Unique Difficulties Presented By Online Courses
Dec 27th, 2005
" Growing by Degrees: A Report on Online Education in the United States, 2005,'' a recent study of online learning technology and trends at more than 1,000 universities and colleges, has revealed its results.
Among the findings: online education opportunities are growing immensely, ' traditional' institutions are finally opening up to the idea of distance learning, and perhaps most important, that students have a ' harder' time passing an online course than a ' classroom' course.
Though online education offers terrific opportunities, there are drawbacks that students need to be aware of. As a professor, this is the weakness I see most often in my online courses: students not realizing that more discipline and motivation will be needed to succeed in an online course, compared to the same course taught in a traditional classroom setting.
The Kalamazoo Gazette reports:
Taking an online course, educators say, usually requires a student to be more disciplined than an on-campus class might require.
“I warn the students at the very beginning they are going to do more,'' said Ashlyn Kuersten, associate professor of political science at Western, who teaches an online course to non-majors.
“They're going to have to be consistent and self-motivated. I'm not going to motivate them,'' she said.
“I would say 30 percent of a class will just stop participating. … That's why I think the best students are the nontraditional students,'' she said.
For this reason, some universities offer online tests to help students assess whether they are good candidates for learning online.
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