Volume 6, No. 1, Winter 2002

Online Courses That Work . . . and Some That Don't

Not all online courses are created equal

by Sarah Haavind, Raymond Rose, Alvaro Galvis, and Robert Tinker

In light of our successes with online learning, we are concerned about the widespread skepticism regarding the viability of this promising development. There is, of course, reason for skepticism because so many online courses are poorly designed and inadequately supported. Almost every educator has taken an unsatisfactory online course or heard someone's horror story. Others have tried to offer online courses and found them overwhelmingly complex and time-consuming.

It is unfair, however, to base policy on such anecdotal data. We have extensive research findings and several successful programs that belie the skeptics. In fact, we have found a small subset of potential designs that really work. Designs that don't work are those that fail to take full advantage of the technology. Below we describe these different models.

The online supplement model. Not an online course at all.

Most online courses are not actually complete courses, but online supplements to face-to-face courses. For the online component, supplementary materials often include a class syllabus, homework assignments, an optional discussion board, or recommended Web sites. Courses that truly overcome the barriers of place and time are entirely online.

The online self-paced model. A poor use of the technology.

Many online courses are actually correspondence or self-paced courses. The best of these provide a structured learning experience that leads the student through a series of activities and challenges with little or no personal assistance. While there is a role for this design, it hardly takes advantage of the technology.

The online lecture. Almost as good as a lecture course.

Another major group of online courses is modeled on the lecture hall. The emphasis here is on recreating the presence of a lecturer with audio and video, often accompanied with some form of real-time feedback. Without feedback, this ends up providing the same experience as TV or film lectures, approaches that have not been widely accepted.

Most online courses using lecture hall pedagogy employ some synchronous technology such as whiteboards, shared applications, or multi-way audio or video. Providing real-time feedback sounds like a good idea, but is often expensive. It creates huge scheduling problems while succumbing to the weakness of the lecture model. If there are many listeners, each gets very little interaction with the lecturer and has little time to formulate a thoughtful question.

Guided collaboration. Realizing the promise of technology with an affordable, high-quality model.

We are excited about a different model for online learning that is closer to a well-run seminar. The key idea is that participants create their own learning through thoughtful conversation and collaboration, guided by a knowledgeable teacher who is expert in facilitating online groups. This design is pedagogically superior to other designs because it is based on social constructivist learning principles: having learners create their own understandings based on group conversations.

When group-based learning is implemented online, inexpensive asynchronous technologies (typically, threaded discussion groups) are not only satisfactory, they are superior to synchronous ones. This online learning environment can be better than a seminar, because each participant has time to think about the conversation as it unfolds in slow-motion and to make thoughtful contributions. Because students must contribute to online discussions, well-designed online collaborations are more inclusive than typical classes (Hsi & Hoadley). Add to this a few other design principles we have identified, and you get a model for online courses that really works.

Online Collaboration at Work

Early on in our experience with Virtual High School (VHS), we taught an online professional development course for high school teachers who wished to develop their own online classes. We detected a degree of trust among the participants that resulted in a level of teacher collaboration never before encountered. In a virtual "Teacher's Lounge" discussion area, a teacher in California asked for other teachers-in-training to go into her new course and check it out. "Is it interesting? Does it flow? Do the links work? Does the content make sense?" she wanted to know. Within a week several teachers from around the country had given her the requested feedback and had asked that their own courses be similarly scrutinized. Before long all thirty teachers were receiving feedback from their peers in twenty-two other states. We asked them all if they had a natural tendency to walk down the hall in their brick and mortar schools to have peers review their lesson plans. Not one had ever done that. "Well, then, why are you doing it online?" one of us asked. The reply came from another California teacher, "Because I can't hear anybody laughing at me here."

For this design to be successful, the teacher must be an effective facilitator of the online conversations. Inexperienced online instructors tend to jump into the middle of the online conversation, hijacking the student's learning process. They are soon overwhelmed by the resulting volume of private email messages and cannot keep up their end of all the conversations.

