COURSENET

CourseNet

CourseNet

1) Course readings or activities could be built around real-world or theoretical problems. Teachers could follow these assignments with threaded discussion forums or live chats. Students would be expected to read and respond to comments made by those in the class. Once this dialogic process was established, students could use this same model for their own project presentations. Similarly, student groups could be assigned topics of importance to research, develop, and teach to the class. Groups could post Web pages with relevant links for class exploration before conducting formal discussions via live chat or threaded forum discussion.

Several things can be done to minimize the effect of student isolation. One idea is to have students and faculty create biographical pages with visual and auditory elements that briefly encapsulate each individual in an interesting way. Everyone in a class or degree program should have easy access to this password-protected information. Password protection prevents search engine spiders from cataloging this information in their databases. Without it, students would soon find their biopages listed in the directories of major search engines.

2) Idea is to group students together when they begin to work on a degree online. Students could be grouped by such factors as interests, personal situations, goals, or the pace at which they plan to work through a program. If a group of six students with similar interests starts out together in a program, real friendships may be fostered on the way to a degree. To help forge a connection with the university, graduate assistants or faculty could be assigned to these groups that meet periodically online.

Degree programs should be collecting and developing online-accessible databases of this type of information, as well as more personalized information from students including their interests and learning styles. Instructors and developers should have access to this database. Finalists for the "1998 Outstanding Online Course Award," sponsored by the Paul Allen Virtual Education Foundation, gave presentations at the "Creating Effective Online Instruction" conference in May 1999.

3) Developers of two of the courses stated that the next wave of development for online courses is to make them more personalized for individual students. Both planned to develop more personalized Web courses with software such as ColdFusion, which allows developers to create database-driven Web sites. When a student accesses one of these course sites, an individualized course Web page can address her by name, and because it has already parsed through ...