Last week’s study gave us a basic understanding of mixed education. We also learned that the advantage of online learning is that big data collects information from students and analyzes it, which facilitates teachers to make better courses. This week’s reading, “Teaching Online: A Guild to Theory, Research, and Practice, “discuss the difference between varies in online learning and how schoolteacher design the course structure.
About Course Structure
A course structure is not only an instruction offered to students to read but also a tool to classify students through the course they choose. In the course structure, five elements need to include such as course term (how long does this course take to finish), course credit hour (fixed or variable), course enrollment (large class or small class), course section, and course type. These elements are the basic information offered to a student to know. However, I think this is also critical information that would help teachers structure their courses. For example, they go through the size of the courses that students choose and find that students prefer to take smaller courses because there are more opportunities to connect with professors in smaller courses. Then, the teacher may choose to make their class enrollment smaller.
About Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
MOOCs are free online courses available for anyone to enroll. MOOCs are divided into two types. One is cMOOCs, characterized by openness, diversity, autonomy, and connectivity across distributed knowledge networks. The other is xMOOCs, similar to Brightspace, that only face the school student. The advantage of MOOCs is if someone wants to learn a skill, they can learn it anytime and anywhere. Alec Couros thought the role of the mentor is to participate in course activities, provide feedback on student work, and share resources. The students who go through the online course are the ones who are interested in the course. Hence, this is also why the online course will become so popular now.
In the end, despite the many conveniences of online classes now, fully online courses, I think, are still somewhat difficult because online classes require a lot of autonomy, and some people still have a hard time doing that. Therefore, I think blended learning would be better.
Reference:
Major, C. H. (2015). Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uvic/detail.action?docID=3318874 (pp. 76-108)
Jordan, K. & Weller, M. (2017). Openness and Education: A beginners’ guide. Global OER Graduate Network.
8 Comments
I agree with you that for a fully online course, there are times when students need more discipline. Whether students can arrange their time reasonably to complete their study tasks, and whether they can abide by academic integrity to complete each assignment and test. In my opinion, it is very difficult.
Hi Moky,
Thanks for your comments. I think a fully online course is more suitable for students with strong autonomy and great interest in the study. However, the people like me have absolutely no way only to take fully online courses.(crying 🙁 )
Julie
Hi,
Share your point of view is very interesting, I also very agree with what you said even if the present network class very convenient but we still can’t give up the traditional education pattern in class, blended learning can be both of the convenience of online classes and traditional teaching, the traditional teaching to students and education workers engaged in is and the network class is completely different, I think that with the development of the time, Blended learning will get better and better.
The best
Lei.
Hi Lei,
Thanks for sharing your idea. I also think blended learning will get better and better because blended learning combines both strengths of online learning and traditional learning.
Julie
Hi Julie
I am totally agree with your sharing. The five elements of the course structure not only help students to have a general reference for the course, but also help the instructor to organize the course. Professors are well positioned to adjust accordingly based on student information and feedback. Similarly, although online courses have provided us with a lot of convenience, the disadvantages of online courses for students who are not strong in autonomy far outweigh the advantages.
Hi Yilin,
You’re right. I agree that the disadvantage of online courses requires students to have a strong autonomy ability, which is not what everyone can achieve. Hence, blended education would be more efficient in nowadays.
Julie