Students in Scott Lathrop’s class see him face-to-face the first four days of the semester. Beyond that, they just see him through a computer screen.

Lathrop, who teaches the iMBA program in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, posts videos of himself, mini-lectures and other content on Blackboard so that students can earn their degrees online, he said.

‘It does a nice job of keeping me in touch with the students,’ Lathrop said.

Nearly 30 percent of all college and university students are taking at least one online course, according to the Sloan Survey of Online Learning published in November. The survey of more than 2,500 colleges and universities showed that roughly 5.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2009 semester, an increase of nearly 1 million students from the previous year.

SU professors who teach online said they like the rapid feedback of teaching online but note that there are disadvantages to it as well.

Lathrop’s iMBA program features all of the same curricular content as the full-time MBA program. The program is very beneficial for his students because many of them work full-time jobs, and the online program allows students to keep their jobs and still log in at their leisure, he said.

But he does acknowledge that there are some flaws to taking an online course.

‘You don’t get the same kind of in-class contact with the professor,’ he said.

Mathematics professor Jeff Meyer uses online homework assignments in his calculus classes.

‘I like that the feedback for the students is instantaneous. They don’t have to wait for a homework assignment to be handed back before they learn that they’ve done the problems right or wrong,’ he said.

While Meyer does find online assignments useful, he also believes there are a few setbacks, he said.

‘The thing I like least about the programs that I have used is that there are only a limited number of problems for the students to do. Many fewer than in the text for the class,’ he said.

Meyer said the programs offer little flexibility, and it is nearly impossible for him to post questions that are exactly like the ones on his exams. But students seem to like being able to do the problems and receiving feedback right away, he said.

Breagin Riley, an associate professor of marketing, administers quizzes for her class’ assigned weekly readings with the online program Qualtrics. The students take the quizzes before the lecture to prove they are prepared for class, Riley said in an e-mail. Riley is then able to gauge how well the students comprehend the material and addresses any misunderstandings or issues in her next lecture, she said.

Riley does not have a way to measure if students’ average grades in the class are up because she started using the program one year ago, but she said the program seems to have positively affected students.

Certain subjects lend themselves particularly well to online learning, said Ben Miller, a policy analyst at Education Sector, an organization that examines all aspects of modern education. For example, math courses work well when students do their homework online because they can receive immediate feedback on what they got right or wrong, Miller said.

Miller said he believes that many classes will be moving toward the use of online programs in the future. In the long term, Miller said he believes technology will become a larger component of higher education.

‘When used properly and in carefully targeted ways, it can produce some real benefits to students,’ he said. ‘But if implemented hastily, without thought or done on the cheap, quality and student learning will suffer.’

snbouvia@syr.edu

 

 

 

 

Published on January 25, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Stephanie: snbouvia@syr.edu | @snbouvia