Online
courses are something that a lot of us are now dealing with. Some of
the courses may be something you take for your own personal interest
and then there are the courses that you will be taking for your job.
It
can be interesting but also frustrating if the material that you have
been given doesn’t actually work as well as you were lead to
believe. In some cases it could be the material actually has errors
in it and they haven’t been corrected from previous versions. The
instructor, if they are aware of the errors should ensure that they
let the students know about the corrections so that they don’t get
frustrated. What can be extremely frustrating is hearing a comment
from an instructor of “Oh yes, there are lots of errors in the
material” but they don’t let you know where the errors are. This
comment is one that we recently heard and that really frustrating as
a bunch of us were trying to do some labs for a computer course and
we didn’t know where they errors were until each of us ran into
them.
Issues
with material can make a course a challenge especially if you are
told one thing when you register for a course and then when you start
to take the course you are told something different. Making sure that
the prerequisites are clearly defined is very important and they
shouldn’t be changed after the list has been issued out. In some
cases people have invested money and/or time to make sure that they
have the original listed items only to be told once the course starts
that the prerequisites are different.
As
an instructor of an online course it is very important that you are
aware of all the prerequisites as well as any videos outlining prep
work. If you aren’t the one that recorded the prep video ensure
that you have watched it prior to starting the course so that you are
comfortable with what was said in the video or if you haven't reviewed your own videos recently. Actually as an
instructor it is very important that you know the entire course and
the schedule for each week. If you need to have a sheet of paper
beside you with some notes that’s fine because no one will know
that if you are doing webinar classes.
If a
course has conflicting material, it makes for a harder course for
everyone, so if you are the instructor let the students know if there
are corrections to the material they have received but don’t change
the prerequisites just because you don’t like something that was
suggested. The instructor’s role is very important for the online
courses because each student will be be learning at a different
speed. As the instructor you are going to be partly the teacher but
also the support system when problems are encountered. If you make
promises to the students to provide certain material at a specific
time make sure that you follow through with that because you are
impacting how the students are learning and how comfortable they are
feeling about the material.
Conflicting
material needs to be highlighted to the students as soon as it is
known and it would be really nice if one page was available online to
show all the errors that have been found and the corrections that are
needed.
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