Students today have access to more information than ever before.   Beyond Google-fu and Wikipedia, new technologies allow anyone to research and order practically any publication with a few keystrokes.  College students have access to expansive libraries filled with volumes on the most obscure topics, and at larger universities like DePaul, students can access full-text articles in respected academic journals with a few simple searches.  The amount of information we students have access to before we ever reach a classroom or open up Blackboard can be overwhelming. It raises the question, given the wealth of information students have access to outside the classroom, what exactly is the role of the instructor?

It cannot simply be to impart information—all the information is out there and available for students.  Rather, I think part of the instructor role has to be to act as a filter—to cut through all the information out there and identify and present only that which is most important, most up to date, and most accessible for students who are just being introduced to a field or subfield of study.  The material then needs to be arranged into a coherent, unified form.

I think a lot of professors disregard this filtering function, and either put too much into their syllabi or overwhelm students with “optional resources” for topics they can’t cover within the course.

I know from experience how frustrating it can be when a student is confronted with an overwhelming number of sources.  I enjoy being subjected to academic rigor, but I’m put off by instructors handing me articles I “might be interested in” or optional resources, even when I’m really engaged by the subject-matter of the class.  First of all, I know of no student that has the time, at least during the school year, to go that far above and beyond the course requirements.  And more importantly, I think all these secondary resources can create intellectual clutter, distracting from the central principles the course is trying to communicate.

In short, as a student, I’m interested in what I need to know to meet the course goals. All the other stuff is a distraction, more often than not.

When I began my undergrad in 2002, I was a fairly shy kid and had moved to a college two states away where I didn’t know anyone. I never would have thought that in three years I’d have been a founding member of an environmental club, vice president of a literary magazine, and the organizer of a writer’s group.

It’s difficult to overstate how much of an effect these student organizations had on the trajectory of my life. The environmental club implemented the college’s first recycling program, for which we needed to interact with college administrators and county officials. This was my first experience navigating different levels of organizational hierarchy to implement a program. We also networked with regional environmental advocacy to educate students about issues and mobilize them in petition and letter-writing campaigns, which provided me a taste of politics.

My role in this organization was one of the first items on my resume and gave me something to talk about in my first few job interviews. I likely would not have been seriously considered for my AmeriCorps position after college without it. But not only that, it provided me with leadership skills, teamwork experience, and a broad knowledge base in a subject other than my academic major.

The benefits of a traditional college experience are not limited to what students get from classes. College life provides an abundance of other enrichment opportunities, such as performances, symposia, and student organizations. And I worry that online students don’t have as much of an opportunity to tap into those activities.

Even if we accept that the majority of online students are nontraditional learners who are taking classes online precisely because they have complicated schedules that would not accommodate these activities, I wonder if more could be done to promote a well-rounded education among online learners.

Let’s look at student organizations, for example. In many ways, college campuses are unique environments as crucibles for grassroots organization, be it an activist political organization or a Frisbee club. It’s obviously easier for the first buds of a student organization to form on a traditional campus as classmates make small talk, share interests, and become friends.

But it’s important to remember that student organizations don’t simply emerge from the ether. There are physical and bureaucratic structures on every campus that promote their existence. There are designated meeting spaces for these organizations to use. There are bulletin boards used to advertise meetings and events. There is funding set aside for student-organization activities. There is a procedure in place for the college to legitimize the organization.

Without these physical and organizational elements, campuses would not enjoy the level of student enrichment they do today. And I fear that as universities expand into online classes, they’re missing opportunities to provide the full student experience to their online learners.

Of course, there’s nothing to stop online students from using third-party social-networking Web sites right now to form student organizations. Students can use something like Facebook’s Group feature to organize and Skype’s video conferencing for meetings. But the farther students need to reach outside their institution’s online learning environment to form these groups, the more initiative it takes, and the less likely they are to do it. I think we’ll only see a richness of online-student activities that approaches that of traditional students if we offer a comparable infrastructure to that of the brick-and-mortar institutions.

But how would one build a comparable infrastructure online? Perhaps each college or academic program could operate its own online discussion board, linked to existing student accounts, providing students the opportunity to share resources, experiences, and ideas.

As these discussions expose shared ideas, desires, and interests, students can form groups that meet synchronously through applications like Wimba. Tools like Blackboard Community System, a comparable software package to Blackboard Academic Suite, allows student groups to have their own uniquely branded space within the online learning environment. A student group using this as its hub could provide information, create discussions, or set up Wimba sessions for audio and video conferencing.

There are innumerable tools that could be integrated with the online learning environment in innumerable ways. But I hope that as online education progresses, extracurricular activity becomes more and more a standard part of the experience so that online learners have the same opportunities for growth that I did.

As a graduate student from the writing program working at IDD, I often wonder how much time it makes sense to devote to copy editing the online-course syllabi and modules that come across my desk. I sometimes think I’m being too stringent in my attempts to apply the rules of the Chicago Manual of Style. I have a tendency to get lost for upwards of half an hour at a time trying to resolve ambiguities of correct hyphen and comma use. (I’m still not sure if I should use a comma before a coordinating conjunction connecting two imperative clauses.)

Generally, the amount of attention that gets paid to a certain text’s punctuation, grammar, and accuracy is proportional to the number of people we expect to read it. An article in a national news magazine is rigorously scrutinized while an e-mail to officemates may not be reread once. Given that logic, it doesn’t seem to make sense to go over every course module with a fine-toothed comb.

However, I think everyone involved in producing a class should have a healthy amount of fear of students misunderstanding the course content. I bring this up because I think there’s a sense that proper grammar and punctuation, while important in order to appear professional, are purely cosmetic—at best only necessary to make a text easier to read. But something as simple as a hyphen or a capital letter can make a sentence mean something entirely different than what is intended.

In neither speech nor writing is meaning in the words alone. For example, in speech, we can distinguish the White House, the building where the president lives, from a generic house that happens to be white, by using stressed and unstressed syllables. “The white house” is not the same “the white house.” Say it out loud; you’ll hear the difference.

While we use and interpret stressed syllables naturally in speech, in writing, we have to rely on visual elements to make sure our audience reads the sentence the way it is intended. When these are absent or inconsistent, the writer loses control of what the reader interprets.

If, for example, someone referred to the syllabus for an online course as “the online course syllabus,” there’s a very real chance that the reader could interpret it instead as a course syllabus that is online, possibly assuming we are talking about a face-to-face course in which the professor posted the syllabus on Blackboard.

To prevent this kind of miscommunication, the phrase must be hyphenated as “online-course syllabus” because the words “online course” function as a compound adjective to modify “syllabus.”

Perhaps I am trying too hard to justify my existence as a writing student working at IDD. But since instructors are often trying to differentiate subtle shades of meaning and convey complicated ideas, I think every effort should be made to eliminate the potential for this kind of misinterpretation. Remember that in asynchronous learning it’s harder for students to ask and get answers to questions when they’re confused.

Of course, much of the time, students will be able to tell what you mean by context, but not always. And I think we should be on the lookout for the situations where a comma, a hyphen, or a capital letter can keep students from misunderstanding the class concepts.