I am getting close to wrapping up my first on line class. I'm curious what people think about them, especially people who have taken them before.

i wasnt a fan, i need personal interaction to learn

My opinion is that they are VERY, VERY easy and a good way to save time on easy general ed req classes that you don't actually need to learn anything from.

Yeah, online courses are about getting a degree more than an education.

I had a very good experience but it was in GIS so it was a very process oriented class.

We had a message board that was well attended and did group work by networking over the phone. It was very much like my normal working environment.

I like classroom learning quite a bit and probably prefer it (I like lectures), but I feel like Penn State has done a great job with thier World Campus program.

My professors were very accessable when I needed them. I enjoyed it, though it did take an enormous amount of my time.

I felt like it was what you make of it. You can read and be engaged or you can do enough to get by. In that stead I'm not sure it's any different than the traditional classroom. If you care about it you're going to learn more than if you don't.


In a less process oriented class with more lectures, I much prefer the classroom environment, though in my GPS survey class I did listen to lectures, and then participate in a weekly classroom phone call and it was great. Had it been world history or Poly Sci or something I think I'd have prefered the classroom envrionment.

ALso I'm not sure it's possible to really learn what you need to learn in science without having labs.


For the most part, I took tests, I wrote papers and did research, I participated in class and I performed weekly projects. It wasn't vastly different than a regular class room except that I didn't have to drive there and show up at a particular time.

They wrote all of their course material as if it were a textbook. The outside links we went too were all important tools we needed to know how to use.

I just started work as an instructional designer for Bellevue University like three weeks ago, and, yeah...the whole thing is a bit of a joke. Classes are usually poorly structured, filled with outside links (Khan Academy videos? Really???), designed with a complete disconnect from any and all learning theory, and generally kind of counterintuitive. This tends to be offset by the incredible ease and a lack of rigor or depth. The ID field is packed full of people from corporate training...I'm literally the only teacher here...and nobody works very hard.

I haven't gotten my first course to build yet...it's coming up in a week or so...but I sincerely hope to fuck this shit up.

I think they take a lot of work to do well and I think at least initially a lot of schools and administrators saw it simply as a nice relatively cheap source of extra revenue.

Many institutions are figuring out how to do this much more effectively now.

If you want to learn something online, Khan Academy and MIT Open Coursewear are all you need.

Khan is good for something things, but mostly as a support tool.

This is a pretty good article on its strengths and weaknesses.

It complements the MIT Open Coursewear quite nicely.

So you're saying it's good as a support tool?

That's exactly what I'm saying, cutuphalfdead.

Curves are learning.

I have taken Learning Tree 'boot camp' classes online and they have been fine. I don't know how well this would work for math or science classes, but this is the future. College instructors will be temps, and the schools will make most of their money on volume in online classes. The "go away to college" experience is really just sex and drugs now anyway.

Hmm... wasn't the UVA president fired recently for opposing a shift in focus to online classes?

But what is the future of sex and drugs? Where are our youth to go for the appropriate sex and drug experience?

stip how many emails did you answer from students?

all of them?

I am using an online text book this time around (new for me). I assign the textbook chapter, which they have to read, do some written assignments on, and answer the study questions the book assigns. That's to make sure they have the nuts and bolts down. Obviously I answer questions. I write up a supplementary lecture that doesn't cover textbook material and deals with the thematic issues I want to cover. I also then usually post a few supplementary articles that develop these themes further they need to read, answer questions on, and respond to other students posts about. After they do that I post a long comment for each of those questions responding to the questions and ideas raised, etc.


I think I may be assigning more work than many of them expected. I'm not a fan of this format at all, since i'm a good classroom teacher and I do think a lot is lost. It's good for older and working students, but I dont' think it comes remotely close to replacing the classroom experience, and I hate that this is the direction education is trending

i think these are good for some subjects, depending on the intent of the course. i took a quantitative statistics class my last semester of college and learned a good bit. exams were timed, but you still had time to refer to the various equations and formulas as needed, which i felt helped my retention. i also felt learning the material at my own pace was helpful, instead of quickly scribbling down equations in a classroom setting just to keep up.

my former university will actually be offering an online capstone history class starting in the spring. i'm kicking around the idea of taking it to turn my history minor into a major (which might help if i decide to pursue graduate work eventually), but i'm not sure how a traditional seminar course will work in that format. probably a lot of message boarding, i suspect.

Then why are you here?