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Reversing roles to create an online course.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

A graduate student and an assistant professor forge a unique partnership utilizing experiential learning to create an online course and to find a way to attempt to answer the question of optimizing instructor time, student learning and quality course design. The partnership resulted in positive learning experiences for both individuals. Results from a survey disseminated within the learning management system at the end of the semester to assess student perceptions of course design indicated the course was well designed with a high degree of interaction among peers, instructor, and content.

Introduction

Creating courses for the online environment can be an arduous undertaking and the demand tbr more is high. The design and development process requires numerous hours and intense creative effort on the part of the instructor who is already overloaded with the traditional "duties" of teaching, research and service. Time spent on creating courses to teach online is met with little reward. Individuals teaching online do so for the intrinsic reward and in recognition of students' needs and in many cases, without release time or assistance to properly prepare a course (Pachnowski & Jurczyk, 2003; Parker, 2003). As a result, the instructor and the student can become overwhelmed and frustrated with teaching and learning in the online environment. How can we optimize instructor time and student learning as we administer online courses?

Once the decision is made to teach a class online, time becomes a valuable asset and the once familiar concept of class structure becomes vague. Gillette (1999) suggested that when teaching online, instructors are required to wear many different hats in order to keep students engaged in their new learning environment; not only are they the course instructor, but an instructional designer and technical support. In addition to the challenge of multi-tasking these newly found "duties," instructors should also take into consideration the students' perceptions of online learning to help them succeed. The online classroom looks, feels and "acts" differently from the traditional one. Developing a community of scholars asynchronously who are now anonymous rather than synchronously presents a challenge for the instructor, and must be considered in the design process. Alternatives to the verbal and visual cues normally present in the traditional/synchronous classroom need to be replaced with alternative methods. It is important for instructors to build into their course design a method of obtaining student feedback beyond the traditional university summative evaluations to help determine from the students' point of view the effectiveness of the design of an online course. Ignorance of students' perceptions may result in learner resistance and/or failure to succeed (Blythe, 2001).

Purpose for Partnership

To help minimize the time and effort involved with designing and developing an online course, a graduate student and an assistant professor reversed their traditional roles of instructor and student. They worked together over the course of one traditional semester to create an online course to be taught during a two and one-half week mini-semester. The online format for a mini-semester was selected because of the high demand for more online mini-semester courses by graduate students at a primarily commuter campus. A course taken in a mini-semester is a fulltime commitment by the student, as they are not allowed to enroll in more than one course during the mini-semester. This approach served several purposes. The primary reason for this partnership was to provide a graduate student with the opportunity to learn the course content in the form of an independent study in order to fulfill a graduation requirement through experiential learning...

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