Accelerated Online Summer Course

[Caracal]

Thanks, this is all very helpful. I needed the reminders about managing my own workload. One of the things I've realized from trying to teach three different classes online for half this semester is that getting everything up on the CMS somehow ends up being far harder than teaching a class for me. It should be simpler to only have only one inflexible deadline for myself in terms of putting things up and then the rest of the week I can focus on all of the management of those assignments.

[downer]

Obviously others have done it, but I would find the goal of having an assignment due every week day too much for me and the students. I guess that they can work ahead, and do assignments early if they want to create a day off for themselves. But most students are not good at doing work ahead of time.

I guess it depends on how many students you have in the class. I'm teaching an online summer class with around 35 students in it. My practice is to be realistic about how much time I am prepared to spend on the class, and design assignments accordingly.

[polly_mer]

From the administrative view, do not make the course easier in terms of content and demonstrating mastery of that content/skills, whatever that means for this course.  As the_geneticist wrote, the university cannot award credit for only half a course.

One way that institutions get in trouble with their accreditor is having accelerated courses be noticeably less work than their full-term counterparts.  Accreditors look more closely at the most accelerated courses in large part because they know that the 5.5 hours a day is a heavy lift and therefore students should only be in enrolled in one course at a time while doing everything else in life or two courses and nothing else.

Institutions that let students overload are also asking for additional scrutiny during accreditor review.

[fishbrains]

I guess it depends on how many students you have in the class. I'm teaching an online summer class with around 35 students in it. My practice is to be realistic about how much time I am prepared to spend on the class, and design assignments accordingly.

True that. Our Comp classes are capped between 20 and 25, and you usually lose 3 or 4 students pretty quickly in the first week.

[HigherEd7]

You bring up some great points. Let me ask you this, you are not doing a discussion board and I agree with your reasoning. I always thought a discussion question was needed in any online course.

I'm teaching a similar course format in the Summer, and, having done it before, here is my plan:

• Something is going to be due every weekday. My class is a first-semester freshizzle Comp course, so I want to eliminate the question in their heads about "Is anything due today?" Even if they are just submitting a thesis statement or a proposal on some days, something is due. I've found that having assignments due once a week means they wait until the night before it's due to start the work--and disaster ensues.
• Modules work. Comp. tends to naturally fall into a "modular" format because each essay forms its own project
• I state on the syllabus that the work-load for the course is 2-3 hours per weekday. This isn't true for all days, but I've never had a student complain about a reduced workload on a particular day. I'm not sure I'm trying to scare students, but more like cover my behind when they complain that I don't "accommodate their schedules" (one or two usually do).
• I also state that vacations will not be accommodated in any way. If students are going anywhere, they had better have a computer and internet access.
• No discussion boards for my class. They take too much time with little benefit for a Comp. class.
• I drop an essay (I do three instead of four or five] for the accelerated course, but the essay I drop is the easiest one.
• I don't have anything big due on Mondays, or I will not have Sundays off at all.

I'm contemplating revising my late work policy to "punish" late work more severely. We'll see.

[arcturus]

You bring up some great points. Let me ask you this, you are not doing a discussion board and I agree with your reasoning. I always thought a discussion question was needed in any online course.

Discussions are not required in online courses. The relevant regulatory issue is that online courses require peer-to-peer interactions (to distinguish them from correspondance courses, which are not eligible for federal financial aid) and instructor-student interactions. Discussion boards are an easy way to guarantee such interactions. However, you can set up other peer-to-peer interactions, such as peer review of student work (good practice in writing-based courses) or group-work assignments. As always, assigned work should be designed to achieve specific learning outcomes, not just be busy-work for the sake of busy-work.

[polly_mer]

You bring up some great points. Let me ask you this, you are not doing a discussion board and I agree with your reasoning. I always thought a discussion question was needed in any online course.

Discussions are not required in online courses. The relevant regulatory issue is that online courses require peer-to-peer interactions (to distinguish them from correspondance courses, which are not eligible for federal financial aid) and instructor-student interactions. Discussion boards are an easy way to guarantee such interactions. However, you can set up other peer-to-peer interactions, such as peer review of student work (good practice in writing-based courses) or group-work assignments. As always, assigned work should be designed to achieve specific learning outcomes, not just be busy-work for the sake of busy-work.

The regulations also include some evidence that the course, while possibly asynchronous day-to-day, is not self-paced.  A distance education course has a cohort of students who are all going through together while a correspondence course is for one student at a time.

A really great self-paced electronic tutorial is not eligible for the same financial aid as a sort-crummy distance education course that relies on an undertrained faculty member herding reluctant learners to do something meaningful every week.

Distance education that is mostly synchronous lectures with a once-per-week assignment due is much more favored in financial aid space than a great all-online course in which the students all go at their own pace without being slowed down by their peers who refuse to prepare and participate.

[dr_codex]

You bring up some great points. Let me ask you this, you are not doing a discussion board and I agree with your reasoning. I always thought a discussion question was needed in any online course.

Discussions are not required in online courses. The relevant regulatory issue is that online courses require peer-to-peer interactions (to distinguish them from correspondance courses, which are not eligible for federal financial aid) and instructor-student interactions. Discussion boards are an easy way to guarantee such interactions. However, you can set up other peer-to-peer interactions, such as peer review of student work (good practice in writing-based courses) or group-work assignments. As always, assigned work should be designed to achieve specific learning outcomes, not just be busy-work for the sake of busy-work.

