The idea of best practices in online courses

[spork]

[. . .]

There are, of course, professors who "phone it in" for either type of course. In fact, they often are the same professors.

[. . .]

Same with students. Those who fail online don't do well face-to-face. And if a professor's students have uniformly high grades in his/her face-to-face courses but terrible grades in his/her online courses, there's a good chance the professor is terrible at teaching both. 

[Caracal]

I agree with hegemony. I view that online teaching (asynchronously) resembles the way that Deism is generally described. I need to spend quite a bit of time setting up the classroom, writing the assignments, going through the links, etc, but once it set-up, it requires less day-to-day involvement beyond checking in to make sure everything is going smoothly (both in a technical standpoint and that the students are doing well). So online teaching is quite a bit of work, if done correctly, but beyond grading and checking in, much of the work is done before the class begins.

Classroom teaching requires less pre-semester time (assuming that I am familiar with the material), but requires more ongoing work. Even if I have taught a course before, I tend to spend several hours before each meeting reviewing the material (at the least reading the assignments), and then there is the time in the classroom itself.

There are, of course, professors who "phone it in" for either type of course. In fact, they often are the same professors.

I find that there is a higher fail rate for online courses. Once I had a course where out of 15 students, 13 failed. This is in part because I think, from a student's perspective, taking an online course is harder. It requires more self-discipline; it is easier to "coast" through a course that meets on Monday and Wednesday by going to class and paying some attention, even if you don't read, than it is do so for a course that has no real lectures and no meeting times.

As I stated, this is for asynchronous courses, which I prefer. The past year, I have been teaching online, but this really means that I am teaching a class-room course, except that on Mondays and Wednesdays we do it via zoom instead of in the classroom. Of course there are tweaks that are required, but it is closer to classroom teaching than it is to asynchronous online teaching. Early in the pandemic, I tried to modify my classes to include more asynchronous components (discussion boards, etc), but it ended up being just more work piled on (for the students and for me) and didn't go well.

I would have had a hard time with asynchronous courses as a student for the same reasons it was a struggle for me to teach them. I have a hard time keeping myself organized without a structure.

[kiana]

There are a couple of groups where I'm seeing a dramatically increased failure rate (and there's some overlap between these groups).

a) Students who show up to class and do what they're told but nothing more. They're on their phones at every chance but will participate if it's problem-solving time. When they're on their own they just don't get around to it.

b) Chronically disorganized -- the kind of space cadet we've always had where they show up to class on test day and "Omg, there's a TEST??" In a f2f class we stick a test in front of them anyway and they take it and maybe don't do as well as if they'd studied, but they still get a nonzero score.

c) Cheaters. I've had more exam cheaters than I would normally get in several years. A 0 on a test tends to tank one's chances of passing -- the students who are strong enough to pass anyway with a 0 on a test aren't usually the ones cheating. It's just easier to do it online and you feel less "watched".

[AvidReader]

I have mixed feelings about returning to the classroom in the fall. I'm not scheduled to do any evening classes, and I"m glad about that. I am increasingly motivated to do a flipped classroom.

Definitely looking at at least a partial flip. I'll probably continue to do instruction for topics that I know they find very challenging, but for things they need to learn but don't usually struggle with, if I can move that out of the classroom we can spend a lot more time practicing the harder stuff, and I can cut some of the homework to make room for it.

I love the concept of a flipped classroom. However, I have had hybrid classes this year and have really struggled to get students to read or watch anything before coming to class. When I have students who do prepare, being available as they write their essays has worked beautifully. It's just hard to get them to prepare.

AR.

[kiana]

I love the concept of a flipped classroom. However, I have had hybrid classes this year and have really struggled to get students to read or watch anything before coming to class. When I have students who do prepare, being available as they write their essays has worked beautifully. It's just hard to get them to prepare.

AR.

Agreed completely. It's set up with videos and "check yourself" problems in Mylab; planning on a pretty draconian late penalty for those assignments only, coupled with open-notes quizzes at the beginning of class. I'm sure I'll still have some show up without having done it but they'd probably be the same students who would skip the homework and text through class and be lost in a regular lecture. I'm all ears about better ways to encourage it, too.

