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The online courses I took at Jr. college were mostly horrible, which is why I took as many of them as I could. A class with "discussion credit", multiple choic

by furyg3 14y ago

The online courses I took at Jr. college were mostly horrible, which is why I took as many of them as I could. A class with "discussion credit", multiple choice quizzes, and one-size-fits all writing assignments, is pretty much junk. At my Jr. college, these classes were the most likely to be made into online courses. As such, a student was insane if they were required to take a course like this and didn't elect for the online version, because a physical class only wasted even more of your time. A physical course had extra value for students who lived on the pass/fail line. They get a chance to display their problems to the teacher, who may feel bad and give them extensions on their busy work. Sympathy was harder to garner online, which is probably why online courses saw higher failure rates.

VLM 14y ago
"discussion credit" Discussion credit was the bane of online classes, in that most classes of this type were "regurgitate the text back to me" so there is an inherent hierarchy of "correct" answers ranging from best to worst, so the first poster gets the best comment and so on down until the folks later in the day have a terrible struggle trying to find something to repeat back to the instructor. So rather than having to be in a lecture hall at precisely 2pm or 6pm on Wednesdays, you had to be online at precisely 9am on Monday so as to be in on the discussion credit feeding frenzy at the instant the unit opened, and I hated that component of online classes. This completely eliminates the 24x7 advantage of at least some online classes. Discuss one of the three defining characteristics of object oriented programming as per the text... well the fourth guy who waited to post at 9:01 am is pretty much outta luck until next week... if he's lucky. One interesting observation of the article is it equates all online courses as being the same. The state-U MBA program, the regional hybrid private-U CS degree, the 250K person MOOC classes, all the same. If they tried that with brick and mortar they'd be laughed at. Also I feel based on experience the sympathy card was harder to garner because, after all, its theoretically a 24x7 online class. You'd think superficially that not having to be at a lecture hall at 2pm would eliminate "flat tire" as an excuse, however, fundamentally, a flat tire eliminates a couple hours outta your life, the specific time doesn't actually matter. If I was going to do my classwork online at 3pm and instead spent my time at the tire repair shop, it has to be realized that missing time at home is just as damaging to productivity as missing time in class, if you're doing classwork in both locations.

by furyg3 14y ago

VLM 14y ago

"discussion credit" Discussion credit was the bane of online classes, in that most classes of this type were "regurgitate the text back to me" so there is an inherent hierarchy of "correct" answers ranging from best to worst, so the first poster gets the best comment and so on down until the folks later in the day have a terrible struggle trying to find something to repeat back to the instructor. So rather than having to be in a lecture hall at precisely 2pm or 6pm on Wednesdays, you had to be online at precisely 9am on Monday so as to be in on the discussion credit feeding frenzy at the instant the unit opened, and I hated that component of online classes. This completely eliminates the 24x7 advantage of at least some online classes. Discuss one of the three defining characteristics of object oriented programming as per the text... well the fourth guy who waited to post at 9:01 am is pretty much outta luck until next week... if he's lucky. One interesting observation of the article is it equates all online courses as being the same. The state-U MBA program, the regional hybrid private-U CS degree, the 250K person MOOC classes, all the same. If they tried that with brick and mortar they'd be laughed at. Also I feel based on experience the sympathy card was harder to garner because, after all, its theoretically a 24x7 online class. You'd think superficially that not having to be at a lecture hall at 2pm would eliminate "flat tire" as an excuse, however, fundamentally, a flat tire eliminates a couple hours outta your life, the specific time doesn't actually matter. If I was going to do my classwork online at 3pm and instead spent my time at the tire repair shop, it has to be realized that missing time at home is just as damaging to productivity as missing time in class, if you're doing classwork in both locations.