The regulations also include some evidence that the course, while possibly asynchronous day-to-day, is not self-paced.  A distance education course has a cohort of students who are all going through together while a correspondence course is for one student at a time.

A really great self-paced electronic tutorial is not eligible for the same financial aid as a sort-crummy distance education course that relies on an undertrained faculty member herding reluctant learners to do something meaningful every week.

Distance education that is mostly synchronous lectures with a once-per-week assignment due is much more favored in financial aid space than a great all-online course in which the students all go at their own pace without being slowed down by their peers who refuse to prepare and participate.

While my online courses are by no means perfect, the bolded sentence is the complaint that I've been getting over the last two years.

To be fair, "group work" has been a student complaint since the time that Socrates put Plato in a discussion agora with Thrasymachus. But online courses exacerbate the problem, especially when they are there only to tick an assessment box, as arcturus notes above.

[HigherEd7]

You bring up some great points. Let me ask you this, you are not doing a discussion board and I agree with your reasoning. I always thought a discussion question was needed in any online course.

Discussions are not required in online courses. The relevant regulatory issue is that online courses require peer-to-peer interactions (to distinguish them from correspondance courses, which are not eligible for federal financial aid) and instructor-student interactions. Discussion boards are an easy way to guarantee such interactions. However, you can set up other peer-to-peer interactions, such as peer review of student work (good practice in writing-based courses) or group-work assignments. As always, assigned work should be designed to achieve specific learning outcomes, not just be busy-work for the sake of busy-work.

Thank you for the response, I have always thought discussion questions are needed. I guess I need to rethink giving this assignment in my summer online courses. Is there anything else you can do besides group projects? I have given group projects in the past and there are going to be students in the group who do not do the work and they are very hard to grade.

[fishbrains]

You bring up some great points. Let me ask you this, you are not doing a discussion board and I agree with your reasoning. I always thought a discussion question was needed in any online course.

I'm teaching a similar course format in the Summer, and, having done it before, here is my plan:

• Something is going to be due every weekday. My class is a first-semester freshizzle Comp course, so I want to eliminate the question in their heads about "Is anything due today?" Even if they are just submitting a thesis statement or a proposal on some days, something is due. I've found that having assignments due once a week means they wait until the night before it's due to start the work--and disaster ensues.
• Modules work. Comp. tends to naturally fall into a "modular" format because each essay forms its own project
• I state on the syllabus that the work-load for the course is 2-3 hours per weekday. This isn't true for all days, but I've never had a student complain about a reduced workload on a particular day. I'm not sure I'm trying to scare students, but more like cover my behind when they complain that I don't "accommodate their schedules" (one or two usually do).
• I also state that vacations will not be accommodated in any way. If students are going anywhere, they had better have a computer and internet access.
• No discussion boards for my class. They take too much time with little benefit for a Comp. class.
• I drop an essay (I do three instead of four or five] for the accelerated course, but the essay I drop is the easiest one.
• I don't have anything big due on Mondays, or I will not have Sundays off at all.

I'm contemplating revising my late work policy to "punish" late work more severely. We'll see.

Just to clarify. I use discussion boards in my literature survey courses. I do so sparingly (generally regarding the more difficult works, so students can see it's not just them not getting the material). But not for composition courses. Especially not for accelerated composition courses.

My best advice about online teaching tends to be to seek advice, but do what works best for you and your students and your specific course. This may seem obvious, but I've seen many online instructors get turned-around trying to do things that just don't work with the course material or course format because some goofball guru said to.   

[Hegemony]

If you can find a way for discussions to be useful for the course, they do promote student engagement. If you have students interacting with each other in other ways, then that may not matter. But as I understand it, student interaction is required for a course to count as the equivalent of an in-person course. If there is no engagement with other students, it's the equivalent of a correspondence course.

[kiana]

Distance education that is mostly synchronous lectures with a once-per-week assignment due is much more favored in financial aid space than a great all-online course in which the students all go at their own pace without being slowed down by their peers who refuse to prepare and participate.

While my online courses are by no means perfect, the bolded sentence is the complaint that I've been getting over the last two years.

To be fair, "group work" has been a student complaint since the time that Socrates put Plato in a discussion agora with Thrasymachus. But online courses exacerbate the problem, especially when they are there only to tick an assessment box, as arcturus notes above.

Very interesting and thanks for the discussion.

I wonder if I could make "group work" count by putting people into groups by the order they hit a milestone? At least that way the people who are checked out would be in a group together.

Because, yes, in an elementary algebra class I pretty much would be doing it to tick an assessment box.

[HigherEd7]

Obviously others have done it, but I would find the goal of having an assignment due every week day too much for me and the students. I guess that they can work ahead, and do assignments early if they want to create a day off for themselves. But most students are not good at doing work ahead of time.

I guess it depends on how many students you have in the class. I'm teaching an online summer class with around 35 students in it. My practice is to be realistic about how much time I am prepared to spend on the class, and design assignments accordingly.

You bring you a great point and I know I have talked about here in the forum. Most people I have talked to give a quiz and a discussion board each week, along with two or three assignments during the semester. If you are teaching 3 online courses with 25-30 students it becomes time consuming to grade discussion posts each week.

[Parasaurolophus]

Yes to the full load issue. Our students are not supposed to be able to sign up for more than 2 courses in a summer session, but I know that they do. And they work.

I heard from the humanities admin that some students--international students, in this case--are taking SIX courses this summer in a desperate attempt to finish ASAP.

Six. Summer. Courses. Holy crap.