Online based college courses.

Greetings,

I was working on some of my discussion posts for an online course I am enrolled in and I've noticed a trend with many of the online courses I have had. I've been taking courses for a little over two years now, only some have been entirely online since I am I guess a hybrid student and I take some classes on campus (mostly technology related classes) while taking some of the more general study classes online. Over the years I seem to have noticed a bit of a trend in how the classes are conducted and a few main issues that I have identified.

The first main problem that I see, at least where I attend college, is many of the online courses do not seem to have as much care or concern about the quality of education from the courses instructor. This obviously very difficult to gauge being that you never physically interact with your instructor in person, perhaps on a rare instance you may via telephone. Many of my online courses that I have been part of, the instructor essentially lays out the week by week syllabus and that's about it. I have only had one or two classes that I can remember the instructor actually genuinely participating with the online discussion topics which the courses generally rely on heavily as that is your interaction with your peers and instructor. Most of the time, it's just a bunch of posts from the students interacting with each other, and nothing from the instructor that really provokes additional thought, or steers discussion towards the proper direction if things move awry. Most of the posts from the instructors seem to be fairly generic such as "You showed great insight on your post" or similar.

The next issue that I see is partly stemming from what I suspect from my first problem is to be a fairly relaxed instructor who appears more to be there to collect a wage rather than provide a solid education, and that is many of the students wait until the last minute to provide the required discussion posts for each week. Obviously in doing so, you really aren't having any real interaction, it's just a scramble to construct some thoughtless reply to meet your weekly quota on discussion posts. Here I am trying to be a good student along with a couple other students in the class by actually doing the discussion posts throughout the course of an entire week, but since only a couple of us are actually beginning to post meaningful discussion from the beginning of the week onward, it's hard to have any real diverse and thought provoking discussion, so you don't get as much out of it as a student. Problem number one that I discussed also comes into play here as they use Blackboard so you are able to see your grade and the average grade, and surprisingly the average grade is often the maximum grade or very close to the maximum - even though the majority of the students posted everything in the last couple days of the week instead of first post by Tuesday and subsequent 6 or 7 posts thereafter and most replies are short "I agree!" instead of a meaningful reply.

The third and final issue, one that has been seriously annoying me the past three weeks is plagiarism. On at least two discussion posts from a couple of students for the past three weeks, they have been 100% copy and paste without a reference given (not that a reference would matter with a complete copy and paste). It's a big problem when you can copy a line from their post, Google it, and have the source they used and it matches word for word. The first week that I noticed this, I stayed out of it publicly and sent the other students an e-mail stating my observation and a friendly reminder that it could very well get them removed from the school and how it's not fair to the other students who genuinely try to achieve success. I didn't get a reply from one of the students, the other student replied and flat out denied any wrong doing and said it was their own post (even though I had supplied them with a link to a source they used to copy and paste from). The second week I noticed this, I very subtly hinted at it by replying to their own post and saying something like "Great post, I found this exact same information at this website (link goes here)". This week they were at it again, and I was frankly tired of it, so I replied to each with a link to the source and called out the plagiarism.

Are these experiences similar to any of those which some of you may have run into? I'm just curious if this is how online education in general is, or if I am just stuck at a school which doesn't have much care about the quality of the education and/or the quality of the instructors they hire. I already have a lot of examples which lead me to believe that the school generally only cares about making money as it's a for profit school. I'm far enough along in my program already that it wouldn't make sense to switch to a different school since I would have to take many additional classes. It makes more sense at this point to finish up here with my bachelors and get into a masters program at a school which hopefully seems to care more. I'm mostly concerned about the overall feel towards online education, since if I enter a masters program it will probably be mostly online hopefully, but I want to make sure that I actually get a meaningful degree that genuinely requires a lot of hard work on my part to achieve.

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Comments

JDMurray

Are these online courses given by a brick-and-mortar school, or is the school's curriculum entirely online?

