The idea of best practices in online courses

[marshwiggle]

As a "stronger student" in high school, I got deliberately paired with "weaker students" all the time. I hated it.  I guess the idea is that I would patiently serve as a tutor to the weaker student. Which I had no desire to do. What it meant was that I would try to convince the weaker student to care, and the weaker student would roll their eyes and go back to talking about sex or drugs, and then I would have to do all the work. Basically I hate group anything anyway, but this is one big reason why.

I've often wondered how the people who do this don't seem to realize that it pushes the good students to a more conservative and/or elitist worldview. By making them see that many of the students who aren't doing well are in that boat by their own lack of effort, (at least to some degree), rather than by just not being as smart. This is especially true if all of the students who work "together" on something get the same grade on it. The attempt to hide the bad performance of the lazy students behind the effort of the conscientious students is a scam that all of the students see through.

[kiana]

What really frustrated me about the "best practices" our online course design kept wanting is that they were very clearly designed around a specific idea of a course where you would have a weekly module with readings, videos, discussion board, a weekly assignment, and a quiz. They wanted everything in the same order for consistency between classes.

[Caracal]

The actual advice in those links is mostly fine and takes as a given that instructors have different sorts of classes, styles and material. The problem with these things is usually when people get too prescriptive. You see the same thing happening with discussions about in person teaching. I've often seen people on here make claims that lecture based classes are inherently bad pedagogy. People get stuck with an image of a lecture where they imagine a boring person reading from a piece of paper as they talk and don't realize that a lecture can be a pretty flexible format you can combine with other teaching methods.

You're describing a similar mindset. It sounds like these assessment are pretty useless because they aren't actually addressing actual issues in your teaching, but just measuring it against a generic standard.

[the_geneticist]

What really frustrated me about the "best practices" our online course design kept wanting is that they were very clearly designed around a specific idea of a course where you would have a weekly module with readings, videos, discussion board, a weekly assignment, and a quiz. They wanted everything in the same order for consistency between classes.

It's sort of like the folks who are convinced that the "5 paragraph essay" is the best/only way to write a short paper.  It's one way to write a paper, and is certainly better than 2 pages of random sentences, but it's not the only way to write a well-organized short paper.
I have some modules that are split over 2 weeks - introduction & experimental design in week 1; time between for the instructor to set up & film the experiment; students collect data, interpret results, & write conclusions in week 2.  Apparently no one else is doing this (at least not in my online cohort).  I've been asked why I don't just put in all in one module & use previous videos (which ruins the idea of letting students do the design).  Or why I can't make the project even BIGGER and have it take all of the term (it's not that big of a project).  Or why the students can't do the experiment at home and upload the videos (Seriously? Do you think they have a molecular lab in their guest room?).

[ciao_yall]

What really frustrated me about the "best practices" our online course design kept wanting is that they were very clearly designed around a specific idea of a course where you would have a weekly module with readings, videos, discussion board, a weekly assignment, and a quiz. They wanted everything in the same order for consistency between classes.

It's sort of like the folks who are convinced that the "5 paragraph essay" is the best/only way to write a short paper.  It's one way to write a paper, and is certainly better than 2 pages of random sentences, but it's not the only way to write a well-organized short paper.
I have some modules that are split over 2 weeks - introduction & experimental design in week 1; time between for the instructor to set up & film the experiment; students collect data, interpret results, & write conclusions in week 2.  Apparently no one else is doing this (at least not in my online cohort).  I've been asked why I don't just put in all in one module & use previous videos (which ruins the idea of letting students do the design).  Or why I can't make the project even BIGGER and have it take all of the term (it's not that big of a project).  Or why the students can't do the experiment at home and upload the videos (Seriously? Do you think they have a molecular lab in their guest room?).

I bet if their fridge looks like a lot of other college students' refrigerators I have seen, they probably have some good source material.

[Aster]

"Best Practice" is having a lot of choices and freedom to determine what curriculum design works best for you. For online education, this absolutely requires a top-notch LMS, and (usually) requires diverse and easily configured anti-cheating and plagiarism detection software options.

"Best Practice" is regularly updating and adjusting your curriculum instead of slapping everything into a can and putting the robot in charge of your class. The latter case is especially prevalent in online education. It's far too easy in online education to become ossified. Therefore, design your online curriculum to be easily modified and adjusted. Don't over-complicate your online assessments so that they're difficult or tedious to update. Don't automate all of your assessment grading to the point where you no longer regularly inspect your assessment questions or check up on the individual student responses to your online assessments. At that point, you're no longer a professional educator and I could replace you with a student worker.

[fishbrains]

I'm taking an online class about "best practices" in online teaching and I don't think they have considered that their materials are internally inconsistent.
Last week, we were told to think about making a syllabus that's more like a comic book or post a video or make a "liquid syllabus".
This week, we are learning about how to make our course more accessible and checking for ADA compliance.
A video of your syllabus or a comic book of your syllabus makes your course LESS ACCESSIBLE.

Hey, geneticist! Get out of my life! And I love the way they become agitated at us when we point out these kinds of serious inconsistencies!

