Governor Pawlenty made waves about a year ago when he proposed that he wanted MnSCU to have 25% of its credits generated through online courses. The current amount is 9%, so he wants to almost triple online enrollment in 7 years, quite a hefty feat. Yet there are no real guidelines passed down from MnSCU or SCSU about what an online course must contain. There are some outside standards (the one I am going to be using is by Quality Matters), but nothing from the administration. As educators, we like flexibility and academic freedom, so I appreciate nobody telling me exactly how an online course is supposed to look. However, a mandate for increased production of something without any standard on quality will likely lead to a reduction in quality, and some of us in academia are concerned about that.

I’m in the middle of a redesign of the online principles courses in the Economics department to take advantage of new technology and a new and growing understanding of what it takes to create a good online course. There are many issues to consider and I’d bore you if I went into them here. Let’s just say that I have a very good vision for what I want the online courses to look like and am trying to make sure I can get the technology to do it in a way that is easy for students to follow. But as professors, sometimes we find that our vision of a course conflicts with what students want in a course. In that kind of a disagreement, the professor usually wins, but sometimes the class as a whole loses as a result. Our job is not an easy one: to balance our professional expectations for what goes into a course with an understanding of what our students will and will not do; to push students to do work we know will be beneficial for them, making them live up to our expectations, without pushing too hard and risking a revolt.

For example, I would love it if all my students read their textbooks before class. It would allow me to spend more time on applications and extensions of the concepts and less time going through the basics. A few years ago, I started using pre-lecture quizzes to force students to read the book before lecture. The questions weren’t too difficult, but you had to read the chapter if you wanted to pass. I eventually came to find that students just skimmed the book  or searched through the book to find the answer to the question without really paying attention to what they were reading. The pre-lecture quiz performance was never good. Students did the quiz but didn’t learn much, so I had to go over the basics anyway. My students told me, through their behavior, that they’re simply not going to read their textbook before lecture, since they felt I did a good job communicating the concept in lecture and they didn’t need to read the book. The pre-lecture quiz idea was great in theory but just didn’t work well in practice. (I got the message, loud and clear, and have dropped the idea from my courses.)

The purpose of this post is to solicit feedback from students about online courses. For those of you who have taken online courses: what made it a good or bad course? Why did you choose the online course instead of a lecture-based course: convenience or a perceived lower level of difficulty? Was it easier or harder than a lecture-based course? Was it just as educational as a traditional lecture course would have been? If you had a bad experience, what could your professor have done differently to have made it better for you?

Please share your thoughts so that I can understand why students take online courses and what makes them successful from a student perspective. Our goal is to make our department’s online courses as educational and informative as a traditional lecture course — I’m just trying to figure out what that means for students.