I concur. Designing a course that will include e-learning tools is never an easy undertaking. In addition to the time it will take to accommodate different technologies that are used for e-learning, the designer has also to worry about technology incompatibility.
I am afraid that I have to agree with the notion that time spent to develop courses for online delivery is more than the time develop course that will be though in a traditional classroom. An online course doesn’t just contain texts. It is designed to accommodate other types of media including text, sound, video, etc.
First off, whereas consideration is often not given the looks and feel of the course and whether the contents will be intellectually stimulating to a lonesome learner when designing courses for traditional classrooms, a lot of consideration is always given to looks and feel and how the contents of a course can stimulate an independent learner when designing online courses. This requires survey of learning style which must be analyzed by the designer of the course. Secondly, most online courses learner-centered courses. It is assumed that the learner will require less physical interaction with the instructor. Materials that compensate for lack of physical interaction are included in the course design. Thirdly, several types of media such as video, text, presentation, chat, threaded discussion are included. Needless to say that designing courses that include all the aforementioned media types will consume a lot of time.
I agree that takes more time and energy. I am also discovered that it is always a good practice to test different environments that could be used by a potential student to access an online course. The designer cannot assume that users of Safari and Fire Fox browsers will be able to access the course without actually testing the course with the browser.
I strongly disagree.
To make a quality online course will require learning and leveraging the technologies that are out there to engage the learner. For example and as an experiment, you can use YouTube videos to manage your videos (I’ve posted over a hundred videos at http://www.YouTube.com/drjctu and http://www.YouTube.com/drjcircuits ). I’ve also developed a social network learning community at http://FreedomUniversity.ning.com. Although I have not tried to put together all of the free technologies, I believe it would be time-consuming to learn and integrate these technologies and collaborative tools into developing a quality and coherent course.
In my experience, developing the video content is a huge task by itself. Also, I’ve tried to integrate the above free services at my website as well as using a blog platform, such as Wordpress as a content management and search tool.. As a measure of my small success for this experiment, I have hundreds of subscribers thus far during this past year.
For teaching engineering courses online, I believe you need step-by-step videos, interactive simulations of lab demonstrations and experiments, lab reports, research projects and interactive quizzes to engage the student and enhance their learning experience.
In a traditional classroom delivery, you can adapt your teaching delivery in accordance to your student needs. In online delivery, you need to account for the different types of learners beforehand, as well as the anticipated questions with appropriate answers.
For the above reasons, developing a quality online course will take more time than the traditional classroom delivery.
I would have to disagree with the generalization of the statement. Many times, more time may be put into the development of an online course due to the inability to adjust; there is more standardization within the online environment. This has its positives and negatives.
I completely disagree. The time to develop an online course is much more than developing an on ground course. An instructor needs to take much more into consideration because the attendance requirements are much different between the two forms of class time. If the students are not engaged they will not sign into class and/or not be successful in class.
I have found that it is the opposite. It is easier for me to develop an online course than one for the ground. I guess it depends on your own personal background and mindset.
I, too, totally disagree.
I feel like online content must have its structure heavily brainstormed in a mind-map type software before you even think about course construction. No room for errors in subject matter 'chronology' so to speak.
I also find that being able to refine course content in class before going online is a great asset!
As with most here in this forum, I would have to disagree also. The presentation of the material requires a professional approach that requires a lot of time. When learners are not given the benefit of an instructor with a dry-erase board and hands on instruction it becomes imperative to subsidize the class with animations, PowerPoint presentations , audio and visual representations of everything that the instructor would normally give. This will require more time than an instructor would spend on class time, although the benefit is that millions of people can participate in the class and there is absolutely no overhead for the institution.
I disagree very highly with this thought. I feel that the time spent in developing an online course is much more than the traditional classroom setting. For the first thought I think that it is much more important in developing the content for said course because it means that the instuctor must be able to put themselves into the position of the student. A student must learn the material and retain it without interaction from a face to face encounter with the instructor. So the course needs to be very flexible as well as well structured to maintain the learning process. Second, as an instuctor you must be well aware of the levels of your students abilities and this is a bit more difficult with an online course compared with the traditional classroom. Each and every student needs to be challenged and given the opportunity to excell in their work.
Tanya,
Thanks for your comments - It can be very time consuming! I think a lot of it has to do with what is required of you, and what type of support you have.
Jon
Thanks for sharing! - Jon
Donna,
Great point - I agree, class management and your need to quickly respond is much different online.
Jon
Thanks for sharing - good thoughts - Jon
I agree, faculty get many of the same benefits that students do in terms of flexibility! - Jon
Belinda,
Great points!
Jon
Great points - thanks for sharing! - Jon
I disagree. Having been involved in reviewing an online course being developed I am aware of how many hours the course developer spent putting the class components together, then he would send them on to those of us who were reveiwing the material.
He spend countless hours creating the course and each of us reviewers spend just as many hours reviewing it. In addition to proof reading the material and making sure that references within the course were all consistent we had to verify that the assignments adequately covered the material in each section. As this was a math class we also had to complete each of the exercises and test questions to verify the answer keys were correct. This was a lot of work and many hours overseeing the process.
Written material must be perfect before it is loaded in an online classroom, directions must be clear and concise so that there is no misunderstanding. In an on-ground classroom verbal directions can be given and then enhanced if there is no understanding. But in the online environment written directions need to be the best and all encompassing they can be.
Online classes take much more time than on-ground classes.
Betty,
Good point, especially if the developer is working by themselves.
Thanks,
Jon
Developing any course, whether online or traditional, requires a great deal of thought and expertise - one requires no more than the other.
