I was recently watching an Aspen Ideas Festival session about the tradeoffs between privacy and security, and it made me think about the tradeoffs we as faculty need to make daily within our classrooms. I think education, as with many other occupations, is a tradeoff-centric position. We need to balance our needs and sanity with the needs and desires of our students. Specifically, this can relate to the grading of assignments as well as the application of policies within the classroom setting.

There seems to be a delicate balance between encouraging student progress and providing edifying and useful feedback, and although these are not diametric aspects, building student confidence and being honest about a students' ability can be a difficult course to navigate. There are perennial issues concerning displaying grace to our students' unique situations while exhibiting an equally applied discipline structure, especially regarding late or incomplete assignments (Junk, Deringer, & Junk, 2011). Although I want my students to succeed, I also want them to have an acute understanding of their current abilities. The grace/discipline paradigm is important as it can affect both faculty members and students. Leaning too much toward one direction can hurt the faculty member, harm the student, or make both parties unhappy and unfulfilled.

The online environment increases the difficulty of tradeoffs as we have a fleeting and tangential connection to our students (4, 7, or 8 weeks per course), which does not allow a deep connection between the student and the faculty in many instances (Bekmeier-Feuerhahn & Eichenlaub, 2010). This might necessitate that we have some type of tradeoff paradigm developed prior to a course beginning. We want to educate our students to help them to succeed in our course and their future courses, while we also want to grade their work based on merit. A central issue is how we balance these two desires: building student confidence and providing honest feedback. The ability to accomplish this nuanced task is a cornerstone of teaching, and I am curious to hear how everyone does this.

Thanks,

Eric

Reference:

Bekmeier-Feuerhahn, S., & Eichenlaub, A. (2010). What makes for trusting relationships in

online communication? Journal of Communication Management, 14(4), 337-355. doi:10.1108/13632541011090446

Junk, V., Deringer, N., & Junk, W. (2011). Techniques to engage the online learner. Research In

Higher Education Journal, 101-15. Retrieved from http://www.aabri.com/rhej.html