By Matthew Curtis, Fourth-Year Journalism, Carleton University
From a teaching perspective, comparing face-to-face with online courses is somewhat like comparing movies with theatre. Movies take a lot of time to produce up front, but once they’re done they can be replayed, or parts of them can be used for different purposes. Theatre is live, the actors can feed off the audience’s energy and immediate feedback, but night after night the actors must show up and perform. They are two different approaches that each come with their own set of opportunities and challenges.
For Anne Trépanier, a professor in Carleton’s School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies, one of the main differences is that online courses have the ability to reach large student audiences from around the world, who can each bring different perspectives to the course material.
“They can speak to each other in forums, they can work in groups, they can look at each other’s work, and because all of that is asynchronous, they can work at their own pace while still working together,” she says.
Bruce Tsuji, an instructor in Carleton’s Department of Psychology, has taught approximately 14,000 students online since the fall of 2014. When compared to the couple of thousand he’s had in his face-to-face courses, he says it’s easy to see the difference in accessibility online courses can provide for both professors and students, and lauds teaching online for its ability to condense lecture material into “bite-sized pieces.”
“What we know from psychology is our attention span is kind of limited. When someone makes us pay attention to something for three hours at a time, we know that chances are pretty good that our minds are going to wander off,” says Tsuji. “What I’ve done for my online courses is I’ve broken them up into usually somewhere between 65 and 70 little bite-sized pieces, average duration of those about 11 minutes.”
This is something Kevin Cheung, a professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, says both he and his students see the value in – especially when students are required to complete exercises between lecture segments.
“I try to break up my lecture material into short segments, and in between segments there are simple questions just to test understanding. I did get feedback from students saying that this way of breaking things down is helpful,” he says.
Online courses do come with their challenges though, one of them being the obvious fact they aren’t live sessions where instant questions and feedback is possible.
“There’s an element of delay in responding to students’ queries,” says Cheung. “You have to wait until the students have watched the videos and posted the questions or come to your office hours, whether they are online or in person.”
With face-to-face courses, Cheung says he appreciates the energy he receives from the students and their real-time feedback.
“Sometimes they ask a question or make a comment that you’ve never thought of before. That’s invaluable, right? That’s priceless,” he says.
Cheung also cites the attrition rates of online courses as one of their challenges.
“There are many factors contributing to that, but I think one of the biggest difficulties with online courses is the scheduling – how do you make sure students actually allow sufficient time for themselves to handle the course material?”
Online courses require a higher level of self-discipline, but Cheung says there should be a balance between both the students’ responsibility to complete the course and the instructor’s responsibility to teach the necessary self-discipline skills to succeed.
“We can’t expect every student to have these kinds of skills, coming in at least,” he says. “There’s an opportunity for us to teach the students to acquire those skills but we don’t necessarily want them to fail a course before they realize they need to develop the skills.”
To reduce attrition rates in her online course, Trépanier incentivises participation.
“Simple trick. Every time they log in they have the opportunity to earn marks. There are loads of mini activities, mini assignments; they see the benefit of working often in the course because marks are attached to mini activities,” she says.
For Tsuji, he says he has faced problems in his courses with what psychology calls “magical thinking” – the belief that if we want something badly enough, it’ll happen, like when students show up to write a final exam even though they have no mathematical chance of passing. To combat this, Tsuji designs his online courses using a technique called daisy-chaining, which helps students look at their progress in a more realistic way.
“When somebody takes one of my exams online, they can’t get access to it until they have succeeded in the three quizzes before that. And then the next exam they can’t open that until they’ve succeeded in the three quizzes before that one, and they’ve gotten a certain grade in the previous exam,” he says.
Make no mistake, online courses take a considerable amount of work to prepare – all the 13 weeks’ worth of course elements need to be ready well in advance of the course start date.
“Every activity has to have clear objectives and clear outcomes, and my assessments have to be also very clear on how the outcomes will be met,” says Trépanier.
When it comes to course preparation, Cheung says he often tries to reflect and anticipate what kinds of questions students might have.
“If I’m teaching a particular topic, I have to imagine [as if] I had taught it before as a face-to-face course – I have to imagine what questions would be asked. So there’s a lot of soul searching really, you need to find out whether you’re making the point clear enough for the students.”
Despite the advance work required, Trépanier says she definitely prefers online courses for large class sizes, and highlights how much she loves the flexibility it offers.
“I can be abroad, I can do my research, I can have a cold. If I’m in the middle of a snowstorm I’m still working, if my children are sick I can stay home and teach. So my personal life is of better quality when I can actually teach one online course a term,” she says.
Face-to-face and online, theatre and movies. They are two very different approaches, but one does not exclude the other. And at the end of the day, the audience remembers the experience more than the modality.