On 29/09/13 11:25, Roger Clarke wrote: > ... Is it all that much better now?
My anecdote is of a senior academic who congratulated me on the very high student feedback score for my e-learning course. He then asked "How many contact hours are there for the course?". I explained that an e-learning course has no contact hours, in the conventional sense. He looked very worried and said: "I think you need to invite all the students to come in, so you can ask them if it is okay not to have contact hours". I explained the students could be anywhere in the world (one Australian university had a student in orbit). The students might be a little annoyed to be required to travel to Canberra, just so they could explain they did not want to travel to Canberra. > Where I think lectures help is in assisting candidates to break into > a new topic-area ... at the end of a logical block within a unit. With the usual e-learning course you have a socializing period at the beginning, points for review along the way and summary/celebration at the end. On a finer scale I have proposed synchronization points: http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/moocs_with_books/ > ... you can't *help* the bottom 10-20% ... We can help the struggling students with progressive assessment and feedback, to either improve or realize they should withdraw from the course. > ... I attended a small percentage of lectures in most subjects ... I attended most lectures, I hated them, but I attended. Perhaps that was why I did not do well in my studies. On 29/09/13 12:49, Roger Clarke wrote: > I was meaning in the sense of attendances at lectures typically being > half (or less) of the unit enrolment. ... About 25% attendance seems to be typical for blended courses with optional lectures. I ran my ICT Sustainability course with optional face-to-face tutorials last semester. About one third turned up to the first one, by the last one I was down to the 10% who were required by their visa conditions to attend. I am dropping the set tutorials next semester. Students tend to book an individual appointment, or come in with a friend, just before an assignment deadline, for help. -- Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150 The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/ PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/ _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
