| | I taught my first online class last semester. I expected it to go well. I work online, I collaborate with people from all over the world online, I accept and grade papers by email all the time -- why shouldn't it work well? I worked hard on my course and was responsive to my students and did my best, and I expected the online class to work just as well as a physical world class.
But it really didn't. I taught a face to face and an online section of the same class at the same time. My online students had a much harder time and just didn't improve their skills the way the face to face class did.
Some said to me, "What did you expect? If they had time to take a class, they would be in the classroom." A group of recent college grads, all overachievers, laughingly assured me that they had never done the online work for their classes. There seemed to be general agreement among the people I talked with that online classes just aren't as good, and everybody knows that, so I should just get used to it.
But I really want to do better in the fall. So I'm taking an online course this term. I figure the experience of being a student in an online class will give me useful insight into distance learning from that point of view.
Essentially, we do the work in our text books, zip up the files, and send them in. There are videos and PowerPoints available, but when I checked the first ones out I found that they were covering the same things that are in the books, so I ignore them. I wouldn't skip classes, even if I decided in the first class that they weren't that useful, so I may be seeing the same behavior in myself that I saw in my online students, in contrast to my face to face class.
We're required to visit the discussion room a lot, and there's actually a lot of chatting going on there, though much of it is "Help! This is hard!" Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't add to the experience for me.
I'm going to write about the experience from time to time during the course, and then next fall as I teach online classes again, and I'd be interested to know what you think, too.
I just read this morning that distance learning is being suggested as a plan in case of a flu pandemic, and of course many schools are using it to cut costs. It's becoming more popular in colleges, and it certainly seems like a good idea.
But only if it's possible to make distance learning a comparable experience to classroom learning.
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| | Posted 6/4/2009 5:33 AM - 45 Views - 2 eProps - 2 comments
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