Do you have advice or suggestions for Dave M, who wrote: We have been asked to develop 8 week online courses, but my faculty are concerned that the 8 weeks limits the course too much (and that science and math in particular are more difficult to do online). We have the concern that 3 credits are given for both versions of the same course when one (full semester) is rigorous at the college level and the other (8 week) covers much much less.
Do you have advice or similar experiences? Please let us – and Dave M – know!
I have faced a bunch of these challenges, as the COO of a joint venture of Oxford, Stanford, and Yale universities until 2004 (now in healthcare). I agree that math is very difficult to teach online. With math, you can probably teach anything that your students could learn themselves with a book. There’s no way to accelerate students as it’s difficult to suss out what concepts they are having trouble with. With science, it’s different. Science is about testing and challenging ideas and so a lightly-guided online discussion can reveal a lot. For example, you could focus a course on, say, how Watson and Crick figured out the double helix. Read one carefully-chosen paper each week, providing appropriate reference material, and one could follow (and discuss) the various evidence discovered and good and bad hypotheses from examining it.
I have been teaching math online for about six years for Saint Leo University. We have eight week terms and use MyMathLab. I had doubts in the beginning; but Pearson Education, the publisher of MyMathLab, has done a great job.
Email me privately for additional info.
The 8-week course should NOT cover less than the traditional course. I’ve had good luck with 10-week online math courses by setting DAILY deadlines for online homework. The students protest at first, but quickly realize by week two that those daily deadlines are keeping them from procrastinating to failure.
If the course is awarded the same credit, it must have the same content and contact hours. We offer 6 week intensives, 12 week terms (and in the summer 8 week) where instructors regularly cover the same material in all formats. Inform the students that an intensive format will require more time from them on a weekly basis than a traditional course, set a schedule, and stick to it.