Evaluation (Prof’s Response)

• Strengths

  • Access.
  • Content richness (prof. & Web).
  • Student participation.
  • Novelty.

• Weaknesses

  • Time expense.
  • Students’ evaluations (-0.5).
  • Students’ cognitive & psychosocial landscapes (dependent, LD, non-participant, over-committed).
  • Attrition/completion.
  • Socialization.
  • Verbal learners rewarded (not visual, auditory, kinesthetic learners).

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The principal investigator composed a list of strengths and weaknesses. On-line instruction consumes enormous amounts of time. The principal investigator also noted that in the Student Response to Instruction (student evaluations in which students respond to a series of positive statements with Likert scale choices) numerical summaries of responses were on average 0.5 lower than the responses to the same course in previous semesters (in a regular classroom, not on line).

Of particular concern is that given the college’s current resources, the instructional and media design of the course could not adequately provide for varieties of dominant learning modes. Instead the course employed heavily verbal learning activities.

Indeed, the cluttered psychosocial landscapes of community college students would not seem to be promising terrain for on-line instruction. On-line courses cannot supply the rich forms of socialization that many community college students otherwise lack and need in their professional development.