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7/7/2003
Any oversight of online courses raises a concern about academic freedom. Will faculty members be surrendering academic freedom by oversight of their online course development? I do not believe so. Faculty members already participate in oversight of their classroom instruction, conferring about their online course delivery would be following suit. In fact, any oversight program—online or in the classroom—should be focused on the improvement of instruction.
However, that is currently not the case. At most institutions, there is little guidance or scrutiny of the quality of the material that instructors deliver online. In fact, there is probably more scrutiny over classroom-based delivery of instruction. Someone from the institution should be overseeing and guiding the development of online courses with what research and good practice have shown to foster effective learning. Proper guidance of online course development will result in better instruction and students will be the benefactors.
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We think that Marcinkiewicz has made a good point: Much online instruction is still piecemeal and few institutions are working on ways to review content and structure of faculty materials developed for online teaching. Will they do so in the near future, given that there is a lot of time and resource cost to do so? That's a good question. Maybe we all need to pay a little more attention to the work of the Center for Academic Transformation's Program in Course Redesign, which is showing financial savings from the redesign of large, introductory courses. Maybe, in a twisted analogy to sports programs, if institutions can show dollar savings from redesign and quality control of the larger classes (football, basketball) then the resources gained in terms of process can be used to support smaller classes (comparative literature, biological anthropology).
Henryk Marcinkiewicz is vice president of for academic affairs at the Pennsylvania College of Technology (www.pct.edu).
About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society
for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.
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