What are the similarities and differences between designing and delivering a distance education course and a face to face course?
Similarities:
Regardless of the course being online or face-to-face, instructor and students follow the same schedule, as in the timeline of the schedule when the course begins and ends. You have communication (discussion board) in which you share dialog; you have quizzes, exams, finals, reports, etc. You have a timeline for projects and papers like face-to-face course, and you also have reading assignments each week to be completed.
Differences:
The differences with online and face-to-face are when you are done with your papers you turn them online instead of in person to the instructor. The communication in the course is mostly dealt online, asynchronous, no one person is there all the time, and not everyone will be communicating synchronously like in face-to-face. There is also anonymity among the students and the instructor. You might not know what your instructor looks like, what h/her voice is like, and this is also the same for your fellow classmates.
Also, as mentioned in Chapter 7 by Bates and Poole (2003), online learning provide such areas of learning as group activities and better participation for students when it comes to online discussion forum (pg. 161). Both of these are true because most, if not all, online courses require students to work in some kind of group project, and you don’t see this much in face-to-face course. In addition, students are more prone to contribute in the discussion forum online than in face-to-face, especially, those students who are better at typing responses than speaking in person…shy students to say the least.
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I'm not sure if students are "more prone to contribute" because it is online as much as they are required to contribute as part of their grade. The contribution is one way the instructor can determine if the student is understanding the material. In the F2F course the instructor may be able get the visual clues, even if it is just seeing the student in class each week. In the online world, the instructor has no way of knowing if the student ever attends with the exception of the discussions.
ReplyDeleteThat said, the online forum does provide shy students the opportunity to "voice" their opinions with minimal chance of feeling embarrassed. Also, as others in class have pointed out, it gives us the opportunity to think about what we want to say and always get the chance to say it. In the F2F class the class may end before we get a chance to speak.