Conversation
Notices
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I have recently seen a few people complaining that they aren’t getting peer interaction in their newly-virtual university environments. Yeah, the online experience does not mirror the physical. In the physical, there is usually one or two peers that you hit it off with ... you might all meet in the campus library to study together (because the student center is too loud and has too many distractions). The virtual world does not really offer as a way for you to know which of your fellow students is likely to be suitable for this.
Years ago, online classes had a certain number of required interactions in a forum. That always felt artificial. You’d go to bed the night before an assignment was due, thinking no one had been paying attention. Then the next morning, right before the turn in deadline, six or eight students would be trying to get their required “interaction” before time ran out.
It was not the same.
We also had group projects. Whether online or in class, group projects stink. I used to write up almost completed “parts” for each group member, then send them out, so they could refine them a little. Why? Because one person could deflate the scores for the entire group, so I wanted to ensure they had as much information (with citations) as needed to write up a good part. (One time, someone else did the same thing, and they got theirs mailed out before mine was completed, so I just summarized my info and sent it out as a supplement.)
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I had one interesting experience I want to note: I took a couple of #Java courses at the community college level. During my master’s degree program, I was in a Java course completed online. I was in a group of six students, most of whom had not taken Java previously. Four students and I struggled with the assignment, with attempt after attempt that failed to meet objectives. The day before the assignment was due, the other group member handed us a completely working program, apparently forked off one of our earliest non-working versions.
It turned out the instructor could see our group interactions (chats, forums) and marked him down for failure to participate. So he got the rest of us a passing grade on the assignment, but because his only interaction was the toss the finished program into our forum, he received a failing grade on the project.
This was so long ago that we used MSN Messenger as our unofficial (out of the campus’s view) communication medium. I received an inquiry about my grade on the assignment. I shared it, expecting that every group member would have received the same grade, only to find that D received a lower grade.
He tried to make a stink about it, but it is hard to argue with the interaction record.
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One thing I agree with is that however online education proceeds, videoconferencing is no substitute for face-to-face interaction.
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We had course videos that we were supposed to watch. I found that the videos that were not from actual in-class instruction were not very helpful. Either the instructor talking to a camera or generic animated “here are the principles behind relational databases” type videos added little.