Online vs. Onsite

By Neil Hollands, Project Director North Carolina Virtual Learning Community On-site learners know the drill. Online learners may not. We all have many years of training in how to behave in a classroom. The social rules, class procedures, and expectations for online learning are less clear. The instructor must make sure that students are completely aware of what is expected. Spell instructions out completely! Every item that you take the time to make clear in advance will save a dozen email messages later. Online learners will quit more quickly. In a classroom, most learners are comfortable enough to wait things out if the first week or two of instruction is unclear. There is no such social pressure to stay at a computer if an online course isn?t meeting expectations. Online learners will walk away. They?ll assume that online learning is a bad form of education or that they just don?t have the skills or personal style to handle it. Begin personal interaction with online students immediately. Get them talking with the rest of the class. Build preparatory assignments that give students experience with the course site and the technical skills they will need. Provide on-going praise, encouragement, and other incentives for them to keep working. Online learners require more interaction with an instructor. This principle might be a surprise, but it?s true. On-site learners designate one or two of their members to be the implicit "participators." These students ask most of the questions and give the instructor feedback while the others learn more quietly. Because online students can?t pass this role to others, be prepared to answer plenty of email. To keep your burden as instructor reasonable, pre-empt questions by answering them in support materials before they need to be asked. Encourage interaction between students so that they can get help from classmates in addition to the instructor. Provide links to online resources in technology and the subject you are teaching. Online learning can lack feedback for both students and instructors. Poorly designed online learning fails to provide feedback for everyone involved. Instructors do not know if students understand the material or if their teaching methods are working. Students aren?t sure if they are working enough or if they are catching all of the concepts. To compensate, use communication tools frequently and provide a variety of assignments. Ask more confirming questions and review more often. Online instructors must take some technical responsibility. Whether you like it or not, participants will look to you for technical help when taking online courses. Prepare yourself. If you know your skills are a little "iffy," collect a set of resources to which you can send students. Online learning is frequently more participant-driven. Online learners are usually a self-motivated breed. As an instructor, listen to what they want to learn. Give them content choices. Use telecommunications to get them to teach each other. A good online instructor is a facilitator, not the only source of information Online learning should be broken into manageable pieces. Because online learners quit quickly and because our attention span for a computer screen is limited, online content should be broken into chunks that take twenty minutes or less to complete. Students can always do more than one piece if their attention span holds. All learners are media critics. We have all been trained by television, movies, and Internet to be harsh media critics. If presentation, content, or design is mediocre, we seek out other sources. Information is plentiful and we have to be good critics or we just don?t have enough time to get what we need. Quality design becomes critical in this atmosphere. Finally . . . After all is said and done, there are still more similarities than differences between online and on-site learning. A good test for any online material is to first ask, "Would this work if I was presenting it as a live, on-site course?" If the answer is no, then start over. © Neil Hollands, May 8, 2000 By permission: North Carolina Virtual Learning Community