Topic2

After Teaching Online : A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice, I realized how important course structure is to learning online courses. The two main structures are open course and closed course. Closed courses will only provide teaching for students who formally sign up for this course, while open courses are the exact opposite. I personally prefer open courses, but open courses will also impose a certain burden on teachers, and some people who are not interested in learning may also disrupt the order of the classroom, so the two structures are mainly mixed nowdays, which those two structure are not contradiction to each other.

And another byproduct of online learning: social media, is also a teaching method with clear pros and cons. On the one hand, making students pay attention to social media to understand what is going on in society, and assigning homework in this way can also enable students to apply what they have learned to real life early, but on the other hand It is easy to be incited by saying that students do not have enough experience with social events. So my point of view is that teachers filter social media content before handing it over to students, that is, let students focus only on what they need to know, and not by other content on social media (advertising, games, political content) as a distraction.

In the end I believe that online learning will never replace real in person learning, at least not for the foreseeable future. But online learning can be an auxiliary tool for face-to-face learning. For example, after covid, almost all UVic courses have office hours in the form of Zoom, so that teachers and students are no longer limited by location, which is the best application I have seen so far.

Reference:

1. Major, C.H. (2015) Teaching Online – A Guide to Theory, Research, and Practice. John Hopkins University Press.
2. Weller, M. & Jordan K. (2017) Openness and Education: A beginner’s guide. Global OER Graduate Network.