 For me, the difference between teaching in a blended format, rather than teaching face-to-face is that it's significantly more multi-dimensional. I've been able to, for example, in the context of this class, bring in what we're calling virtual visitors, who are experts in the field, who we have taught through, who we've spoken to via a Skype-like software, a more sophisticated Skype, which has allowed us to have experts from Montreal, from Edinburgh, from London visit us in class. And that's something that has come to me because of my association with the Center for Pedagogical Innovation here, and the fact that I'm teaching this course. And we then have captured those interviews so that they can be materials for the learning in the subsequent iterations of the class. So it's really broadened my thinking about what I can use as teaching resources and teaching tools. In teaching online versus teaching face-to-face, something that was quite different for me was how I prepared for the course going in. Rather than having some ideas about where I was going and letting the lectures evolve as I went, which I typically do or have done in my on-campus teaching, I found with the online courses that there was a much greater degree of planning. With the massive open online course, we essentially had the course complete before we ever engaged with a student. So it was mostly in the can before any student started engaging with the material. So having the course planned and that lack of flexibility to respond to students' questions and concerns in a significant way to really adjust what we were going to do going forward was quite a difference. When people compare online teaching to face-to-face teaching, they often in my mind actually over-exaggerate the difference. They'll say things like there's an intimacy in a face-to-face setting that you can't get in an online setting and I immediately think of the match.coms and all the ways in which people are meeting each other and having really deep personal relationships online. So I don't accept some of the exaggerated differences, but it is a different medium and it does push you to think in a different way. You cannot be quite as back and forth. You can't be quite as back and forth in the modern 500 seat lecture hall either. But you do really have to think about how to engage, how to somehow bring in the student body and make them feel warm and connected and fuzzy when you're not all sitting in the same room. And that's certainly not impossible, but it does push us to think in creative ways and pushes us to come up with new techniques. There's lots of differences between teaching online and teaching face-to-face. For me, the biggest thing when teaching online is that I try to use many of the principles that have always guided my teaching. So I try to make sure that the students have space to talk in their own voice. I try to figure out ways that the students can be engaged with the material so that there's the development of a learning community. And so in a face-to-face classroom that's fairly easy because everybody's sharing the same space. Everybody has the exact same experience of coming in. They sit in the same chair every week and they get to know one another in an intimate way, I guess, within a classroom. So I try to, when I'm teaching online, I try to take those principles and as much as possible translate them to the online environment. So it's challenging in the sense that in some ways the anonymity of online allows students a sense of freedom to maybe say things that they didn't say within the classroom. So there's benefits and drawbacks to that in the sense that students are less inhibited in terms of maybe expressing extreme opinions in the online environment. But at the same time what I've found is that students who I know are a little reticent to speak within a face-to-face classroom are some of the biggest contributors to the online environment, which is really great. There are so many differences. The first one would be that I don't have to be on the stage so I can rerecord my lectures until almost perfect. I can also revisit the content of my own lectures to answer questions so they're more directly related to the student experience. Also, the course can run even though I'm away on a conference or if my children are sick for instance, so that's a big advantage. For me it was an awakening, it was almost a pedagogical epiphany. I had to rethink my role, my role as a teacher, my role as a thinker in a very humbling manner. It was about making sense of all the information that's already available online, helping the student in organizing the findings, making sense of what's out there. So organize a meaning-making system for the student and that's very humbling because the information is already there in a variety of forms. I love teaching in both environments because of their unique challenges and opportunities because you can do some fantastic things in both environments. One of my own observations when I was teaching face-to-face is that I'm a talker, I like to engage learners with on-the-fly kinds of conversations, I can prompt a classroom conversation based off some fascinating research that's done in dinosaurs for example and I can grasp almost immediately and I think educators have this skill is they can sense when students are not understanding something and they can adapt on-the-fly literally as the class is taking place. The types of conversations, off-the-cuff conversations that can take place in a classroom, there's an energy there and it's really real and I feed off of that. And you get to learn about the people in your classroom in ways that I would say are different and you can build interesting student-teacher relationships because you recognize those people and we tend to associate very clearly with who that person is and what they're bringing into the classroom in a face-to-face environment. Things are a little bit different online. I don't lecture online, it's a facilitation role. The modules and lessons that are designed have all been planned in advance. The engagement therefore is a little bit different. There's a little bit more of a separation. The learners are primarily engaging with the material and the activities that I've designed or I've worked in conjunction with a team to design and so there's a little bit of a separation and that means that the activities can be really, really, really good but I don't necessarily have that immediate feedback when each individual learner is not learning a particular content area. I need to dig a little bit deeper, I need to probe some more and so that's a challenge, right? I like that because there's all kinds of techniques that you can do that to do. The other aspect, because students are interacting with the content, it takes a little bit of a shift and change, right? And that means control. In a classroom, the control aspect of being in control is something that I have to work to relinquish. In an online setting, right away by design because it's more student-centered, I know I'm reaching my students in a more personal and meaningful way and that I find that very satisfying.