1. Kirschner states that it “is easier to wash your hands than it is to design a first-rate online course.” One of the criticisms of online courses is that students fail to complete them, or wind up learning little to nothing from them. Can this criticism be attributed not only to the students, but to the fact that many professors teaching online courses do not know how to adequately design, structure, or teach them?
2. Could contemporary institutions of higher education benefit from MOOAs? Is this one of the ways that public HE can combat the problem of budget cuts, little to no funding, etc?
3. Polley Ann McClure (Cornell CIO) states that “students need to feel that they can plot their own academic path. If a student wants to come, they should be allowed to take the final exam on the first day of school, and get credit for the portion of the course they’ve passed. If they answer 80% of the test correctly, for example, testing software would identify the issues behind the 20% of wrong answers and focus student attention on those areas instead.” Does this make sense in HE today? Why should a student have to take 12 weeks of a class that she knows perfectly, when she needs only to take the last 3 weeks of the same class? Will this become a trend in online education in the years to come, and will it be commonplace in most technologically advanced universities?
4. Stokes describes the different classifications of online learning: traditional, web-enhanced, hybrid, and fully online. (All of these variations are offered here at BC.) Which do you feel is the best way to take a class? Should traditional classes be the only classes offered? Do the hybrid classes offer “the best of both worlds?” Does the fully online class lose some of the “university appeal” that traditional classes have?
5. One of the times articles blames online learning for the students’ failures stating that students who took online courses were more likely to fail or withdraw and that these students failed to master basics of math and English. Should these students’ failures be blamed on the online courses? Could it just be that the students who failed the online course most likely would have failed the traditional counterpart? Why do certain people feel as if traditional “brick-and-mortar” courses offer a superior learning environment?
6. In regards to the Times article on cheating: Is it probably true that those students who wish to cheat on online courses would probably be cheating anyway in her traditional courses, as well? Would cheating students go out of their way to take an online course only to cheat if they could still manage to cheat in traditional courses? Isn’t it also true that most likely, if a student makes it all the way to the end of a rigorous online course, she is probably a student who wouldn’t cheat anyway?
7. This is just a general question about BC: In one of the first readings for the class, we were told that there are three main types of institutions of HE today, in regards to technological advancement: brick, click, or brick-and-click. Here at BC, there are some online classes (even though they’re the same 10 classes every semester). Should we classify ourselves as a brick-and-click university? Do you think that the professors here are adequate enough to handle online classes? Should we really classify ourselves with the word ‘click’ at all? (If you can’t see this last question because you’re on campus and BC-WiFi isn’t working, as usual, I’ll take that as a NO!)
