Truly assessing the capabilities of an online learner

I’ve often wondered how an online teacher keeps track of her students and their various contributions during the span of time a semester course runs. As a student I assume my instructors know me and are well aware of what contributions I’ve made not only in my current class, but also in previous classes I’ve taken from them. After all, that’s the way it would be in an on ground degree program. Right?

My daughter, for example, is only one semester behind me in her quest for a master’s degree. However, she is on a campus working on her degree in person: taking classes, teaching classes, researching, and interacting daily with her professors. Is there any doubt the teachers know who she is and what her talents are? None! Is my expectation that my capabilities be just as clear in my online professor’s minds realistic? I’m not sure.

Ko and Rossen give what seems to me to be great advice when they recommend that folders be kept for each student’s work and your own notes about his/her contributions. That would be one way to attempt to put the whole person together into one package despite the fact you’ve never met them face to face.

Unfortunately, I don’t even know where to begin to find articles dealing with the psychology of getting to really know a person you never interact with face-to-face, but being an old student of both communication and psychology, I certainly find the ability to truly assess a student’s capabilities when you’ve only interacted online perplexing. This gives me great pause for thought, especially when I think about the job recommendations I will want in a few months!

Importance of tech skills for online learning

Ko and Rossen’s discussion of what it takes to prepare students to take courses online made me think of what expectations there are for us in the EdTech program. Should we, as technology students, be held accountable for more technology skills than students who are taking, for example, an online psychology course? I think of how many hours it takes me to do assignments, and I’m someone who’s pretty well versed in the technology I’ve been expected to use, as opposed to classmates I’ve had who really have very little technology expertise. I can’t imagine the difficulties of grasping subject matter while also having to learn new technologies. And yet, the field is educational technology. Doesn’t that presuppose a certain level of technology expertise?

According to Maggie McVay Lynch at http://technologysource.org/article/effective_student_preparation_for_online_learning/, “the domain of online learning was new to students; many lacked fundamental computer skills and were newcomers to the Internet. This lack of experience impinged on their ability to adapt to the new learning environment.” Therefore, many students dropped out of online courses. Surely tech skills play a very important part in online learning. Going further, surely more advanced tech skills should be expected of EdTech students.

Copyright and intellectual property

The thought of the work I've created for an online course not being mine is something I've never thought about before. It was interesting to see Ko and Rossen recommend that you should do an online search every six months or so using identifying phrases from your work to determine if someone else is using your material (p. 177). The response is then to send a warning note to the author of the page with your material on it.

This makes sense. I did a research paper for another course last semester concerning student plagiarism. I made the same recommendation, based on other's research, to determine which students plagiarized all or portions of papers turned in for credit. A site with various links concerning the detection of plagiarism is http://www.ncusd203.org/central/html/where/plagiarism_stoppers.html.

Ownership of digital content is such a tough issue. I no more want someone to take my hard work than fly to the moon. I also don't want my students to represent someone else's content as their own. It's hard, though, to know what is acceptable and what isn't. The rules and guidelines must be clarified when possible and then must be taught to students beginning in the lower grades and clear on up through graduate school.

Web page design

I've done enough studying of web page design to wonder exactly what works best--Short pages with links to more short pages, long pages with bookmarks to sections of the page, white backgrounds or colored backgrounds, graphics or no graphics, on and on. While there are some universal truths, my feeling is that Web page design is an art form, and depending on what one's purpose is, some rules are meant to be broken.

That said, though, one of Ko and Rossen's guidelines for web pages (p. 139-140) interests me, that being the recommendation that text not stretch "completely across the page." Reading this, I realize I've seen this recommendation before, but I've never really thought about it when creating my own pages. Is it because we're accustomed to reading text from books that contain page margins? Is it a product of the way our eyes scan a page (or screen) for reading?

Using tables to arrange the objects on web pages is great advice as it's the only way to get objects to stay where they belong on different computers and in different browsers. Lynch and Horton at http://www.webstyleguide.com/index.html?/graphics/multimedia/front/preface-2.html provide a whole series of recommendations for web page design, including the recommendation to create a template for the pages of the site, so the layout doesn't have to continuously be recreated. I suppose the principle of blank space could be taken care of with a three column table with the outer columns being the white space. I'm anxious to try this out on my next web page.

Optional assignments

Ko and Rossen in the book Teaching Online discuss the use of optional assignments (p. 107) which I’ve often wondered about. Although I think of myself as the model adult learner, more in this degree program for what I can learn that will help me out on the job, than for the degree itself, I often do have to draw the line at optional assignments for the very reasons the authors present. Prioritizing job responsibilities, family responsibilities, household responsibilities, and coursework responsibilities is a tightrope act in my life, and most often, not always but most often, optional assignments don’t get moved up high enough on that list of priorities to ultimately be accomplished. Honestly, one of the hardest parts of adding this degree program to an already busy life is the difficulty of determining priority.

In a research article by Gale Parchoma that, by the way, references BSU’s distance learning program (PDF link at http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=%22optional+assignments%22+%22online+courses%22), it is reported that 83% of students in an exit interview recommended that there be no optional assignments. This is an interesting article as it gives some guidelines for creating learner centered courses by describing two successful programs. It would be interesting to track optional assignments in online courses to see what the completion percentages are.

Knowing your online students

Ko and Rossen introduce an interesting point when they discuss the scheduling of online courses. I read with trepidation the line, "think in terms of subdivisions of two- or three-day spreads" (p. 74). I haven't seen many assignments that require such a quick turn-around in my online classes, but when I do, I'm frantic trying to keep up. Ko and Rossen go on to admonish online teachers to keep scheduling flexible to allow for busy work schedules, time zone differences, and computer accessibility issues. I've posted before that there are merits to keeping a weekly or bi-weekly schedule, so students can collaborate or interact while learning the same things at the same times. That said, though, I also think assignments shouldn't be scheduled too close together to allow for short-term flexibility when determining when during the week or two weeks to complete the assignments.

The Center for Teaching Effectiveness outlines the essential elements for an online course syllabus (http://cte.udel.edu/syllabus.htm) that is an interesting comparison to the checklist included in Ko and Rossen (p. 75-76). Both lists include the importance of due dates. The next step in my personal research will be my curiosity with what the best practices are for online assignment due dates.

Fraud and cheating in online course environments

Ko and Rossen, when discussing assessment strategies to choose from when designing an online course, touch upon the topic of avoiding “fraud and cheating” (pp. 60-61). This is a topic I have often pondered, both as a student and also as a future online teacher. As a student I wonder if there are other students out there who are able to cheat the system, do significantly less work, and yet still get the same degrees I will. As a future online teacher, I wonder what the best ways to deter online cheating and fraud are.

Adkins, Kenkel, & Lo Lim, in an article examining academic dishonesty (PDF link at http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=fraud+and+cheating+in+online+courses&hl=en&lr=), discuss ten methods that instructors at Northwest Missouri State University use to discourage cheating in online courses. From developing a relationship with the students, to making the consequences for cheating clear, to working hard to catch cheaters, to keeping an electronic database of previously submitted student papers, to time limits or one-on-one chats for tests, attempts are being made at this university to minimize online cheating.

In general, cheating and fraud, when it comes to education, has always baffled me. In my humble adult learner opinion, the value of my degree will be directly proportional to what I have learned as I earn the degree. Honestly, I can think of no greater nightmare than to cheat my way through a degree program, fake my way through an interview, and get hired for the job the degree qualified me for, only to find myself without the knowledge or skills necessary to perform the job.

I still wonder, though, how do you make sure the person purporting to take the online class is really the one doing the work? And, in most circumstances does it matter? Food for thought.