I really, really like teaching online, and I've done it for nearly 20 years. I would put my online composition courses up-against most in-class versions of the same course any day. But FFS, everyone has suddenly become an expert on these "best practices" for online courses. Not every "best practice" works in every course for every instructor for every semester. Why is that so f-ing hard to understand?

[spork]

I'm taking an online class about "best practices" in online teaching and I don't think they have considered that their materials are internally inconsistent.
Last week, we were told to think about making a syllabus that's more like a comic book or post a video or make a "liquid syllabus".
This week, we are learning about how to make our course more accessible and checking for ADA compliance.
A video of your syllabus or a comic book of your syllabus makes your course LESS ACCESSIBLE.

Hey, geneticist! Get out of my life! And I love the way they become agitated at us when we point out these kinds of serious inconsistencies!

I really, really like teaching online, and I've done it for nearly 20 years. I would put my online composition courses up-against most in-class versions of the same course any day. But FFS, everyone has suddenly become an expert on these "best practices" for online courses. Not every "best practice" works in every course for every instructor for every semester. Why is that so f-ing hard to understand?

Yes. I teach graduate courses online throughout the year. The students are often outside the USA, sometimes at sea or in combat zones with limited bandwidth. I am not creating lecture videos, nor am I assigning any text that isn't available in digital form and downloadable.

[apl68]

I'm taking an online class about "best practices" in online teaching and I don't think they have considered that their materials are internally inconsistent.
Last week, we were told to think about making a syllabus that's more like a comic book or post a video or make a "liquid syllabus".
This week, we are learning about how to make our course more accessible and checking for ADA compliance.
A video of your syllabus or a comic book of your syllabus makes your course LESS ACCESSIBLE.

What would a comic book or video syllabus even look like?  In most cases the video syllabus would probably just turn into a cumbersome show-and-tell talking head.  A comic-book syllabus might work for just the right class and instructor.  But that would surely be a rare combination.

Weird ideas.

[the_geneticist]

I'm taking an online class about "best practices" in online teaching and I don't think they have considered that their materials are internally inconsistent.
Last week, we were told to think about making a syllabus that's more like a comic book or post a video or make a "liquid syllabus".
This week, we are learning about how to make our course more accessible and checking for ADA compliance.
A video of your syllabus or a comic book of your syllabus makes your course LESS ACCESSIBLE.

What would a comic book or video syllabus even look like?  In most cases the video syllabus would probably just turn into a cumbersome show-and-tell talking head.  A comic-book syllabus might work for just the right class and instructor.  But that would surely be a rare combination.

Weird ideas.

I posted my usual .pdf syllabus.  The online designers were impressed by the fact that it was well-organized with content heading, a schedule for the term, and "good use of white space".  You know, like a normal syllabus.

If I wasn't so darn busy I'd be tempted to do a video syllabus using sock puppets just to see what they'd say. (But students love videos!  Who doesn't love sock puppets?).

[kiana]

I posted my usual .pdf syllabus.  The online designers were impressed by the fact that it was well-organized with content heading, a schedule for the term, and "good use of white space".  You know, like a normal syllabus.

If I wasn't so darn busy I'd be tempted to do a video syllabus using sock puppets just to see what they'd say. (But students love videos!  Who doesn't love sock puppets?).

... I'd actually watch the syllabus video instead of saying "**** this, I can read" if it involved puppets.

[AvidReader]

I agree that the sock puppet video could be awesome. I imagine that it could be made to meet accessibility requirements if you captioned it. Unfortunately, it would make it much harder to say "Please see the syllabus" as an email response unless you also included a time-stamped table of contents.

But I, like kiana, would watch it.

AR.

[marshwiggle]

I posted my usual .pdf syllabus.  The online designers were impressed by the fact that it was well-organized with content heading, a schedule for the term, and "good use of white space".  You know, like a normal syllabus.

If I wasn't so darn busy I'd be tempted to do a video syllabus using sock puppets just to see what they'd say. (But students love videos!  Who doesn't love sock puppets?).

... I'd actually watch the syllabus video instead of saying "**** this, I can read" if it involved puppets.

I read this as the sock puppet saying "**** this, I can read", and I thought that would make an awesome 5 second video.

[the_geneticist]

I posted my usual .pdf syllabus.  The online designers were impressed by the fact that it was well-organized with content heading, a schedule for the term, and "good use of white space".  You know, like a normal syllabus.

If I wasn't so darn busy I'd be tempted to do a video syllabus using sock puppets just to see what they'd say. (But students love videos!  Who doesn't love sock puppets?).

... I'd actually watch the syllabus video instead of saying "**** this, I can read" if it involved puppets.

I read this as the sock puppet saying "**** this, I can read", and I thought that would make an awesome 5 second video.

Now that is a video I can totally make!

[dismalist]

There's another term that I managed to expunge from my memory until now -- state-of-the-art. Now that's definitely a little nothing form the business world.

-Is the art adequate?

-Does the state-of-the -art correspond to best practices? :-)

These are all meaningless phrases used to prevent thought.