Setting Expectations for Online Learning

One of the major projects during the upcoming academic year at Lake Superior College will be to develop several lists of expectations regarding online learning. This is our thirteenth year of offering online courses and programs and we have always preached certain things about how to teach online and how to learn online.

However, we have never had a written list of what those expectations are. So, anyone who wasn't in the room when we were talking about these things probably never actually heard our expectations. This is a problem particularly when we bring in a new online faculty member and they might not get all the information that the long-term faculty have heard time and time again.

For example, we have always had the expectation that our online courses will NOT be electronic versions of independent study (also called e-correspondence courses). We expect faculty members to plan for and design into their courses a great deal of interaction - including student-to-student and student-to-instructor. BUT, no where does it actually state that in writing that we can point to.

Therefore, we will have a work group comprised of people throughout the college, plus student representatives, who will work to put together the following lists:
  • 1. Expectations that we have for online students
  • 2. Expectations that we have for online faculty
  • 3. Expectations that we have for administrators of online learning
A couple of weeks ago I tossed out a quick tweet seeking ideas and resources from my Twitter network about this topic of expectations. I received a thoughtful response from one of my Twitter friends and I will be using her input to make a couple of posts regarding her experiences with shaping expectations in online learning. Coming soon.

Comments

Lisa Cheney-Steen said…
We have our faculty expectation on our wiki at http://faculty.ccconline.org/index.php?title=CCCOnline_-_Faculty_Gold

You are welcome to any of it.

Lisa Cheney-Steen
August 31, 2009 2:59 PM
Barry Dahl said…
Most excellent. Thanks Lisa. I am working on some posts about expectations developed at St. Pete College and will post those soon. I also received a great e-mail today about UMUC and will share that as well. Now I'll try top absorb yours as well and see where this all takes us. Thanks again.
August 31, 2009 3:13 PM
Lisa Cheney-Steen said…
The biggest problem with ours is that we got a little excited when we wrote it up..... bunch of very wordy academics. In reality our QA program is now all about the discussion area - response time and whether or not the response re-engaged the students.
August 31, 2009 8:49 PM
Anonymous said…
When you decide on the objectives and expectations, the next step is to find elearning authoring tools that would work for your students and faculty.
August 27, 2010 12:17 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by...
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving...
Read more

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow...
Read more