Imagine a classroom without walls. No physical walls to contain you, no mental walls that stifle creativity or opinions. In this classroom, you can come in when you want and you can work on assignments at your own pace. And you can do it while sipping a cafe au lait in a Paris bistro during your summer internship.
Online courses appeal to many students who require flexible schedules: working adults, student athletes, students traveling abroad, those who are just about to graduate or those who have medical restrictions that keep them away from campus. The University’s Continuing Education program offers Distance Education courses – 18 undergraduate courses this winter – to allow students an alternative to on-campus classes while still working toward their degrees and pursuing other goals.
According to Distance Education Program Director Sandra Gladney, “There are all kinds of reasons why people choose to take online courses.”
Fifty-six percent of students who choose online courses cite scheduling conflicts and inability to attend live class as their reasons for doing so, while 28 percent need the course to satisfy the University’s general requirements, according to data compiled by the Continuing Education program.
Whatever the reasons, annual enrollment figures for Distance Education courses are steadily increasing. In the summer of 1997, 58 students were enrolled in Distance Education courses; last fall’s enrollment was 938.
Gladney said student performance in online classes is generally parallel to that in live classes, according to her dialogue with faculty.
“If you come in with the attitude that it’s a class with deadlines, you’ll be OK,” Gladney said.
Gladney also said that there is high student demand for more courses, especially those that fulfill general education requirements. Some current online offerings include courses in the Arts and Administration, Physics,
Geology and Economics departments.
Advocates of Distance Education believe online courses are not only practical for many students who need more flexibility, but are an important educational component for all students.
Distance Education courses appeared at the University in 1996, when physics professor Greg Bothun began teaching online courses as an experiment to see whether it was possible to convert a regular course into an online one. After the first two years, Bothun found “virtually no difference between online courses and regular courses.” Instead, he found that students actually engaged more in an online format than if they sat passively in a large lecture hall.
Kassia Dellabough, a professor of Arts and Administration as well as a Career Counselor, was among the first to teach Distance Education courses at the University with the use of the “course management system:” Blackboard. Dellabough’s first Art and Human Values online class had 20 students; she now has 30 to 40 students and she teaches online courses four terms per year.
Like Bothun, Dellabough noticed that she could easily teach her online courses parallel to her live ones. But what surprised her was that she often had more contact with her online students, and her students were interacting more with each other via discussion boards.
“People say things online they wouldn’t normally say live,” Dellabough said. She believes online courses might allow students more opportunities for peer-sharing and to explore the subject matter in more depth than they might in a physical classroom.
Still, Dellabough said she enjoys face-to-face interactions with students, dubbing herself a “skeptical evangelist” when it comes to online instruction. “I’m kinesthetic and I love teaching live.”
But, she said, “There really are students who learn better in (an online) setting,” she said.
Dellabough points out that students have to be highly motivated to excel in online courses.
“There are always a few fringe people who are trying to skate by, but usually there are 15 core people who really get into it,” she said.
Between 1996 and 1999, the University experimented with Blackboard and other course management systems such as WebCT, but by summer of 2002, Blackboard was chosen as the standard system, primarily because it was so simple to use.
While Blackboard was initially used only for online courses, its potential as a tool for face-to-face courses has become clear in recent years.
November 2005 statistics from the Center for Educational Technologies – a Knight Library service that assists teachers in implementing technology in their courses – shows that Blackboard usage by students and faculty has seen consistent growth. More than 1,000 faculty use Blackboard in their classes, and about 85 percent of the student body uses the server.
As Blackboard has been integrated into live courses, students and faculty alike see its potential as an educational supplement. CET director JQ Johnson said efforts are underway in various departments to create hybrid courses, which rely heavily on Blackboard for delivering information and emphasize more interactions among students and professors.
“Blackboard is easy enough and widespread enough that most faculty consider it to be a mainstream technology,” Johnson said.
So as more teachers adopt Blackboard and other online tools to supplement their courses, Bothun believes that more courses should be taught solely online in the near future, but there is still enough faculty resistance to make such a transition slow-going.
Bothun believes this resistance to convert to an online course format is a “faculty ego and control problem.”
“It doesn’t matter what the mode of delivery is,” Bothun said, “but how the student engages.”
He argues that students learn differently in “physical space” versus “network space.” Students in large lectures often become passive learners, he said. In an online format, though it is not possible to cover the same amount of the material as in a regular lecture, students’ engagement and quality of learning are greater.
But some students are not convinced that online courses are right for them.
Amy Burke, a senior environmental studies major, said an online finance class she took while at
Portland State University would have worked better for her in a face-to-face class setting.
“There was a lot of material and it was hard to internalize everything,” she said.
Burke believes online classes for large lecture courses may have some disadvantages.
“Because it’s not an actual lecture, you may not learn exactly what the teacher wants you to know,” she said.
Bothun believes face-to-face interaction is still important.
“There is no electronic substituting” for smaller, upper-division, mentor-based classes, Bothun said.
But Bothun and advocates of Distance Education believe there is great need for online courses to serve the diverse student population of today.
In the future of the educational landscape, Johnson said there is a definite trend toward more media support in the classroom, whether the course is in PLC or in cyberspace.