One of my students recently wrote about his experiences as an online curriculum development person who works for an online university that has a division that partners with traditional higher-ed institutions to help them bring graduate programs online. He noted that the upper management was all crazy about stuffing as much media into every course, then joked that they were much less energetic about paying for the media or what it takes to create it. That’s kind’a typical. Then he made the following comment about student usage of this media content:
Careful analysis of click-tracking data is showing that only around 50% of the students are actually watching the media elements integrated into the courses. We are trying to understand the reasons why students aren’t watching the media. Sometimes, it is clear that they are just not seeing the value in the media pieces. And admittedly, not all the media is uniformly excellent. However, we are also finding that our online students are incredibly task-focused. They do exactly what they need to do to complete the assignments and nothing more. As an online student myself, I guess I understand that one! (d. lungren)
My words of wisdom to this student:
Some very valuable analysis here. The quality level and relevance to subject being taught, or even just the perceived level of importance of the media really makes a difference. It’s that careful incorporation of content and delivery methods that can get easily lost in the pursuit of having all kinds of “shiny things” on one’s educational website. A lot of folks on the top of the institutional food-chain often confuse what works well for student learning versus what looks good in the PR video clip. Hell, look at any educational institution that presents itself as promoting “technology” and the first thing they’ll show you is there computer lab and shiny boxes. But ask them to show you how the tech is used across the curriculum and your likely to run into institutional double speak. In fact… I did a whole video on just this subject:
Again, thanks for the inspiration. Great job. jbb