I find that what you describe is typical of a brick-and-mortar college that's added online classes as part of its extension program. Those classes are viewed mostly as a new source of revenue for the school rather than as a superior educational opportunity. You might find that these online instructors are paid less, so they don't attract the better, more experienced educators. Also, teaching online classes are a good way for grad students to earn independent study credit, but their inexperience at teaching is not a good thing for the students in the class.

When a brick-and-mortar school adds online classes, they may not consider several details that require extra attention, such as plagiarism. It is usually much easier to plagiarize in an online class, so greater controls must be used to safeguard against its occurrence. Of course, if the school isn't doing much to control plagiarism in its brick-and-mortar classrooms then I certainly wouldn't expect more of an effort to do so in its online classrooms.

msteinhilber

Yea, they are primarily a brick-and-mortar school. The classes I have had on campus have overall been fairly good with a couple of classes which were borderline terrible due to the instructors not having any real knowledge on the subject (CAD instructor teaching advanced TCP/IP for example) which was clearly evident and I was able to take notes several pages long on false information.

It's really a shame that these online classes are like this, I've expressed concerns to the proper channels and have escalated my concerns higher up when they went unnoticed but I have yet to get any serious reply other than "we'll look into it". Makes it difficult to see nearly 17k a year going towards your education when you feel you are being short-changed.

What you mentioned makes perfect sense though, I have not thought about it in the regard that a business model geared specifically towards online education would likely have more checks in place since their reputation entirely relies upon the quality of the online experience whereas the brick-and-mortar still likely concentrates on the on-campus experience.

Thanks for the input!

SamCarter

I have taken both online and in-person classes and I had similar experiences in the online classes. After I got comfortable with the format, I tried to balance it so that I took the "hard" classes in person and the "easy" ones online. My reasoning for that was that I would have less interaction with other students and the instructor online but I wouldn't really need to ask questions if the material was familiar for me. It was essentially graded, timed self-study. Though at my school the online instructors are the same ones that teach the in-person classes, and they all have a lot of real-world experience. I have found them to be very responsive by e-mail (and some by phone) when asked about anything but very few actually posted on the discussion boards.

Taking the "hard" classes (the ones on topics that I had no experience in) in person allowed me to benefit from hearing other students' questions and from asking my own. It also let me know how I was doing in comparison to other students - to see if they were struggling with the material too. Online, you are supposed to be able to do that by looking at the average grades for the class, but I noticed that they always started out at the top and went down as time goes on. I assumed that was because a few students dropped out but were not removed from the averages.

Some people think that an online class is the ticket to an easy A, but they time the tests and make them difficult so that you can't look up every answer in the book. Most of the time the in-class tests are easier because the teacher will do a review and give you hints that you wouldn't usually get online. There is also a perception that you don't have to "waste time" listening to the lectures online, but you do since they ask specific questions about it. Some classes had great online discussions going and others - not so much. It depends more on the classmates you end up with than the instructor IMO.

In my case, I took a combination of class formats so I could get done faster (and I'm almost done!). Looking back though, I don't think I would have changed that.

JDMurray

What people don't realize is that online classes are often good for people who do poorly at taking exams, but are good at researching and writing and interacting online. All quizzes and exams for an online class are "open book," and therefore not likely to account for a significant percentage of your class grade, so they are relatively easy. Instead, online classes grade mostly from writing assignments and participation in the class' discussion forum.

At Capella, it was not unusual for me, in each 10-week class, to write two, 10-page papers and a 30-page paper (single spaced), and create another 10 pages or so of discussion submissions and responses. On top of that, reading books and journal articles, watching video lectures, and using computer-based training software are also part of online learning too.

What you will miss in online learning is the face-to-face connection with your classmates and instructors. If that's very important for you to have a successful learning experience, online learning is probably not for you.

MCPWannabe

msteinhilber wrote:

Greetings,

I was working on some of my discussion posts for an online course I am enrolled in and I've noticed a trend with many of the online courses I have had. I've been taking courses for a little over two years now, only some have been entirely online since I am I guess a hybrid student and I take some classes on campus (mostly technology related classes) while taking some of the more general study classes online. Over the years I seem to have noticed a bit of a trend in how the classes are conducted and a few main issues that I have identified.

