Working the Online Crowd: Humor and Teaching with Tech
Infusing online courses with a little fun can make a big difference in engaging and motivating students.
Subject: Never run with nitroglycerin or a bucket of camel snot.
Well, you could, but it would be your funeral.
But seriously, using humorous subject lines just might be a way to engage students being taught with technology; more specifically, students in online courses. Humor doesn't always mean jokes that start, "A priest, mountain goat and ballerina enter a bar." It can be a subtle way of looking for a student's funny bone and tickling it enough to spark motivation to finish a course.
I teach for Western Governors University as a faculty member in the IT College. Technical Writing and Capstone courses are my specialty. It's an excellent gig: fantastic students with professional backgrounds working hard to earn degrees while life circles the wagons. Everything is online. It's a totally new experience for me, having spent the rest of my 30-plus years of higher education in brick-and-mortar settings.
Subject: If a wizard wants to change you into a toad, just say, "No!"
Humor is a tough nut to crack. In the face-to-face classroom, it works great to keep the troops awake and actively breathing. Effective techniques include goofy activities, oddball writing assignments and witty comments. Prodding students into a laugh proved to be a viable strategy and I was very successful at it. What really helped was reading the class's body language: those subtle shifts in attitude where I could deliver one of my dry zingers, producing the desired jovial results.
Those experiences proved to me that humor was a dominating factor when creating an interactive classroom. So, moving to the online format was a little disconcerting. Could humor achieve the same responses online as in real life? Well, I've come to find out the answer is, "Absolutely!"
Subject: If you must change a badger's diaper, always wear gloves.
The thing about working the online crowd, as with a face-to-face classroom, is that you don't need to be a standup comedian. Not everyone tells a good joke. What you need is a creative way of analyzing your students and providing the encouragement, mixed with a light-hearted delivery, to help them drop their guards and get involved. Here's what I find creating such an environment accomplishes:
Comfort. Around the third day of teaching face-to-face, my students figured me out. They decided to let down their defenses and open up. I loved that transition. My class of independent learners became a community of learners. I see the same thing happening with my online students. After a phone conversation or a few e-mails, their formal tone is replaced with a willingness to banter, counter my humorous comments with their own, or include links to things like funny YouTube videos.
Motivation. Faculty who have been in the online trenches will tell you this is a big — maybe the biggest — obstacle for students working in a virtual environment. Dry and boring content delivery can extinguish even a blazing self-governing student. When levity is thrown into the mix, students perk up and take notice. I find they start looking forward to my next e-mails in anticipation of what goofy stuff I'll offer up next.
Subject: If a priest, donkey and chipmunk enter a bar, don't use the restroom.
Creativity. Well sure, why not? Mixing things up with random, off-the-wall comments shifts a student's brain from the analytical to, "What the heck does a donkey have to do with it?" And it's not a distraction. I always include pertinent, timely material for my students. It just happens to be sandwiched between a few random thoughts. Brain scans point to enhanced activity when humor is used in instructional settings.