Hybrid / Online Classes

Comparing residential and online courses is somewhat of an "apples and oranges" exercise, given the potential large differences in student numbers and demographics. Your choice to offer a course online will likely be motivated by the opportunity to reach more or different students, or the same students in a different way, rather than by issues of course management.

An "online course" can mean any several things:

• A distance learning course is the online analogue of a limited-enrollment, for-credit course.
• A Massive Open Online Course [MOOC] is an open-enrollment course, the vast majority of which currently do not provide credit beyond a completion certificate.
• In a hybrid course some instruction is delivered online, but some still occurs in a campus or classroom setting.
• Many variations are possible, such as having all instruction and student work take place online but with in-person discussions, office hours and/or exams.

Online courses can offer many advantages in terms of flexibility and access:

• Instruction may take the form of live video streams, pre-recorded video or audio, text, or student exercises embedded within instructional media, or a combination of these.
• Course development and deployment may be less constrained by the traditional academic calendar.
• If the course allows for it, students can similarly do their coursework with fewer calendar or schedule constraints.
• A larger and/or more varied student population may be reached.
• Online course platforms typically feature data tracking of student access and performance which can aid in learning assessment and educational research.
• MOOCs in particular provide a "large N", allowing for more fine-grained research opportunities such as assessing differentiated instruction and assessment methods.

However, there are possible downsides to online education; many of these are a consequence of the inevitable limitations of having a network mediating all interactions, the scalability to large numbers of geographically dispersed students, or both:

• While online platforms can be used to foster active learning by students, they may also induce student passivity if a course relies overmuch on video-based instruction.
• Interpersonal interactions which occur fairly naturally in a campus setting need to be deliberately engineered online, if they are possible at all.
• Even simple assignments may require having special tools developed in order for students to do them online.
• Providing appropriate feedback to students so they can progress in their learning can be a huge logistical and cultural challenge.
• Best practices for assessing student work, especially in non-technical and non-introductory courses, have not yet been determined.
• The anonymity allowed by only knowing your students and their work through the internet opens up questions of academic integrity and its verification.
• In principle, relying on an online platform to deliver a course may result in a long-term reduction in workload for the instructor(s), but the initial overhead of setting up an online course is usually much higher than anticipated and the long-term time savings may be more than overcome by ongoing course-management and updating tasks.