity to access an infi nite amount of data in the palms of their hands. Yet in fall 2008, my second year as a tenuretrack assistant professor at the Community College of Rhode Island, the department