For week 4.
From China to America, I'm getting closer and closer to online learning.
When I was taking the course of Open and Distance Education in SISU, we studied a case of Beijing Institute of Technology. Online courses in that case focus more on the organization and presentation of learning contents but lack synchronous interaction between teachers and students. There are technical methods to ensure students' online learning time, for instance, the web page will be blocked and a dialog box ejects when user does not operate for over 15 minutes.
This semester I take an online course in IU. Students and the teacher have regular meeting time online, using Adobe Connect Meeting. This software is effective for class meeting but problem occurs to group discussion. Because the class is composed of both on-campus students and distance students, it's hard to reach an agreement on time and individual habit of browsing forum in OnCourse varies largely. Our group has had two or three discussions already but every time we came to a conclusion that we need a meeting next time again. Students are struggling to find a way of effective and efficient group discussion.
Making a conclusion from these two experiences, I feel that the development of online courses is in bad need of theoretical study and technical support. As I see from the article Online Learning as a Strategic Plan, faculty invest additional time and effort in online as compared to face-to-face teaching and learning. Articles in this week talk about various factors affecting online teaching and courses and their present situation, but few of them introduce and analyze online courses in a designer's perspective.
There are really many things affecting the development and sustainability of online courses other than the designer. Strategic decisions, financial investment, technical trends, incentives for faculty, academic resourses and so forth, designer needs quite many things to develop and sustain a successful online course. I remember an interesting saying from my undergraduate teacher, developing online courses also has its fashion trends in choosing what kind of techniques to use. That is proved by statistics but I can find it now ha... Faculty involved in the survey believe that teaching or developing an online course requires more time and effort than for a comparable face-to-face offering. In short term it must be so but I think in the long run, it can benefit larger amount of students in a comparatively low cost.
Actually I'd like to know more about online course design. Ha, that may be one of my future objectives in absorbing knowledge here.
Relevant articles:
Association of Public and Land Grant Universities. (2009, August). Online Learning as a
Strategic Asset. Volume 1: A Resource for Campus Leaders.
http://www.sloanconsortium.org/sites/default/files/APLU_online_strategic_asset_vol1-1_1.pdf
and Volume 2: The Paradox of Faculty Voices: Views and Experiences with Online
Learning. http://www.sloanconsortium.org/sites/default/files/APLU_online_strategic_asset_vol2-1.pdf
(summary page: http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/APLU_Reports)
Hi,Yaya,can you give me more details about the example you mentioned at the begining of your blog, because I never been a online course in china, so were are the students on compus? what grade are they? undergraduate or graduate? is the course full online course or blended course?
ReplyDeleteYes, sometimes, it's difficult for learners to reach a concensus in online group discussion, espeically frequently misunderstanding each others ideas via interactive technologies, such as breeze.
ReplyDeleteHowever, we still are able to take advantages of online courses, such as convenience; particularly, the online community forum enables students to think about the peers' thoughts and ideas in deeper ways in order to make the interaction and discussion more meaningful and decent.
Jason