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.
