Confessions of an Online Student: Voyeur or Classmate?

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Until I had to withdraw due to family obligations, I recently spent four weeks as an online student in one of DePaul’s Cinema and Digital Media courses. While much of the experience was positive, I’m left with some negative impressions as well.

Readers of my earlier posts know that while I design multimedia for DePaul’s School for New Learning online program (SNL Online), I’m usually not enthusiastic about actually taking online courses myself. I normally like the experience of sitting in a physical classroom and interacting with my classmates. For this course, though, I felt that online would be perfect. It was a subject that didn’t lend itself to a lot of group interaction and discussion. There were clearly defined learning objectives supported by a comprehensive textbook, appropriate learning activities and assessments, and a proprietary LMS that would deliver recorded classroom sessions with video, audio, whiteboards and presentation screens that I could view at my convenience. I would read, watch, and produce. What could be easier?

Well, the online classroom experience was completely unsatisfying. I had anticipated being able to supplement the readings and clarify key concepts and directions by downloading and efficiently viewing the classroom presentations. I had, in fact, found this to be a useful perk when in the past I’d taken CDM courses on-ground, where I could note the time a key concept was discussed, then search for and review it later.

This time, however, with my only classroom contact being virtual and asynchronous, I found that I was by turns bored or frustrated. Removed from the distractions of a live classroom I was struck by how much of a three-hour class was filled up with empty space; the instructor shuffling papers or searching for files or waiting for something to load from the Web. Painful waits for students to respond to questions seemed to stretch into hours. And while there were certainly segments of the recording that were useful, there was no way of knowing where those might actually be without sitting through the entire session. It seemed to me that there was about a three-to-one ratio of dead air to useful information. This was not what I’d anticipated.

Oh, and did I mention the actual recording quality? As I peered through my two-inch video portal, I strained to see the instructor, hear what was being said, and make out what was being written on the whiteboard. Though each session could be displayed full screen and had zoom capabilities, the video was very low quality and heavily pixelated even at smaller display sizes. The whiteboard captured input intermittently. Adding to my frustration, the instructor would physically interact with projected data, pointing out and clarifying important equations and processes that the in-class students could follow, but weren’t captured clearly by the video or whiteboards. The online section of this course was an afterthought, it seemed. I felt more a voyeur than a participant.

That said, I’m planning to take the same course online next quarter. But I now know that the online component is really an afterthought, that I’m really on my own for learning the material from the textbook and exercises, and that I’m essentially taking a correspondence course. Because just putting a recording of a classroom session online does not make it an online course. And just watching one makes you more a voyeur than a classmate.

2 thoughts on “Confessions of an Online Student: Voyeur or Classmate?

  1. Taking online courses is a challenge. With the advancement of technology, instructional designers are being pressed upon to come up with new and innovative ideas. How do we keep the student interested in the course materials and still achieved a certain level of required learning. I know that this is a challenge for me as I work on my Master’s degree. I am being asked to complete all sorts of new learnings that I am not familiar with. For instance, just my replying to this blog is something that I am learning for the first time.

    It is important to to strive beyond the bounds of traditional learning in order to keep up with the younger generations. The challenge for an instructor is to know how much information to feed to the student, when all are on different levels of comfortable technological skills. It is especially hard for the online learner because we don’t have the luxury of asking the instructor how to do something in real time. We must wait at least 24 hours for a response to a question, thus losing our momentum when completing an assignments.

    Regardless of the challenges, online learning has definately improved since my first college math class back in 2001.

  2. I think it’s a mistake to let technology drive pedagogical concerns. Attend any e-learning conference and you‘ll see presenters stumping passionately for some tool du jour without demonstrating how exactly the new technology adds anything to the learning process. While one can argue (and I do regularly) that learning to effectively use web tools ought to be part of a liberal education, often the imposition of ill-conceived or poorly deployed technology creates needless barriers to learning.

    Further, while there’s evidence our adult students at SNL often struggle more with tech than do younger students, youth doesn’t necessarily confer a desire to use technology or proficiency with it. My colleagues have commented here about the issues and difficulties more traditional-aged online students have with web tools and the courses that use them. Almost always these issues are exacerbated by the use of technology in courses without any clear or meaningful learning objective.

    Finally, my overarching complaint with the online course I reviewed was that there was no effort in the design of the course to either leverage the advantages of the online environment or mitigate its shortcomings. In this case all that had been done was to record an on-ground session for later online viewing, creating a learning environment that combined the shortcomings of both online and on-ground without the strengths of either.

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