Dispositions To Complete

Dispositions To Complete

The institution that I teach online courses for and have taught in face-to-face classrooms for almost a decade now has long had as part of its program the advocacy of dispositions as part of the recipe for student success upon graduation. Each semester, instructors for each course being taught are required to assess their students on a variety of dispositions or approaches to their program, to each other, to the faculty and so forth.  I was a prime mover for the efficacy of that system of appraisal / evaluation because it provided me with an opportunity to advocate certain behaviours and values to the students in the program. I could talk to them about the relationship between their hoped for future profession and their attitudes towards each other, class assignments, participation in the program, professional behaviours and so forth.  Every semester, I got the students to sign contracts agreeing to adhere to the professional standards and behaviours that were the outward manifestations of their inner dispositions.  I had to constantly help new faculty understand what the dispositions were all about and how to complete the forms and file them with our central office staff.  So, why am I commented on this now? I got an email with the dispositions spread sheet attached from the office with the request to complete the required document and return it at my earliest convenience. The trouble is though that I have a handful of students online and I have absolutely NO WAY of legitimately completing almost all of the fields.  What surprises me is that I would even be asked, as an adjunct teaching an online class, to complete the same set of dispositions as I would have received had I been in a classroom once a week seeing this students in front of me. It occurs to me  that, despite all the time that has passed since we first started to teach online courses, and that would be at least 15 years, if not more, so little has changed, so little has evolved, so much of what we do has not made the accommodation in the slightest bit for the major difference between face-to-face and virtual teaching.  How do we even begin to talk about education in the 21st century unless we start to talk about the very real differences in some ways between the two?