Online Enhancements

Late last week I was conversing with a colleague about different approaches to online courses.  During the conversation I learned the faculty member was teaching the face-to-face section of this course and was going to build a complete online course to support adjunct professors teaching online sections of the course.  This approach is becoming more common and ensures standardization across offerings of the courses while gaining buy-in from the full time faculty.

My opinion on this approach was to question the use of the online content for only the online sections of the course.  We have online support through our course management system for both online and face-to-face courses.  Since the course shell exists for the face-to-face course, why not make all of the online content available in the face-to-face course.

If we build supplemental videos, discussions, quizzes, and other content for our online classes, we should employ these in our face-to-face courses.  Using these online supplements allows us to engage our students with the material outside of the classroom furthering their understanding and application of the course material.

At the end of the conversation we both agreed using the online content is valuable to our in-class students.  While we may not need to require the students to attend lectures plus perform all activities developed for the online sections, we certainly should employ this content to increase their exposure to the material throughout the week.  I think we both learned something as a result of our conversation and this sparked further interest into enhancing our face-to-face courses with this online content.