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[fosca]

And by the quality of the effort faculty put into developing their online courses. My students tell me they are flabbergasted and thrilled once they get into my course and see it's not just a lot of powerpoint slides and assignments and problems to work. They get something more or less equivalent to the traditional course with lectures and demonstrations and how-tos that are analogous to what they'd see in the classroom. The delivery is different (loads of videos, of course) but the information is similar and their learning has been similar.  They tell me that many of the online courses at our university are simply lots of slides or readings to do and then exams to take. The professor hasn't tried to deliver anything using the media available beyond PPT and DOC files. I find that very sad (esp. as I know we have resources on campus to help faculty who want to developed rich online courses).

I took the time to make a whole bunch of videos explaining content with demonstrations and such, and I can't get the students to watch them.  Even the videos that directly explain how to do the assignments get ignored.  I suspect it's because most of my students don't realize how much work an online class will take and find themselves overwhelmed and can't really keep up with the pace (I teach an accelerated online gen-ed course) and the videos are the first to go, along with doing assignments before the morning they are due.

[oldfullprof]

I often think that praising online is whistling past the graveyard.

[octoprof]

And by the quality of the effort faculty put into developing their online courses. My students tell me they are flabbergasted and thrilled once they get into my course and see it's not just a lot of powerpoint slides and assignments and problems to work. They get something more or less equivalent to the traditional course with lectures and demonstrations and how-tos that are analogous to what they'd see in the classroom. The delivery is different (loads of videos, of course) but the information is similar and their learning has been similar.  They tell me that many of the online courses at our university are simply lots of slides or readings to do and then exams to take. The professor hasn't tried to deliver anything using the media available beyond PPT and DOC files. I find that very sad (esp. as I know we have resources on campus to help faculty who want to developed rich online courses).

I took the time to make a whole bunch of videos explaining content with demonstrations and such, and I can't get the students to watch them.  Even the videos that directly explain how to do the assignments get ignored.  I suspect it's because most of my students don't realize how much work an online class will take and find themselves overwhelmed and can't really keep up with the pace (I teach an accelerated online gen-ed course) and the videos are the first to go, along with doing assignments before the morning they are due.

Some of the students don't watch my lovely videos, either. Those students perform poorly. When they come to me asking me why they made an F, I show them how little they've actually looked at on BlackBoard. Some of them eventually get the connection, some don't.  You can lead a horse to water...

Of course, some of the students in my traditional classes don't show up. Some show up but do not pay attention. I'm always amazed (in a bad way) by how many students never take a single note in class. "How's that working out for them?" I think. It's not, of course.

My students are sophomores (in the intro course) or juniors/seniors (in the majors course) so one would like to think they get the concept of doing ALL the work (including watching the lectures and demonstrations), but a few don't. I have one student in the majors course who didn't do any homework (say 5%) the first four weeks of the term. When I asked him about it he said something like,"Well, I do it eventually, but I like to do it much closer to test time." I pointed out the obvious, that he's losing points every time he doesn't do it, and he shrugged and said,"Well, it's only 5 or 10 percent so it doesn't matter."  You can lead a horse to water...

In my intro course, I had two or three students (of fifty) who clearly didn't watch a single video the first three weeks of the semester (as in, they logged in on the first day of the semester and never logged into BlackBoard again). Strangely, they were doing homework and quizzes (on the publisher provided website). I asked one of them how he could do the homework without any of the videos/etc. provided in Blackboard and he said,"Well, I just look at the book and figure it out." If I had designed the coutse like that, I would be FRIED on evals, not to mention I'd have a poorly designed course. You can lead a horse to water...

What I see with online learning is not much different, as far as the range of student behaviors, than what I see in traditional classroom settings.

I do work hard each semester to make the structure of the online course more and more obvious (a traditional course's structure is already obvious, eh?) to the students.  I will keep working on that.

Interestingly, my online students in the upper level course perform the same as the traditional students in the traditional classroom setting. Yes, I did gather all that data and studied it statistically. The only identifiable difference in student performance is a slightly higher drop rate for the full online course than the hybrid course or the traditional classroom course.

I have not similarly studied my intro course since we have changed too many variables (including the text) in the past (less than a) year and I have not been assigned any traditional sections, only hybrid and full online ones, since the change.

I believe a well designed full online course works very well for a majority of students. For a portion of students, no online course design, no matter how well done, is going to make a difference in their performance because they just will not manage their own time and put a modicum of energy (never mind something more than that) into the online course material. Period.

[csgirl]

I simply don't get the push to make and post videos of lectures. I always thought that for many areas of learning, lectures are the most ineffective way possible to deliver content.  I think that is especially true for courses that are about delivery and learning of large amounts of textual material. The professor reads the textual material, turns it into powerpoints and notes (the "recording step") and then spouts it all out orally at the students ("playback"). The students dutifully take notes, essentially rerecording the material, and then later on, spout it back in an exam.  Like it or not, these courses exist in many fields, especially in fields where students have to take a certification exam at the end. Why not eliminate the extra steps?

