Last month, I attended a presentation by Penny Ralston-Berg at the 25th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, titled: “What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective.” Her study, coauthored with Leda Nath (Raslton-Berg & Nath, 2009), asked students to describe their level of agreement with the current Quality Matters standards for online courses and the level to which elements within each standard contributed to their overall success. I was interested in getting this look at online courses from the student perspective to perhaps glean some useful implications for my own design. What I walked away with was a disturbing reinforcement of the competing global motives for my role as an instructional designer and online educator.
As expected, students highly valued technology that worked; clear, consistent navigation in their course sites; and instructions on how to access resources. It was what students found least valuable that caught my attention. Based on this survey, online students do not want to:
- Find course-related content to share with the class
- Use wikis, shared documents, or other collaborative tools
- Introduce themselves to the class
- Coach other students
- Attend synchronous meetings
- Interact with games and simulations
- Work in groups
- Receive audio or video content
Surprised?
I was. Could this be a call to remove the interactivity and engaging content from our courses? Despite the research, does social presence not matter? Should we return to online learning circa 1996? Are these elements really that repulsive to our students?
Or could it be that they are so frequently misused we’ve given them a bad name.
I know how I would feel after being besieged with a sixty-minute talking head in a three-inch square frame; after suffering though a pointless game for the sake of the instructor being able to check the “included game in my course” box on a rubric somewhere; or after participating in a meaningless, unguided group activity in which I do all the work and my group mates get the same grade.
This cry from our constituents, we want engaging, interactive content in our courses. Just give it a purpose.
Maybe the customer is right.
References
Ralston-Berg, P. & Nath, L. (2009). What Makes a Quality Online Course? The Student Perspective. Paper presented at Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, Madison, WI.
Quality Matters rubric standards 2008-2010 edition (2008). Retrieved from http://qminstitute.org.
The complete findings are also available at http://www.slideshare.net/plr15/what-makes-a-quality-online-course-the-student-perspective-1829440