CHAPTER 12

College and K-12
Courses

This chapter attempts to describe just a few examples of online courses that serve different purposes and audiences. Online courses vary widely in their designs. Some courses are conducted totally online without instructor or participants ever meeting. Many courses use a mixed design that affords participants the chance to interact and discuss ideas in a face-to-face, traditional setting as well as the online discussion forums. The design of the course might limit or change the nature of who will be attracted to the course, and the potential number of students who might choose to enroll.

Understanding the type of audience the course is targeting will be a major factor in its design and schedule. In batch mode, all students begin the course at the same time. With a rolling enrollment, the course is more fully automated, and students can begin and end courses on their own time schedule. Stanford

Degree programs are going online. Often online degree programs are offered using a combination of face-to-face and online formats. These mixed-format courses add travel expenses to the cost of taking the course and may be prohibitively expensive for many students.

Teachers traditionally want to meet their students and have the students get to know each other. A mixed design of face-to-face and Web-based delivery of the content and activities has advantages. Because geography often comes alive during field experiences, an online geography course was taught through the University of Nebraska–Kearney that included a 5 day field study at the conclusion of the online content. The mixed-design may have limited the number of participants. The student retention, however, was excellent; every student completed the course during each of the two sessions it was conducted.

Cross campus collaboration is a theme which had begun to emerge at the time the first edition of Web-Teaching was published. This theme is found in three of the courses cited in this chapter.

Charles Ansorge at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln teaches introductory graduate statistics courses. He has a traditional class that meets in a well-equipped multimedia classroom. His classes are videotaped. That video is compressed and streamed to distant students. While the quality of the streamed video continues to improve, it hardly approaches high definition. Nevertheless, this approach has been very successful. To offer improved video quality, Ansorge is experimenting with providing at least some of the course video on a CD-ROM that is mailed to the online-only students.

Ansorge uses the eGrade program developed by John Orr (Chapter 15) for practice tests, and for the online students taking the real tests. Tests for the course are proctored whether the students are on-site or distant. Students working from a remote location are required to identify a proctor according to specific guidelines set up by Ansorge. Ansorge's approach represents an excellent compromise between traditional and distance formats.

German On-Line Distance Education Network is an interactive, online, teacher development program of study for teachers of German. Six courses are available. A course on the use of modern telecommunications materials in teaching German, written by Donna Van Handley and taught by her together with Aleidine Moeller, is illustrated in Figure 12.04.

The submitted writings in this class are captured in a journal that remains accessible to them throughout the course. Other activities in this course series include listening to an audio tape (played online), and then discussing the tape. This represents a remarkable effort to engage teachers who otherwise would have little access to professional development.

Class.com offers a series of high school courses offered through the Division of Continuing Studies at the University of Nebraska. The award winning American Literature I: Diversity in American Literature - Xroads is an example of the courses provided. Class.com courses include CD-ROMs to provide the student with files for use at their own computer. Using this software, the client browser first seeks files on the ROM rather than from the server. Access time for large multimedia files is reduced. Revised files still can be downloaded as needed. The result is the Class.com courses include rich, interactive, multimedia environments as illustrated in Figure 12.05.

In this American literature course offered via the Web, students explore the themes of technology, language, illusion, and independence. Students read culturally diverse selections within such differing genres as the essay, short story, novel, historical writings, and poetry. Through multimedia presentations, selections provide vocabulary enrichment, textual insights, and audio readings of excerpts to enhance the learning experience.

UCLA Extension offers a large array of online courses, including some certificate and degree programs. One such course deals with JavaScript, a programming language used to make Web pages interactive. To determine whether we would outsource a low enrollment course at Nebraska to UCLA, a student took this course on an experimental basis. His experience was high quality. He learned good introductory skills in JavaScripting (Figure 12.06).