The first main problem that I see, at least where I attend college, is many of the online courses do not seem to have as much care or concern about the quality of education from the courses instructor. This obviously very difficult to gauge being that you never physically interact with your instructor in person, perhaps on a rare instance you may via telephone. Many of my online courses that I have been part of, the instructor essentially lays out the week by week syllabus and that's about it. I have only had one or two classes that I can remember the instructor actually genuinely participating with the online discussion topics which the courses generally rely on heavily as that is your interaction with your peers and instructor. Most of the time, it's just a bunch of posts from the students interacting with each other, and nothing from the instructor that really provokes additional thought, or steers discussion towards the proper direction if things move awry. Most of the posts from the instructors seem to be fairly generic such as "You showed great insight on your post" or similar.

The next issue that I see is partly stemming from what I suspect from my first problem is to be a fairly relaxed instructor who appears more to be there to collect a wage rather than provide a solid education, and that is many of the students wait until the last minute to provide the required discussion posts for each week. Obviously in doing so, you really aren't having any real interaction, it's just a scramble to construct some thoughtless reply to meet your weekly quota on discussion posts. Here I am trying to be a good student along with a couple other students in the class by actually doing the discussion posts throughout the course of an entire week, but since only a couple of us are actually beginning to post meaningful discussion from the beginning of the week onward, it's hard to have any real diverse and thought provoking discussion, so you don't get as much out of it as a student. Problem number one that I discussed also comes into play here as they use Blackboard so you are able to see your grade and the average grade, and surprisingly the average grade is often the maximum grade or very close to the maximum - even though the majority of the students posted everything in the last couple days of the week instead of first post by Tuesday and subsequent 6 or 7 posts thereafter and most replies are short "I agree!" instead of a meaningful reply.

The third and final issue, one that has been seriously annoying me the past three weeks is plagiarism. On at least two discussion posts from a couple of students for the past three weeks, they have been 100% copy and paste without a reference given (not that a reference would matter with a complete copy and paste). It's a big problem when you can copy a line from their post, Google it, and have the source they used and it matches word for word. The first week that I noticed this, I stayed out of it publicly and sent the other students an e-mail stating my observation and a friendly reminder that it could very well get them removed from the school and how it's not fair to the other students who genuinely try to achieve success. I didn't get a reply from one of the students, the other student replied and flat out denied any wrong doing and said it was their own post (even though I had supplied them with a link to a source they used to copy and paste from). The second week I noticed this, I very subtly hinted at it by replying to their own post and saying something like "Great post, I found this exact same information at this website (link goes here)". This week they were at it again, and I was frankly tired of it, so I replied to each with a link to the source and called out the plagiarism.

Are these experiences similar to any of those which some of you may have run into? I'm just curious if this is how online education in general is, or if I am just stuck at a school which doesn't have much care about the quality of the education and/or the quality of the instructors they hire. I already have a lot of examples which lead me to believe that the school generally only cares about making money as it's a for profit school. I'm far enough along in my program already that it wouldn't make sense to switch to a different school since I would have to take many additional classes. It makes more sense at this point to finish up here with my bachelors and get into a masters program at a school which hopefully seems to care more. I'm mostly concerned about the overall feel towards online education, since if I enter a masters program it will probably be mostly online hopefully, but I want to make sure that I actually get a meaningful degree that genuinely requires a lot of hard work on my part to achieve.

Hell Yes, I noticed this sort of stuff at my school. Office hours were a joke, and I taught my myself an MBA. I paid tuition for the experience of having someone tell me which books to buy for an MBA and taking test.

In my school's case, over half of the people failed out. The test were all proctored and real. Often times, one would have to cover an extremely large amount of material and take a proctored final at the end of the course, on which over 50% of the grade depended on. It was enough to make those 5% discussion scores count a lot.

At first I complained, but then I learned that it was better to just keep my mouth shut and go with the flow. Otherwise, you'll end up getting labelled as a troublemaker, and that can be a very hard stigma to get rid of.. trust me.