(A continuation from here.)
So, the solution? First, retool online courses: convince your video software provider to offer real-time streaming (ideally with a text chat function, though that could be obtained elsewhere and kludged in), or move to a different vendor. I understand that this removes some of the benefit of a distance course–namely, the flexibility of timing–and, yes, I would support a recording feature for students with exceptional circumstances. But I believe that attending school–particularly graduate school–should require some tradeoffs in one’s schedule. Frankly, recording a course for students to watch later is not even remotely comparable to teaching them interactively, and to treat a distance education provided in this manner as equivalent to an in-person education is dishonest.
With classes held in real-time, the professor can stop to address comments coming in via the text stream. (Specifically, I would support a plan whereby the text stream shows up on the screen with the Powerpoint slides, by the way. That seems to be the best way to do it: no need for repetition of the question, and I believe that knowing everyone could see their comment would encourage students to treat it similarly to in-person questions.) The feedback of facial expressions is still lost, in the case of online-only courses, but when they are given the opportunity to do so, students can be trusted to ask, if they really need further elaboration. In “blended” courses, where there is a video camera in a classroom full of students, any school that is serious about providing distance education needs to find the money, somewhere, to purchase microphones for the student seating area. In the meantime, at least for Pitt, the text stream and a handheld mic could be treated as a stopgap measure; online students can remind those who are there in person that they can’t be heard and to use the microphone.
As for course discussion, I think the signal-to-noise ratio is going to stay low in the electronic realm. I think it’s a feature of the medium, and while it might be combated in any individual course, if a professor cares enough to enact a strict “commenting culture,” no easy global solution presents itself. I figure more-comments-than-sense is probably a given, but whether it is or not, I still support mailing lists or multi-contributor blogs, rather than discussion boards–yes, my opinion on this hasn’t changed since last semester. If anything, my classes with monolithic discussion board structure, this semester, have cemented this opinion. I follow AUTOCAT and ten other mailing lists, and I follow more than 60 RSS feeds; I could certainly handle the amount of traffic my classmates would generate, if it came in an easily digestible format, such as e-mail or RSS. But it is overwhelming when it occurs in an interface like Blackboard’s (slow, poorly threaded, not customizable [for students], with notifications of updates turned off by default).
I am beginning to like the idea of wikis, when professors want students to see one another’s work in a way that is not e-mail or blog friendly. I’m thinking of our most recent cataloging assignment, where each group turned in one or two answers, and we were asked to compare and examine them in light of some really finicky punctuation rules (you’d be surprised at how different they were). It is impossible, in a Blackboard discussion board, to hold two submissions up against one another without opening up multiple tabs. Far better would be for each group to add their answer to a single page on a collective wiki, or even a collective blog, so that any two answers are an easy scroll away from one another.
Anyway, now that I have started to lay out what I think is an implementable solution, I’m curious what others think. Any ideas? Additions or deletions to my ideas?
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