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[mrbreeze]

Hello all,

I teach in s a SLAC with no online course offerings. A Dean recently indicated to me that would be "nice" for someone to do a pilot for an on-line course offering.

During my BS degree (ages ago) I took one online course which and was nothing more than a bulletin-board (back then), an online forum with today's lingo. The experience did not thrill me.

Later, I took an on-line course in Project Management which blew me away!

Lectures were taped (instructor talking to the camera, not in a classroom setting) and content delivery was based on the video, accompanied (same window) with the relevant Powerpoint slides (which moved as the instructor proceeded with the lecture). The course had separate access to Blackboard, on-line discussion groups etc... It was great!


Now I am tempted. I know that I can easily create the 2007 equivalent of my first experience. But I think the "top shelf" way is doing it similar to my latter experience.

I am afraid that it would be a very hard sell to convince anyone to run an entire course in advance, tape it, etc, let alone this endeavor may require cameras, special video editing software etc.

What is your thinking about the different on-line delivery methods?
Does anyone have any good links, proposals or studies that give comparatives in terms of cost, pedagogy (effectiveness) etc?

Any ideas, comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Mario

[bibliologos]

The two on-line courses that I teach were developed by working with an instructional designer to convert a correspondence-type course to an on-line course with a community of learners.  It's all text-based (no fancy powerpoint-type images, no video or audio component), using a common course-delivery platform.  That cost $5000 per course (three years ago) to set up - remember, from an existing course.  The full package (video, audio, live interaction etc.) costs about $30,000 to develop from scratch according to our instructional design people - plus course release, which is credited at two courses release per one course.  I wouldn't even do it without an instructional designer to do all the technical stuff.

[zharkov]

My first reaction to this situation would be to run away from this "pilot" as fast as you can.  "Nice" doesn't seem like a good reason to do something, at what sounds like would be basically "for free" from the dean's perspective.

If you want to try some online learning at your school, you could run a hybrid -- half in class and half online -- and get a blog set up from typepad (etc.) which would allow you to share documents and have online discussions.

It would make more sense, in the longer run, for the dean to pull together an ad hoc committee to investigate online options, get bids from Blackboard, eCollege, and such, and put a proposal in the dean's lap in 6 months, say. 

If you school is not willing to pay for the course management software and hire an online learning admin / course development person, then I wouldn't waste my time. 

[csguy]

 You could look at the Edutools information at http://www.edutools.info/. If you really want to try one out look for hosted solutions.

There are also some publishers that support course management systems. McGraw-Hill, for example, has a thing called PageOut.

But  mostly I'd agree with Zharkov "run away from this "pilot" as fast as you can".

My offspring has done a couple of courses with one of the area universities. They were actually pretty primitive. E-mail or snail-mail assignments.

[larryc]

It isn't that hard.  But don't tell your dean that.  Tell him that it is a ton of work and that the standard development money is $5000 per course to the faculty member.  And tell him that you need to go to the Syllabus or other technology conference. And of course you will need a laptop, digital camera, webcam, and some sushi.

Google around a bit, there a zillion articles about how to do this.  Once you have some more specific questions come back here and tell us what the course is and someone will share their online syllabus with you.

[dept_geek]

LarryC is right (as usual). Ask for the moon if you are the pilot. You might want to also look at some place like Ohio Learning Network, and their free "how to take an online course" course for ideas (http://www.oln.org/discover/e4me.php)

[larryc]

Also--keep in mind that if you are one of the first people to teach online at your institution, you will be teaching the students how to take an online course as well as the course content. It is more work than stepping into a program where a substantial number of students are familiar with the course delivery system and can help the others.

[zharkov]

If you are into do it yourself stuff, another option is to use Moodle and get one of the Moodle hosting outfits to actually carry the class. 

I myself would look for a couple of course releases and/or a month or two's worth of summer stipend, and the college paying for the hosting and what not.

[dale1]

There are ways to do this that are more pedagogically powerful.  Sounds like your later experience was that for you.

Check out Distributed Education at www.cs.iupui.edu if you're interested in seeing a model.  Video is captured and digitized, then streamed through a server.  About 15 courses are totally online.