I teach a mix of courses - the type that is about delivery of large amounts of textual content, and the type that is about pure problem solving. My solution is to do the "large amounts of textual content" course online, WITHOUT video lectures which merely add inefficiency to the process, and then to teach the problem solving courses face to face, with plenty of lab time so I can help the students work through the content.

Perhaps the reason the students are not watching the videotaped lectures is because they recognize the inefficiency of the process?

[mountainguy]

I simply don't get the push to make and post videos of lectures. I always thought that for many areas of learning, lectures are the most ineffective way possible to deliver content.  I think that is especially true for courses that are about delivery and learning of large amounts of textual material.

Yes, absolutely. But knowing Octoprof's field, I'm guessing the point of her recorded lectures is not so much to convey textual information. Rather it's to walk students through complex problem-solving processes so that students can use those processes on their own.

That having been said, I've been fighting the lecture battle for a long time now in F2F classes. Between 1/4th and 1/6th of my students every semester believe that in-class activities other than lecture are "just busywork" or "Professor Mountainguy trying to run down the clock." It doesn't matter if I say "the point of this activity is to help you practice [concept] that you'll need to use in your next presentation" or "you're going to need to do this skill in your other classes." Apparently I missed the memo that I'm supposed to test for recall and nothing else.

[larryc]

I don't do video lectures--they have a textbook. At my current school the online content "experts" used to force you to record all of your lectures before they would approve your online course. Worse yet they use some format so that the students cannot download the lectures for use on a portable device but have to sit at their laptop.

I am thinking of doing podcasts.

[oldfullprof]

I think in-class lectures can be very effective.  It's not a matter of transferring "content."  It's a matter of transferring the professor's attitude toward various forms of content.  (I think teaching "critical thinking" as "steps" is nonsense, but you can sure as hell model it.)  So the unsubstantiated dogma: "lectures suck"-- is just that.  Unsubstantiated, and overmarketed by people who have a stake in promoting new weirdass techniques.

The deep basis of online, on the other hand, is correspondence courses.  I tend not to believe that there's much value added in the tired discussions and other eyewash we see in them.  Correspondence courses are great for people who can't come to campus, if they're responsible, etc.  Giving a live lecture in an online course is another manoeuvre that doesn't seem worth it.   

[octoprof]

I think in-class lectures can be very effective.  It's not a matter of transferring "content."  It's a matter of transferring the professor's attitude toward various forms of content.  (I think teaching "critical thinking" as "steps" is nonsense, but you can sure as hell model it.)  So the unsubstantiated dogma: "lectures suck"-- is just that.  Unsubstantiated, and overmarketed by people who have a stake in promoting new weirdass techniques.

The deep basis of online, on the other hand, is correspondence courses.  I tend not to believe that there's much value added in the tired discussions and other eyewash we see in them.  Correspondence courses are great for people who can't come to campus, if they're responsible, etc.  Giving a live lecture in an online course is another manoeuvre that doesn't seem worth it.   

I agree that transferring the professor's attitude is very important. I work hard to show my enthusiasm for my subject (which many folks are not enthused about, of course). I do that best live, no doubt, but they can hear it in my voice and my words in my online lectures, as well. In the online course, I send a high volume of emails to the students and try to get my enthusiasm for the subject across through those, as well.

I do know some folks who have developed online courses (for their formerly live courses) with no lectures. I just can't see doing that in my field, though.

I don't do video lectures--they have a textbook. At my current school the online content "experts" used to force you to record all of your lectures before they would approve your online course. Worse yet they use some format so that the students cannot download the lectures for use on a portable device but have to sit at their laptop.

I am thinking of doing podcasts.

Do you lecture in your traditional live courses? I don't see how lecture is useless for online ("they text book for that") but not for traditional courses (those folks also have a textbook, no?). Not that I'm saying you MUST lecture (my lectures online are much shorter than my live ones, for example) but that your explanation here is not logical.

Note: My online lectures are not recordings of my live lectures. They are lectures I have produced specifically for the online course, bearing in mind, for example, that students are not a captive audience for 75 minutes at a time in an online course.

[histchick]

I don't do video lectures--they have a textbook. At my current school the online content "experts" used to force you to record all of your lectures before they would approve your online course. Worse yet they use some format so that the students cannot download the lectures for use on a portable device but have to sit at their laptop.

I am thinking of doing podcasts.

Do you lecture in your traditional live courses? I don't see how lecture is useless for online ("they text book for that") but not for traditional courses (those folks also have a textbook, no?). Not that I'm saying you MUST lecture (my lectures online are much shorter than my live ones, for example) but that your explanation here is not logical.

Note: My online lectures are not recordings of my live lectures. They are lectures I have produced specifically for the online course, bearing in mind, for example, that students are not a captive audience for 75 minutes at a time in an online course.

I don’t understand larryc’s logic, either.  I do understand the value of podcasts because the students don’t have to be in front of their laptops (although that could be the case for video lectures as well, depending on the file format), but I don’t see how having a textbook devalues the video lecture while the podcast wouldn’t.