MEET OUR FACULTY
Elad Granot, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Nance College of Business Administration
Online learning is phenomenal at addressing the needs of the business, working, and non-traditional student. Many of my students can’t be in a face-to-face class because they work full-time, travel a lot or have other problems preventing them from being able to attend in-person.
This is where the online learning platform comes in and adapts to different life situations and learners. It allows me the flexibility to allow them to continue working in a course and to not lose any ground compared to their classmates. For example, I am in touch with them at odd hours. If they email me at 11 at night, and I’m right by my laptop, I’ll email them back right there and then.
When I first started teaching online, one of my biggest fears was that I would somehow become disconnected from my students. I like to get to know their aspirations and career plans. Once I saw how flexible the eLearning software platform was and how user friendly it was to both faculty and students, I designed the course in a way where I actually increased interaction and connectedness. Because now they have each one of their profiles on the course website and everybody can see everybody else’s life story. This is something not necessarily possible in a live class.
Having the ability to link all over to different resources on the Internet is one of the things I like most about teaching online. If we discuss an issue like a company’s marketing strategy or their advertising campaign, I can link immediately to that company’s website and to their latest advertisement. This type of hyper linking gives students multiple perspectives which they then can discuss in more detail on the discussion boards. I like it when the discussions get away from me and the students start engaging each other and there is no need for me to nudge them on. I think the future of higher education is precisely this sort of social collaboration and exchange.
Students are very vocal about telling me they appreciate the flexibility of my courses. This is a very positive thing to hear as an instructor. They appreciate the fact that they can submit assignments and participate in discussions, not necessarily on some sort of strict schedule or syllabus. We design courses by modules and usually the modules are five to seven days. Essentially, you have a week to participate and engross yourself in the course content. If you can’t do it on Monday or Tuesday, you certainly can catch up by Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
Ultimately, I think that the important thing about teaching in general is trying to maximize the students’ learning experience. Not just convey the material, but to make sure that they understand its contextual importance, and actually take it and apply it. We’re a business school and we teach them how to be business people. They need to take whatever we teach them and implement it in their careers. For that to happen, there needs to be a degree of feedback that needs to happen constantly. So, if I ask for feedback and I get it, I implement it right then, on the spot.
In Marketing, we talk about what is known as a ‘segment of one.’ I can actually teach a class of 30 people, one person at a time. This allows me a high degree of interaction, flexibility and adaptability to their situation, and to their demands. The most important thing in online courses, and I think in anything really, is communication.
