Sunday, December 6, 2009

Week 10

Delivering Online Learning Resources

I have been enrolled in both hybrid and online learning classes for the last 3 years at Cal State.  I have used discussion boards, blogs, email, digital drop boxes, and threaded discussions to submit my assignments, depending on the class and the instructor.  The easiest has been the digital drop box, email and blogs.  I did not care for the threaded discussions because I would need to scroll through the list of previous discussed comments just to read the latest.  The discussion boards worked out okay, but I would prefer to use the blog because for me, it is simply easier to use and navigate from one student to the next.

In the classes that I have taught online, we use MyMathLab for the eLearning of the material and the turning in of the homework.  The students would complete their set of online homework assignments and then submit them to CourseCompass.  I would, as their instructor, check their grade online.  Therefore, I would not actually need to grade any of their homework problems or test problems because the program would do it form me.  The downside to this method would be if a student make it almost to the end of a problem but then messed up near the end, I would not be able to find their mistake.  All of the exams were multiple choice, which I do not like in a math class.  The reason for my lack of multiple choice is because there is no partial credit and if the student has the correct answer in a different form, they might not get credit for the problem simply because they cannot recognize their answer can be converted to another format. 

I have also tried sending out the final exam via email and having the students work through the problems at home and scanning their work and sending the exam back to me.  This method worked for a majority of the online students during that one semester that I tried this method, but I realized that not all of the students in my class had access to a scanner.  And sometimes when they tried scanning the final exam, their resolution was not high enough to give me a clear idea of what they were doing.  Or they would scan the pages out of order and I would need to print out their exams and try to figure out the order in which the pages should be in. 

I know that other instructors emailed out their final exams and have their students print out the final, work on the problems on the printed pages, and then mail through the postal service the final exam back to the school to the instructor.  This method works also, but sometimes students have claimed to have mailed their test back to the school and the instructor never got their final.  This could be an issue.

For the online calculus course, I would use MyMathLab to submit all of the homework assignments and to collect quiz information.  As far as the exams, I would use the free response option on MyMathLab to create my questions, but put a password on the exams that someone would need to enter before the student can have access to the exam.  This would require each student to come to our Math Lab on campus to have an approved instructor check their photo ID and then enter the password for them, or for the students who cannot come to campus for whatever reason, to find an approved proctor for the exam.  The proctor would be someone that the instructor has contacted and checked references prior to giving out the password for the exam to.

The instructor would also need to consider creating some video podcast lectures perhaps on Jing or Camtasia for each section, explaining the process of how to go through several examples that the instructor find useful or important to that section.  There are some videos already on MyMathLab, but I feel that if an instructor wants to teach an online class, (especially Calculus) they should do more for their students' learning that rely on a software package to teach their students.  There should be some sense of teaching by the instructor for the students to grasp.  Otherwise, if all the students did was learn from the program alone, it wouldn't really matter who was teaching the class; all classes would be the same.

I know that it is left to the instructor to decide how the course grade will be determined, but I would suggest to the instructor to assign a majority of the grade based on proctored exams.  The quizzes and homework could be done at home with the use of a tutor or textbook, but the student's grade that determines whether they really know and understand the material to move on to the next level should be based on how well that student proves themselves on proctored exams.  I have experienced too many times as chair of the mathematics department at our college students who have taken the previous online class and passed with an "A" or "B" and not be adequately prepared and ready for the next level of math. 

Just my ideas of how I would teach an online calculus class.

James

3 comments:

  1. Hi James,
    I like the way you worded your post. There are many challenges to creating an online course and getting the material across to the students. Videos help but there also needs to be the human factor. Math at a higher level needs to be free response because you need to see the process of how they solve the problems. Is MathLab able to give them quick feedback?
    I agree with what you said about the other instructor needed to change things to make it their own. You said it best when you said, "There should be some sense of teaching by the instructor for the students to grasp. Otherwise, if all the students did was learn from the program alone, it wouldn't really matter who was teaching the class; all classes would be the same."

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  2. hi
    i like your suggest to the instructor to assign a majority of the grade based on proctored exams

    i think that your online class will be wonderful

    great work


    eman

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  3. hi
    to make instracter create video podcast lectures for each section explaining i find it useful and important
    thank you
    amal

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