Online courses and their educational impact

Online Courses

Given potential issues, how do you design an online course that fosters equitable, ethical, and legal use of technology by learners?

Online courses, given that they lack the face-to-face class discussion component of 'real life' or conventional classroom courses must contain some forum whereby individuals and instructors may interact in a common and equitable environment. The meeting place of instruction often takes the form of online chat rooms, the use of blackboard technology, or simply communication via email between the instructor and various students. The medium depends upon the resources of the online university and the nature of the course. And as the medium and content of the courses offered online changes, so do the ethnical concerns involved on the part of the instructor of such courses.

First and foremost, in an online course environment, it is important that the instructor not have privileged access to only a few learners, depending on the capabilities of the technology those students possess. For instance, the instructor must strive to be equally attentive in responding to students during an online chat session or to blackboard inquiring people, even if some students may have flashier or speedier fonts and designs in their avatars and designs of messages. Content rather than the appearance of the student, even if the student's 'appearance' is on paper, must be the means of awarding a grade, and the content of the assignment rather than the appearance onscreen and online is what is important. Nor should students be penalized for ungrammatical emails on occasion, if those emails are not technically part of the grading criteria for the course.

Secondly, unless it is integral to the course, the instructor should stress content knowledge of the material, and not producing documents that may appear pretty or attractive via the online format, if those new documents do not exhibit real course knowledge. In other words, while it would certainly be ethical in an online computers graphics course to demand that students before entering the course had Adobe software and could and should use it throughout the course to meet pre-specified requirements, it would be of less clear value to do the same of a basics communications or literature course, and to make the final graded assignment on The Scarlet Letter dependant upon one's ability to design an interactive web page on Nathaniel Hawthorne, rather than to critically analyze the novel. This would be especially the case if a student, especially an older student uncomfortable with technology, would be asked to make use of previous computer knowledge others might be privy to but was not part of the material the course was designed to teach.

Thus, when designing the online course, the teacher must first ask him or herself the primary goal of any pedagogical task -- what skills and values is the course designed to impart to the students, beyond simply showing a basic proficiency with the online format? Secondly, the teacher must decide what types of skill building activities can be employed in the online format that do not privilege users of more pricey computers and programs unnecessarily, but still meet the aims of the course. The course may make use of technology, but not in such a way that the technology becomes the forefront of the instruction, unless that is the specific intent of the course.

Ethically, of course, the teacher has a responsibility to convey to the student that plagiarism and other ethically nebulous practices do not take place within the online course environment -- however such clarity of purpose of research projects should also be deployed in real life courses, such as the inadvisability of cutting and pasting from the Internet, etc. "One of the most important ethical issues which online learning raises, is that of 'fairness', i.e. giving due credit or acknowledgement to the work of others. A commonly held view is that they Internet is 'free' and the resources and materials it provides access to are also free. The Internet and its resources are not perceived to be subject to the same controls and regulations as would be the case in other publishing media, and hence the same rules of acknowledgement need not apply. Some individuals may be led to believe that it is 'fair game' to use others people's work without authorization, clearance or acknowledgement. Such practices are not at ethical." (Labour, et.al, 2003) This is true of all coursework, not simply online coursework, but the online medium may lay a student open to more temptation to transgress, simply because it 'feels' more anonymous.

Ethically and legally, however, new technologies give rise to concerns from the point-of-view of the instructor him or herself -- what about using technologies that could be used to circumvent copyright laws, for the purposes of instruction, for example, such as programs that allow students to download possibly pirated video materials? Legally as well as ethically, one must proceed and err on the side of caution in this regard, less the online course format be jeopardized for legal as well as ethical concerns

What would you have to consider, given the issues, and why?