Development, delivery, and outcomes of a distance course for new college students

Library Trends, Summer, 2001 by Nancy O'Hanlon

COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES

Teaching an online course presents unique challenges in two important areas--communication and student self-regulation. Communication-related issues that surfaced in this course include:

* lack of critical information needed to contact problem students;

* students not reading their OSU e-mail accounts regularly;

* use and misuse of the course mailing list by students; and

* difficulty in solving certain types of problems using e-mail.

The UVC 120 course begins in the fourth week of the ten week Ohio State academic quarter in order to give students new to the university some time to activate their Internet account and become familiar with reading and sending e-mail using their university accounts. Despite the fact that they had registered for an online course during Fall and Winter quarters, some students had not activated their OSU Internet accounts by the time the course began. These students were not receiving any e-mail from the instructor and were unaware of important information being distributed to students. The course management software utilizes this account information in order to authorize students to view course assignments so that students without OSU Internet accounts were also not able to complete any course work. Because the instructor did not have access to the university's student information system, obtaining local address and phone information in order to contact these students was difficult.

During Fall and Winter quarters, it also became apparent that some students who had activated their OSU Internet accounts were not reading the e-mail sent to their OSU e-mail addresses. Many of these students had other e-mail accounts (America Online, Yahoo Mail, and so on) but were unable to configure their e-mail programs to retrieve e-mail from Ohio State's pop mail server. The university's technology center also provides an e-mail forwarding service that is easy to set up using a Web-based form, but students did not take advantage of it. The instructors concluded that they could overcome these problems by requiring students to register in-person for the course. This allows instructors to verify that students have activated their Internet accounts, obtain important contact information from them, and assure that basic information about the course, including the requirement to read their OSU e-mail or have it forwarded, is distributed to everyone. This new system, instituted during the Spring quarter, has helped to surmount these critical barriers to communication.

A mailing list is used to facilitate easy communication by the instructor to the students in the course. The manner in which this list is structured and used has changed since the first quarter that the course was offered. At that time, more than 200 students were enrolled in the course and students were asked to subscribe themselves to the list (directions were provided). Some students never succeeded, and many others required help to accomplish this task. The mailing list was set up to allow posting by subscribers without review by the list owner. During Fall quarter, students were required to post a message to the list, either in response to a discussion topic or simply introducing themselves to classmates. This requirement proved to be a strategic mistake. There were 200 students that generated a significant amount of daily traffic on the mailing list. Although it was possible for students to receive their list mail in a daily digest rather than as individual messages, many never succeeded in making this change and were inundated with e-mail from other students. While this did facilitate some students getting to know others taking the course and feeling more connected as a group, it also generated a great deal of frustration. Much of the discussion was not course-related in any way and required frequent interventions by the instructor to resolve conflicts or admonish students about list etiquette. In mid-course, the instructor changed the list configuration to moderated and the problems largely disappeared. Future group discussion assignments will utilize a Web-based forum rather than a mailing list.