On-line Courses

[nakia]

In the spring, I will be teaching an on-line course for UVA. We will meet as a class three times, but other than that everything will be handled electronically. The class is Social Foundations of Education (so it's history, philosophy, and sociology stuff).

I've taught the class before, but never on-line. I was wondering if anyone out there has taught or taken an on-line course and could offer suggestions as to conduct, content, and assessment. What sort of assignments should I give? How should I make sure folks are reading the stuff I ask them? How do we conduct discussions of the texts, etc?

The program I am using is Blackboard, if that helps.

Thanks!

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Nakia, I can hook you up with a few people I know who are taking classes online right now and work at UVA. They can probably give you some pointers.

 

[Knoxgamer]

While attending UTK I took a few online courses that used Blackboard. I would recommend weekly online quizzes over the reading material, with a brief discussion at the beginning of the course regarding UVA's Honor Code.

For this particular course I would also recommend short or long essay assignments. Ideally a pair of long essays that require putting together a large amount of material discussed in the book. This way even the laziest students are forced to skim and take in a large amount of material.

I would also encourage frequent discussion on the class message boards, but it has been my experience that few students participate on class message boards even in online courses.

Hope that helps.

 

[der_kluge]

I am getting my master's degree in Information systems from an online program based out of Birmingham. (yes, it's accredited). This particular school only offers programs in computer science, information systems, and business.

This program may be slightly different since there are no schedules for classes. So, with moving, and instability of my previous job, it took my almost a year to finish my first class. Conversely, I finished the second class in 1 month. I see people recognized online for finishing as many as 11 classes in a 6 month period. That's insane, btw.

But more to your point, the work varies. For the first class, there were numerous assignments broken out into reading assignments and work assignments. One of the pointers I got early on was to basically skip the reading assignments, which did help a great deal. I was taking a lot of time to read all of the book, and it didn't really buy me much. The assignments for that class (organizational behaviors) were all case studies. So you had to infer the answers from the text. So, you'd have to at least read the relevant sections in the text to be able to intelligently answer the question. There were two progress tests that were comprised of multiple-choice questions. A lot of these could be found almost word-for-word in the book, but a few had to be inferred, and some of them were tricky. The finals have to be proctored by a third party, in my case the local library is doing them. Incidentally, I have the final for my second class tonight.

The assignments for the second class (database concepts) were more work-oriented, so in that one I had to actually create data models, write query statements, and other things. The third assignment was insane, and took me probably almost 40 hours to complete. Again, the final is proctored, and like the first one, includes multiple choice, and essay questions. As far as I can tell, all finals are open book. Even still, it took me a little over 3 hours to complete the first final. Even if I had read the book from cover to cover twice I would have still had to look up all those answers. They covered obscure topics that I had to find in the text. Thank god for the thorough index. I needed a 90 on the final to keep an A in the class, and I pretty much abandoned that notion after I started struggling with the first 2 questions (out of 40 multiple choice questions).