A word about teaching Online Courses
Online courses are not like face to face courses. They are just different. This has to be understandable for the instructors that are involving in teaching these courses. After a long time spending and having vast experience in developing online programs and courses and of course interacting with faculty to help them using these courses. I noticed that some have a different perspective on these courses. Some may think, online courses are a bunch of material that we drop for the students and they will grade old fashionably by receiving in drop-boxes or emails. They are resisting to have a presence in online engagements like Forums or discussion boards. Good discussion spaces, course blogging platforms, curated materials to accompany each module — all of those take time to build and necessary to online courses. Also, it is good to be reminded to some, that the time commitment doesn’t go away after the course is built for them. Throughout the semester, Instructors have to spend a considerable amount of time creating and then maintaining meaningful engagement with their students in Forum and in their course blogs and hangout sessions. Web presence is perhaps the single most important ingredient in meaningful learning online. In the case of absent any social or cognitive presence for an online course and If that’s all online courses aspire to be, we might as well just have students watch YouTube. I hope there will be a day very soon that our faculty members get used to the interactive content and interactions between instructors and students in our online courses. Until then, we have to deal with not so very positive feedbacks from our students.
Happy Learning
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This article published on LinkedIn on March 25, 2019