The secret to success is abandoning the "sage on the stage" role and becoming an effective "guide on the side." This is hard for many teachers accustomed to performing. Not only is the teacher off stage, he or she must carefully prepare to schedule a series of key experiences that all course participants bring to each online seminar topic. And then the teacher must know how to foster a new kind of collaborative learning among participants who also have to learn how to jump in and stop waiting for the sage to do the thinking.

In practical terms, effective facilitation entails reading all postings, but intervening only occasionally to provide strategic guidance to the direction and tone of the conversation. An online course based on this design requires no more time than a typical face-to-face course: 20% of a teacher's time for a 20-participant course, or 1% of a full-time equivalent teacher per student. Our experience of preparing facilitators is described fully in our book, Facilitating Online Learning¹¹ (Collison, et. al.).

Online activities can be designed to foster authentic, embedded collaboration among participants, whether they are students, teachers, or employees. The resulting learning is powerful and memorable.

This model of e-learning has the potential to not only improve education, but to democratize it as well. There are many benefits to be realized with online learning: flexible scheduling, unlimited potential for collaboration, courses that address specialized needs, and customization to local curriculum, to name a few. An unprecedented variety and quality of online courses can be delivered at the secondary and tertiary level. Any student anywhere can enroll in these courses. Advanced and specialized courses can be made available to the poorest school. Geographically isolated schools in any country can be reached. Because this design requires no more teacher time, the courses are no more expensive to teach than current face-to-face courses, once the course design is complete.

The implications for teacher professional development are equally impressive. Online courses can be taken while participants apply what they are learning to their teaching. Forward thinking school districts that are already creating virtual communities of teachers engaged in lifelong e-learning will reap the benefits of a highly sustainable professional development plan—one that enables all teachers to keep pace with current knowledge in their content areas, as well as relevant pedagogies and technologies.

While we are confident that asynchronous, scheduled online courses can be effective and economical, additional research and development is needed. Many courses can be made more effective by the better integration of technological tools. New administrative arrangements such as the cooperative structure of the Virtual High School (VHS)¹² help solve some of the issues raised by online courses, particularly budgeting and employment.

The authors all work for the Concord Consortium. Sarah Haavind (sarah@concord.org¹³) is an online instructional designer. Raymond Rose (ray@concord.org¹⁴) is vice president. Alvaro Galvis (alvaros@concord.org¹⁵) is co-project director of the Seeing Math Telecommunications Project. Robert Tinker (bob@concord.org¹⁶) is president.

Bibliography

Berman, S. & Pape, E. 2001. A consumer's guide to online courses. The School Administrator, 58(9).
Carroll, T. G. 2000. If we didn't have the schools we have today, would we create the schools we have today? Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 1(1), 117-140.
Collison, G., Elbaum, B., Haavind, S., Tinker, R. 2000. Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators. Atwood: Madison. www.concord.org/publications/fol/¹¹
Elbaum, B., et al, 2002. Essential Elements: Prepar, Design, and Teach Your Online Course. Atwood: Madison (in press).
Gideonse, H.D. 1999. What is a case? What distinguishes Case Instruction? In M.R Sudzina, 1999. Case Study Applications for Teacher Education. Cases for teaching and learning in the content areas. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, (1-8).
Haavind, S., 2000. Why don't face-to-face teaching strategies work in the virtual classroom? @Concord Fall 2000. www.concord.org/newsletter/2000fall/face2face.html¹⁸
Hsi, S. and Hoadley, C. M. 1997. Productive discussion in science: gender equity through electronic discourse. Journal of Science Education and Technology. 6:1, (23-36).
Pape, E., 2000. Online education: the Internet's killer app. @Concord Spring 2000. www.concord.org/newsletter/2000spring/killerapp.html¹⁹
Sudzina, M.R. 1999. Case Study Applications for Teacher Education. Cases for teaching and learning in the content areas. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
Tinker, R. 2001. E-Learning Quality: The Concord Model for Learning from a Distance. Special Section: Distance Learning. NASSP Bulletin. 85(628).

The projects described in this newsletter are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Noyce Foundation and others. All opinions, findings, and recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies. Mention of trade names, commercial products or organizations does not imply endorsement.

Document Location: http://www.highwired.net/publications/newsletter/2002winter/online_courses.html
Last Updated: 03/07/2005