JD: How do you compare this with developing just a traditional
face-to-face course?
MS: It's actually a lot more work. In a face-to-face course where a
lot of the work is done in maybe choosing a text or putting together
a reader,...that's really a matter of putting in a bookstore order or
maybe making some photocopies for a reader to be put together. Here
it requires marking up web pages, posting them, uploading things,
reformatting, and of course integrating it all into a sort of table
of contents structure in a logical way. And then, linking all the
quiz information, the bulletin board--so that it all works smoothly
as one big package. But, the nice thing about it is...obviously, for
distance learning, you've got to have something like this and not
just a series of readings on a web page, and then...maybe an
e-mail/chat. I think it gives a much richer environment for students
to work in, and offers lots of different ways of learning for
students, whether they prefer to discuss things more or simply to
read and answer questions. It adapts to different learning styles.
JD: OK, so that addresses the development of the course and all the
issues that you face there. What about when you are teaching the
course?
MS: The teaching of the course goes rather smoothly, and in fact
that's where I think distance courses can be kind of less intensive
in a way than face-to-face courses...because you have time to...think
about the email questions you get, to mull over the discussion
boards, to...look up answers if you need to, and to really give some
well-formed and...well-researched answers when it's needed;
where...in class, you don't often have that ability and sometimes you
have to turn students away and say, "Well, I'll tell you next class
time after I look it up." Or, you just kind of stall for time anyway.
So,...the distance model I think allows for teachers to be at their
sharpest in lots of ways. But it is a time-management issue. There's
a lot of e-mail. I counted at one point in the course I had received,
in addition to what's going on in the bulletin board and on the
course discussion list, 320 individual e-mails from the course
participants. So, it takes some time-management skills and some
strategies for working out how to deal with that volume of additional
e-mail in your in-box.
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