The high cost of gasoline has created a surge in demand for online and hybrid courses. In a fully online course, the student doesn’t have to visit a campus or a classroom. In hybrid courses, students visit the classroom less frequently than in a traditional course.
This New York Times article called High Cost of Driving Ignites Online Classes Boom offers some striking examples from students and academic administrators. No faculty members were interviewed for the article, even though administrators said they were assigning more faculty to teach online courses.
I started teaching online courses in 2006, and I was posting web content for my courses back in 2003. I’ve found that an online course takes me about twice as much effort to develop and prepare as a F2F course. I can walk to my university office from my home, so I don’t really save any money by teaching online.
Universities should provide instructional design and technology support staff and resources to help instructors develop and publish successful course materials in an online environment. This doesn’t mean that the staff are teaching the courses.
I started developing web sites back in 1995, but most faculty members in my generation are ill-equipped to develop their own sites. Most of us learned how to teach in classrooms, not on the web. The first time I ever used a Web browser was in 1994, a year after I earned my doctorate.
They have to rely on whatever resources their university provides for online learning. Newly minted doctoral students and retrained faculty have a better chance of succeeding in an online teaching environment.
Image courtesy of Cali2Okie through a Creative Commons license.
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