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
This post is an eye opener! Lately, I have been working on some courses that are simulation based (regarding ERP implementations). If the learners do not look forward to simulations, then these courses are total flops!!….Do you have any suggestions as to what can replace it and is acceptable and engaging too!
Thanks,
Sherry
Sherry,
Thanks for the comment. In your situation, simulation may very well be the most appropriate approach. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head in that whatever you do in your courses must be engaging. I believe the resistance we may be experiencing to interactivity is more a result of such activities in many cases being implemented and overused without an evident purpose and clearly explicable connection to the expected outcomes of a course. If your ERP implementation simulations are the most clear path for students to traverse in the course to reach the designed outcome – use them. And let me know how it goes.
Jeremy-
This is an enlightening post. Being a grad student in an Instructional Design and Technology program, as well as being a mostly online student, I found myself agreeing with many of the things that students say they do not want in an online environment.
I am currently a student at Walden University, and this past August, I finished my undergrad at a different university. I completed all of my classes online with the exception of one. One of the major complaints I had about this universities’ online environment was the amount of group work we were obligated to participate in. I completed 12 classes (I had a substantial amount of transfer credit), and there was group work in at least 8 of the courses I completed, often times several group projects in one class. I am an adult student; therefore, I was often more concerned about my grade than others in my group. I ended up doing the majority of the work on the group projects while my “teammates” sat back and got an easy “A”. It was extremely frustrating. Often times I was so irritated that I considered going back and taking traditional courses in hopes of avoiding group work. However, because I also work full-time, the online environment was more convenient. Fortunately, my classes at Walden have had 0 group work to this point.
While I believe that minimal group work can be a learning experience for a student, I also believe that too much group work often leaves one or two students doing the majority of the work while the others do minimal or nothing. While the student(s) putting forth an effort in a group are gaining new knowledge, the student(s) doing nothing are gaining just that…nothing.
As a student, and as a future ID, I think adding group work as an “add-on” to an assignment can be beneficial, but I will be steering clear of incorporating too much group work into curriculum.
From my experiences as an instructional designer and course developer with a half dozen collages, universities and businesses, I would say your comment on the misuse of these technologies is one answer while from my own experience as an online student, one of yours at BSU actually, have me agreeing with a few others.
Instructors constantly feel the need to deliver recorded lectures in the 30 minute to one hour range that are littered with difficult to read graphics and other impediments to learning. Talking them out of these things and into shorter, more to the point, well designed types of interactive content is exhausting and too often ends in ID failure.
As an online student, I did not like group work as too often coordination with the group was difficult and levels of participation uneven. Peer review rarely provided insights and was, in general, too generous in its evaluation of my work and lacked the thoughtful critique that would make it useful to me as a learner.
There were exceptions, but in general I found little to like in group work, synchronous meetings, and mentoring situations.
We are adopting the QM rubric as a replacement for one developed internally for the sake of standardization and I have found it to be a valuable tool in that it injects a little more objectivity in the evaluation of online courses.
Wanted to share an update: I’ve been gathering more data – a presentation can be found at the link provided:http://www.slideshare.net/plr15/qm2010keynote
I wouldn’t go so far as to say student don’t want something, but it has become very clear that usability, usefulness, relevance, and alignment to learning objectives is more important to students than any specific type of media or technology.
Thanks for your interest!