[the_geneticist]

There are a couple of groups where I'm seeing a dramatically increased failure rate (and there's some overlap between these groups).

a) Students who show up to class and do what they're told but nothing more. They're on their phones at every chance but will participate if it's problem-solving time. When they're on their own they just don't get around to it.

b) Chronically disorganized -- the kind of space cadet we've always had where they show up to class on test day and "Omg, there's a TEST??" In a f2f class we stick a test in front of them anyway and they take it and maybe don't do as well as if they'd studied, but they still get a nonzero score.

c) Cheaters. I've had more exam cheaters than I would normally get in several years. A 0 on a test tends to tank one's chances of passing -- the students who are strong enough to pass anyway with a 0 on a test aren't usually the ones cheating. It's just easier to do it online and you feel less "watched".

I'm seeing a much broader distribution of grades for these same reasons.  Lots of students are losing "easy" points by forgetting to take the pre-lab quizzes, turning in assignments late, not using synchronous Zoom time to do their assignments, etc.  And the cheaters.  So. Many. Cheaters.

[downer]

I love the concept of a flipped classroom. However, I have had hybrid classes this year and have really struggled to get students to read or watch anything before coming to class. When I have students who do prepare, being available as they write their essays has worked beautifully. It's just hard to get them to prepare.

AR.

Agreed completely. It's set up with videos and "check yourself" problems in Mylab; planning on a pretty draconian late penalty for those assignments only, coupled with open-notes quizzes at the beginning of class. I'm sure I'll still have some show up without having done it but they'd probably be the same students who would skip the homework and text through class and be lost in a regular lecture. I'm all ears about better ways to encourage it, too.

I will phase in the flipped classroom and will start with classes with smarter more motivated students. There is the problem of dealing with students who miss classes for valid or other reasons and how to deal with that in a flipped classroom without giving myself more work. I do know that I don't want to be lecturing a whole lot to passive students. If there's a point to being in the classroom together it must be that the students are actively working there.

[lightning]

I also have been teaching online courses for about a decade, and hybrid courses intermittently in the past five years or so. I also took an online graduate course in "educational design" when I was teaching secondary school. I am sure someone has done research, but I think "best practices" is going to vary widely depending on the class and the students.

The best online courses I have taught have been ones that did not meet about 50% of the "best practices" on most of those links (and at my current school, which is unfortunately not one of those). However, I had students who were motivated to learn and willing to participate synchronously and asynchronously despite having busy lives and schedules.

When I have followed "best practices" at my current school, I end up doing a lot of extra work that students ignore or find confusing. For instance, one current best practice says that you should vary the ways you present information. "Students love videos!" "Students love infographics!" "Add pictures!" "Send out weekly emails with assignment reminders!" Most students do not (in my experience) watch videos, even when there are quizzes on them. Most students (in my LMS) get confused by pictures because they think they are supposed to do something with them. Most of my students do not read weekly emails, even when they have missed class and could use them to get caught up.

Similarly, "Best practices" says videos should be under 5 minutes long. More than half the videos I produced for my 200+ students this academic year have fewer than 10 views. More than half of my 10 most popular videos (20-90 views each) are over ten minutes long. My observations of the numbers of views and durations of views on my own videos suggests to me that students don't like my talking head even for two or three minutes but will actually watch most of much longer videos when I show how to do something on the screen. (I also suggest that students start and stop the longer videos and try to follow my steps in their own work, which I guess is like having lots of little videos, but it doesn't make sense to me to create those breaks and make them hunt for the next steps).

AR.

Because of so-called "best practices," my university paid me extra to make videos of my lectures. Of course, students don't really watch them. But, I got paid, so that was one positive.

Because of so-called "best practices," my university went to great expenditures to include a video feedback feature for commenting on students' assignments that are submitted via the LMS. Of course, students don't really watch them, either.

There are no "best practices" that will get the unprepared & unmotivated to watch the videos, even if they know they are getting quizzed over it.

[AvidReader]

Because of so-called "best practices," my university went to great expenditures to include a video feedback feature for commenting on students' assignments that are submitted via the LMS. Of course, students don't really watch them, either.

Glad you at least got paid for your videos, lightning!

My LMS offers a voice feedback option for commenting on assignments. Perhaps ironically, a member of our teaching support office used this feature in a course I took this spring on best practices for online courses. It was deeply frustrating, both in terms of finding a computer with the required tech and audio capabilities and then, later, when trying to locate specific past feedback when I was completing subsequent activities (there were multiple feedback files for every assignment, with no distinctions made between them). I am sure someone likes it, but I did not.

AR.