Are online instructors afraid to give bad grades because of instructor reviews?

Before you give your instructor a bad review be sure that he is actually the one who designed the course. I think most online instructors have little choice in the contents of the online class because it is already set up for them; if it's bad, it's the fault of the one who designed the class.

 

Thanks for that clarification SurfDoctor. I have taught many courses that I have had no role in designing nor am I able to make any additional changes to. Some of these have been much too easy in my view.

 

This is one of the risks when you teach online, you are being blamed for a bad course design even if you don't get to say much about the content. Many students still believe that the instructor is responsible for the course when most of the online courses are canned and many time designed by education technologist with little understanding of the subject being taught.

Many courses are watered down to attract students, if the course is too demanding students tend to drop it and revenue is lost.

It is just cheaper to have a canned course being taught many times than having a instructor to design a course for every session. It is also cheaper to hire a person with an education technology degree than someone that is an expert in the subject to design a course.

 

I have taken some online courses that fit your description; very ineptly designed.

 

This is one of the reasons I like the UK system of external examiners.

 

It's not just higher ed. I have colleagues in K-12 that say the same thing. The difference is that the student scores a "C" but mommy or daddy think he should have scored an "A" so they come in and complain to the principal and POOF the grade is changed.

-Matt

 

I have experienced this at the Jr. high were I teach. A few years ago, I gave a 6th grade girl an "S" in citizenship. (Grading scale: O=outstanding S=satisfactory U=unsatisfactory) Within a day, her mother came to me irate saying that I had fouled the girl's otherwise perfect citizenship record and it would follow her for the rest of her academic life. (I wanted to say "there goes her chance to get into Havard" but restrained myself) At a private school, parents are paying big bucks for their children to come to us and somehow believe that means their student should get only an "A", I suppose because the parents paid for it. By the way, i did not change the grade; the girl was snarky in my class.

 

Regent has recently stepped up plans to avoid grade inflation in the discussion boards. Most instructors were just giving full credit if the student made the minimum number of posts. The Univ. introduced a new rubric and stated that instructors must consider the length and quality of the posts, as well, in order to avoid grade inflation.

I thought it was a good step in the right direction.

 

You and SurfDoctor are correct that online instructors are often at risk of being asked to teach using poorly designed courses. However, you are incorrect that online courses are designed by educational technologists with little understanding of the subject being taught (by "educational technologists," I assume that you mean instructional designers, since it is the same field). Publisher created online courses (what we usually mean when we say "canned") by the likes of Pearson, Cengage, McGraw-Hill, etc., are created by teams of instructional designers with faculty subject matter experts.

At most colleges and universities, online courses are either created by faculty with no instructional design help (which tends to result in some good courses, some mediocre courses and some abysmal courses that are little more than correspondence courses telling the students to read the texbook in place of actual online instruction). The best situation occurs when a faculty subject matter expert (who knows the content but may know little about effective online delivery) is teamed with an instructional designer (who knows about instructional delivery, but does not know the content). Instances of educational technologists creating courses by themselves (without a subject matter expert) are rare.

In my 24 years in this arena, the most common case of faculty being stuck with a poor course to teach is one that was designed by a different faculty member, not an "educational technologist."

This is also true for many face-to-face courses and degree programs.

This may or may not be true--depending on what you mean by a "canned" course. If it is a vendor-produced course, it could be cheaper or more expensive, depending on the institution's policies for comensating instructor for course design. The practicality of this is that having an instructor completely re-design an online course (a process that takes anywhere from several weeks to a couple of semesters to do right) is something that will not get done. Having build many online courses and having served as both instructional designer and subject matter experts for others (and having overseen the process at a couple of universities), having faculty constant re-develop online courses simply does not work and does not result in higher quality courses.

I hire people with degrees in instructional technology to serve as instructional designers and for every course, they are assigned to work with a subjct matter expert chosen from among our faculty (who I contract to pay above and beyond their regular salary and teaching load) or, in the case where faculty are unavalable, the faculty chair of the discipline and my staff select and contract with an academically and experientially qualified sbject matter expert (often a faculty member from another university).

 

Having never never been involved in online course design, this may be an obtuse question: Aren't most of the platforms designed in such a way that an expert in Ed Tech is not needed? Don't you just activate the features you need from the platform and then plug in your material?

 

There seems to be a lack of respect for correspondence courses in this thread. Is there a reason for that?

Who is this?

Realizing that he lacked a scientific education, he enrolled in a home study. He obtained a degree in Mechanical Engineering through series of correspondence courses at the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1883.

Oh yeah. Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management.

Read more: Frederick Winslow Taylor: The Father of Scientific Management | Bizcovering

 

The current slate of learning management systems (Blackboard, ANGEL, Desire2Learn, Moodle, Sakai, eCollege) don't really work that way. There are a number of features (discussion boards, announcement, grade books, etc.), but they are sort of like PowerPoint presentations--they come "blank" and without any guidance as to what content to include and what to do with the content.

Part of the problem is that most faculty know what content to teach, but do not know how to teach it online. It is one thing to put up some lecture notes--anyone can do that. However lecture notes are not "instruction"--you need to format the informaiton so as to reduce cognitive overload and must include some instructional strategies (e.g. case study analysis, role play, debate, virtual field trips) and opportunities for practice & feedback (so that the students do something with the material other than just reading it). That is where instructional designers can help.