Note: The following are my Diigo’d notes from the blog entry cited below. They should not be interpreted as MY writing, but instead, notes taken that I consider worth keeping.

• Learning from Reflections – Issues in Building Quality Online Courses

  tags: OnlineLearning, research-onlinelearning

  • “It takes both technical competence and effective pedagogy to teach in an e-learning environment” (Southern Regional Education Board, 2001, p. 2). In addition, an instructor’s attitude, motivation, and true commitment toward instruction delivery via distance education programs affects much of the quality of instruction. An instructor’s approach to instruction will depend upon whether he/she views the e-learning environment as one in which technology is used to replicate traditional pedagogical methods or to improve instruction (Valentine, 2002).
  • Reading the literature (e.g., Collison, Elbaum, Haavind, & Tinker, 2000; Palloff & Pratt, 2001; Salmon, 2000) about the online learning environment is a first step in becoming an online teacher.
  • Courses should feature strong professor-student and student-student interactions, in-depth engagement with course materials, and faculty/student technical support. Evidence of academic maturity, such as critical thinking and synthesis of knowledge areas, is prese
  • “Good online teaching encourages student-faculty contact, cooperation among students, active learning, provides prompt feedback, communicates high expectations, and respects diverse talents and learning styles.”
  • “Online students must take responsibility for their own learning …Success can be measured by their commitment, ability to write well, and to manage their time. They need to recognize that an online course is not easier than a face-to-face course.”
  • The success of an online course is affected by its pedagogical richness, which is the degree to which a course addresses learning styles, use of media, and interactivity with content, testing and feedback, and collaboration. Other success factors include content quality, delivery support functions for instructors, administrators, and students, including those with vision and hearing impairments; pedagogically driven instructional design with well-defined objectives, web site usability factors, and technological factors (Sonwalkar, 2002).
  • Students stated that a sign of good content is when students continue to contribute after a course is over.
  • Students found that an entire course should be completed before its implementation and pre-tested because once the class starts, course delivery, management, and communication with students might consume more than double the time required for a traditional class, an observation with which this author agrees.
  • According to Tinker and Haavind (1997), the capacity of the software and network strongly influences the quality of interactions and the ability to build functioning virtual communities. Technologies that allow high interactivity seem necessary to allow high interaction (Roblyer & Ekhaml, 2000).
  • Using multiple instruction delivery systems in a single course might be ill advised.
  • Sufficient orientation time needs to be built into instruction design for students to use the features of the system, as well.
  • Elements of instructional design include a learning model, selection of objectives that address the highest levels in Bloom’s Taxonomy, and application of cognitive and learning theories such as Gagné’s conditions of learning. Design also includes a detailed syllabus, assignments that promote interaction and collaboration, assessments that guard against cheating, implementation of strategies to ensure instructor-student and student-student interaction and community building, and provision for course closure.
  • According to Sonwalkar (2001), cognitive-based learning models that can be used for online asynchronous learning include apprenticeship, incidental, inductive, deductive, and discovery. The apprenticeship model is a building-block approach to presenting concepts procedurally. The incidental model is based on presenting events to introduce concepts and provoke questions. An inductive approach introduces concepts using a set of specific examples that pertain to a broader topic area; whereas, a deductive approach encourages learners to identify trends through presentation of broad data. The discovery method is inquiry-based, and was the learning model of choice for the NSU course.
  • A detailed, well-written syllabus will leave no doubt as to instructor intent and student expectations. The syllabus might contain the course description, learning objectives and outcomes, assignments, grading policy/rubrics, university/class policies for academic honesty, course-related resources, and reference materials (Muirhead, 2001). Instructor contact information and virtual office hours with a statement of days on which students can expect responses to e-mail or other instructor feedback enhances communication and might alleviate student frustration regarding response-time turn around.
  • Assignments should contain due dates, point values or their relationship to the course grading system, and an alternative method for assignment submission for when technology fails. To help organize incoming assignments or e-mail into folders, this author suggested a standard file name format for students to use.
  • Consider collaborative assignments revolving around discussion groups, role-plays, seminars, sharing assignment solutions, collaborative compositions, debates, simulations, case studies, brainstorming, forums, and group projects (Pitt & Clark, 1997).
  • Neufeld (1997) found posting student work on a web site increased participation in lectures and group tutorials and fostered better performance on assignments.
  • Successful online courses have low student/faculty ratios (University of Illinois, 1999). Hiltz (1995) recommends class sizes of 10 to a maximum of 30 because interactions take a great deal of instructor time
  • With fewer than 10 active students, interactions may be insufficient to develop ideas in depth.
  • Students are required to communicate with the instructor and instructional activities require them to work with one another and outside experts and share results. Technologies allow two-way exchanges of text information. Video or videoconferencing technologies allow synchronous voice and visual communication among participants. By the end of the course, 75% of students in the class are initiating interactions voluntarily
  • Students also need a social-oriented chat thread to assist in building community and to discuss assignments, technical issues, and other group-related concerns, which is apart from threads in which they are expected to participate. According to Alley and Jansak (2001), such a “cyber café” also assuages feelings of isolation, helps to minimize a student’s potential frustration, and is an application to help maintain student motivation.
  • Instructor reply to student postings can stimulate dialogue and promote further exploration. However, instructor reply to questions can also be perceived as the final word on a topic, and might stifle or cut off discussion. According to Muilenburg and Berge (2000), if ongoing discussions are going well, the best action for instructors is to take no action to add their comments until conversation is waning, at which time an instructor might summarize key points and ask another prompting question to recharge discussion. Making content summaries takes time and their usefulness in a constructivist context has been questioned, however (Burge, Laroque, & Boak, 2000).
  • According to Alley and Jansak (2001), assigning discussion board threads to student teams for moderation is also a technique to provide students with high levels of feedback without exhausting the instructor. This author found that asking students to summarize a discussion also helped them to analyze and synthesize the body of knowledge presented by their peers.
  • Students expected course closure. One stated, “Communication and follow-up from the online instructor through the final grade is essential to the development of confidence in and respect for online learning.” They expected e-mail with a final grade in each mini-course and details of how the grade was determined.
  • A course web site should contain chunked material, which is a metacognitive feature that helps to minimize learners’ feelings of being overwhelmed by content (Jones, Farquhar, & Surry, 1995)
  • Within each model, media selection provides the cognitive pathways to learning and ranges from simple to complex–text, graphics, audio, video, animation, and simulation (Sonwalkar, 2001).
  • Online learning is not just about putting course materials on the web. Authorship involves creating a collaborative learning environment that supports knowledge acquisition, inquiry and questioning between faculty and students, individual learning styles, social interactions, and authentic assessment.

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