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Traditional Courses vs. Online Courses

Characteristics of Instruction

In terms of content and pedagogy, the differences between an online course and one taught face to face may be that an online course is taught within a course management system or with some other technological infrastructure. The concept course is defined as a focused body of instruction offered by an education provider which may be made up of one or more classes. In other words, a course is education imparted in a series of lessons or meetings. The education or instruction is the content of the course. The content for delivery via the World Wide Web is pre-determined and in place before students actually access online courses. The same methods, procedures, and care that you take to produce the content for a course taught face to face (i.e., the syllabus, course goals and objectives, lessons, activities, and assessments of instruction as well as learning) are the same methods and procedures you will use to develop the content for online courses. However, you must realize that the delivery of the content and the engagement of the students will be impacted by the nature of the software and hardware used to deliver the course (for example, the type of course management system) and must be adapted accordingly.

Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education

In 1987, Chickering and Gamon identified seven principles of good practice in undergraduate education. Now with the onset of the digital age, the principles can be applied to undergraduate education delivered electronically. The seven principles of good practice are these:

  1. Effective practitioners encourage contact between students and faculty. Frequent student-faculty contact in and out of class is the most important factor in student motivation and involvement.
  2. Effective practitioners develop reciprocity and cooperation among students. Learning is enhanced when it resembles a team effort rather than a solo race.
  3. Effective practitioners use active learning techniques. Learning is not a spectator sport. Students must talk about what they are learning, write about it, relate it to past experiences, and apply it to their daily lives. They must make what they learn part of themselves.
  4. Effective practitioners give prompt feedback. Knowing what you do and do not know focuses learning. Students need appropriate feedback on performance to benefit form courses.
  5. Effective practitioners emphasize time on task. Time plus energy equals learning. There is no substitute for time on task.
  6. Effective practitioners communicate high expectations. If teachers expect more they will get it.
  7. Effective practitioners respect diverse talents and ways of learning. There are many roads to learning. Students need the opportunity to show their talents and learn in ways that work for them.

Principles for Improving Higher Learning

Angelo (1993) similarly articulated for faculty and administrators a well-supported list of "fourteen general research-based principles for improving higher learning" that can also be applied to elearning:

  1. Active learning is more effective than passive learning.
  2. Learning is more effective and efficient when learners have explicit, reasonable, positive goals, and when their goals fit well with teachers' goals.
  3. High expectations encourage high achievement.
  4. Motivation to learn is alterable; it can be positively or negatively affected by the task, the environment, the teacher, and the learner.
  5. Learning requires focused attention and awareness of the importance of what is to be learned.
  6. To be remembered, new information must be meaningfully connected to prior knowledge, and it must first be remembered in order to be learned.
  7. Unlearning what is already known is often more difficult than learning new information.
  8. Information that is organized in personally meaningful ways is more likely to be remembered, learned, and used.
  9. To be most effective, teachers need to balance levels of intellectual challenge and instructional support.
  10. Mastering a complex skill or body of knowledge takes great amounts of time and effort.
  11. Learning to transfer, to apply previous knowledge and skills to new contexts, requires a great deal of directed practice.
  12. The ways in which learners are assessed and evaluated powerfully affect the ways they study and learn.
  13. Interaction between teachers and learners is one of the most powerful factors in promoting learning; interaction among learners is another.
  14. Learners need feedback on their learning, early and often, to learn well; to become independent learners, they need to become self-assessing and self-correcting.

What Research Says About College Teaching

Cabrera and LaNasa, 2002, wrote this article after reviewing 40 years of substantial research on college teaching:

  1. Good teaching can promote student development.
  2. Learning is a social phenomenon. Learning is the product of a complex process. The classroom climate, the student's own learning needs, goals and preferences along with teaching strategies and curriculum all interact in producing cognitive and affective development. Assessment of both learning and teaching should reflect this complexity by including a variety of assessment methods capturing the nature of the classroom interactions. Teaching practices, values and performance on a series of well defined cognitive and affective domains.
  3. Students have different ways of knowing. Classroom practices and even the curriculum itself should take into account the fact that students' way of knowing are affected by a variety of factors ranging form their preferences towards learning, their learning needs (e.g. vocational vs. academic), their gender and even their own culture.
  4. College teaching is multidimensional. Teaching is complex. It embodies a wide variety of practices and methods.
  5. The effectiveness of each teaching dimension varies as function of the student outcome under consideration. There is no best way to teach. Effective teaching can only take place once curricular objectives clearly specify the specific knowledge, skills and values the students are supposed to master. Only in this manner would the college professor be able to choose that pedagogy most fitting to the specific student outcome under consideration.
  6. Classroom climate matters. A classroom climate dominated by prejudice and discrimination lessens learning. College professors are key in creating a nurturing environment by stressing equity and fairness in the relationships among students and between students and faculty.
  7. Students can evaluate effective teaching. Students can be excellent raters of teaching performance. The key for good assessment rests on the extent to which teaching behaviors themselves are the object of assessment. This implies that institutions should expend considerable effort identifying relevant teaching behaviors and incorporating them as part of the student evaluation forms.
  8. Students can evaluate their cognitive and affective growth. Again, the key in good assessment rests on content valid measures. That is, growth measures need to evolve form a deep understanding of the curricular objectives and the subject matter.
  9. College professors do not use innovative teaching methods. No matter how much knowledge exists regarding effective instruction, college professors still use traditional lecturing as the main mechanism of knowledge transmission.