Online Education Review

I've taken quite a few online classes in my four years here and, honestly, I prefer them to in person classes. I like being able to work (for the most part) at my own pace. I don't have to be in a classroom at a certain time for a certain amount of time every single week. I can get to online classwork when I get to it. I personally think self-paced classes are the best, but I don't think it's necessary for students to have "full" control where everything is due by the last day of class. Lengthy and flexible deadlines makes for less stressed-out students.

One of the things I don't like about online classes are discussion posts. These assignments are meant to get you to engage with other students and the instructor (since you never actually meet up) as well as further your knowledge about whatever you learned that week. However, I mostly just find these assignments to be tedious wastes of my time. I hardly ever learn anything new from my classmates and I don't feel like I contribute much to others either. We're all just filling up the post with enough words to meet the occasional word requirement and seeming like we're saying something significant when we're really not.

Another sort of bad thing about most online classes is that I usually don't retain much of the information like I do in regular courses. I feel like this is due to a lack of reinforcement of the knowledge from the textbook that you get by attending a lecture. Instructors try to make up for this deficit with discussion posts, but I've already stated how pointless I think they are. However, this isn't entirely a bad thing because if you're taking a class about something that you're never going to use in your real life then it doesn't matter if you remember the material. As long as you can make a decent grade in the class and get that credit you need then you're good. This doesn't really apply to our Mythology and Folklore class, though, because you aren't learning new information so much as you are actually engaging with the material (the units we read) and doing things with it (rewriting stories, commenting on people's projects, etc.).

If I could design my own online course I would set it up in 4 big, self-paced units. All work in each unit would be due at the end of each quarter of the semester. There would be no pointless discussion posts. Students could engage with the material at their own pace and not have to worry about getting everything done by a midnight deadline on Friday or Sunday like is usually the case. Depending on the subject of the course, I would probably have quizzes and one test in each unit. All tests would only be over the content in a single unit, though the 2nd and 4th tests would be called the midterm and the (non-comprehensive) final. I'm still a student so right now I care more about how much less stressful non-comprehensive finals are than how much a student remembers about all the material in the course. As I get older, this feeling might change.

I am pro online class! (Pixabay)