Start
For the traditional course structure, it basicly consists of these parts: common organization elements for the course; course credit hour; how many people enroll in the course; the type of the course. These elements give a basic structure for online courses design.
Personal thinking
In the essay, author states that the open course from Dave Cormier have more than two thousands of people enrolled. I was wondering, how the professor evaluate these students by traditional scale format? Use assignments? But there are more than two thousands of students, it is very hard for professor to evaluate each students assignment carefuly. By using quiz format is also inapproapriate. As it mentioned before, it is a online course. Doing quiz or exam online is easy to cheat. Although there are people who do not need this course for credit, there are still some students who use this course as a credit course. So, it is not fair to give credit to these kinds of students who shows no real efforts to this course.
When design a online courses, we need to figure out what institution we are at. There is a difference for higher educationa or young adult teach. The most important thing in my opinion is we need to figure out who is our students.
After I review these professors’ case, I found that they have some similarities. First of all, they make their sites very clear or funny for students. A clear and funny sites may attract students use them. Personally speaking, I feel stress when I need to use a boring, messy website to have a online study. Also, and I think is the most important part, is professors give a open space for students to discuss. This place can always have some amazing idea. Students who afraid face-to-face discussion may talk online. This is also the advantage for discuss online-everybody can talk at the same time.
Reference
Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 76-108)
Thanks for the post, Jason. I agree that all online discussions are great for hearing from all students and allowing more “shy” students the ability to think and formulate their responses.
In your post, it’d help to include the name of the author in the post to clarify what you are discussing. Write your post for an open audience that doesn’t know what you are talking about. As I have suggested, have one clear message for your blog post. What would you say your message is here? What are you hoping we go away with?
Your comments around assessment and cheating are challenging. Most MOOCs rely on quizzes. Another common form of assessment is peer assessment. Cheating is a concern, but less of a concern as these courses primarily exist for people to learn. If someone is going to cheat at an open course, it would defeat the purpose of taking the course as a credential from an open course or MOOC doesn’t mean much. It means something, but definitely doesn’t carry the weight of closed online courses. That may change over time, but your concern about cheating would need to be addressed.
It is true that it is difficult for professors in a course of 2,000 students to assess each student carefully, and often a TA will help the instructor with the assessment assignment. It is very important for professors how to be fair. Also a clear outline can give students a lot of help.
I agree with you that there are issues of equity in online courses, but I think this equity is more a result of academic misconduct on the part of the students themselves. Both open learning and distributed learning are just tools to aid learning for the students and teachers. In addition, I believe that quizzes are only meant to help students consolidate their knowledge, not just assess their learning ability.
Hi Jiacheng,
I agree with you that funny and clear resources are important when teachers choose the course materials. They arouse students’ interests in further knowing more about this topic.
I have a little advice for your in-text citation. In your blog, you like to use “author”. instead, I think you can illustrate “Major” and when the year directly. It is more concise for readers to get where this idea from.
Hey Jiacheng,
Great post! I really enjoyed reading it.
Your question on how the professor evaluate these students by traditional scale format is really interesting. I never actually thought about this topic when reading the Major article. I do agree also it’s unfair to give credit to people who didn’t put in the effort. Since it is easy (I also agree) that it’s easy to cheat online, of the many challenges with online education is how we will prevent such measures when there’s no physical solutions as their was with traditional learning strategies. Interesting to take note of.
I also agree that face to face my be intimidating and that talking online allows student’s who are more shy to be able to participate and ask questions without the fear and comfortableness take over and ruin their experience. I agree with that part of your article.
Overall I enjoy reading your topic 2 discussion Jiacheng! Have a good day.