How to Take these Classes

We call our teachers "Learning Guides" here at Pionline.

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There is a "Learning Guide" for each course. These learning guides are people. Specifically, myself and a few other humans who are seasoned veterans of the touring production industry. These Learning Guides oversee their classes and students, answer all forms of questions and provide support and feedback as students progress through the class. The Learning Guide will also moderate a forum for each topic and subject in the class. Forums are a post and respond type of message board. Yet, they are always active in real-time, so they are like a slow-motion conversation that the Learning Guide can visit several times throughout the day and respond to.

Many of us are professionals who spend an inordinate amount of time at our desks behind computers, so we constantly keep an eye on this stuff. The advantage here is that we use these persistent forums as a "blackboard" for extended teaching. Students can log in anytime and review all of the information in the class and the logs of the chats and extended classroom training sessions as well as these forums. Students post their questions and observations in the forums, and the Learning guide will respond with answers and more questions and pointers to further reading and learning. That way, many students can benefit from the questions, answers, and responses of those posted.

The Learning Guide for that course will set a schedule and lead at least one online, interactive webinar-style class sessions per week. We limit these online class sessions to 60-90 minutes apiece. We use Google Meet because Google will support a large "group" voice chat, and the quality is quite good.

These interactive sessions may sometimes be text chat only or video chat or voice chat, but these sessions are one of the most important aspects of the course. These sessions allow students to interact directly with us and get real-time answers to their toughest questions. Students need to be self-motivated for the rest of the week and complete their reading and paperwork on time to receive their full grades. There will be weekly quizzes for a grade. The qizzes are interactive and can be taken multiple times to reinforce outcomes. There is a final for the entire course that will be extremely challenging. Yup, just like a real school!

The Learning Guides will be responsible for issuing final grades for classes and students. They will have little leeway to influence grades. These classes are based on participation and delivering the assigned documents and homework. There are grades in a few classes that are subjective choices by the Learning Guide. But they are very few. Ultimately, student work and input is 90% of the grade.

There will be assignments to author specific types of production documents, and these assignments will be uploaded to the forums for the Learning Guide and classmates to review. An essential part of this program involves students interacting with one another in the process of mutual discovery.