The best part of an online class-- by far-- is the ability to shoehorn the study time into your own unique schedule. That has worked out fairly well, for the most part, in this class. I do wish that the readings for the upcoming week were posted early so that we could look at them over the weekend; that would take a lot of pressure off during the week.
In other online classes I've taken we had video lectures. I'm not sure what I think about that, although I do enjoy a good lecture and it certainly hits my learning style. But sometimes they ran to 45 minutes or an hour and that got pretty tedious. So maybe there's a happy medium somewhere. Last spring/summer I was part of the Ireland studies program at GRCC. We had three online classes during the month of May, followed by three weeks in Ireland in June. May was a ton of work; hundreds of pages of reading each week, a few hours of film/lecture online, and a handful of posts on Bb discussion boards. What was amazing was how many of us posted dozens of times during the week; we had some very lively discussions! Of course we were all very excited to know that after all the tedium of the online part we'd be actually going there and seeing all the things we'd been reading about and discussing.
I actually liked the Atomic tutoring videos. I was able to pick and choose from the ones I wanted to learn more about beyond just the ones that were assigned. (I also found them useful after I bought my Mac)
Overall I've enjoyed the class. Whether I would take another is still an open question. I don't think there are many of them offered in the classes I need from here on out. I certainly would consider it if the option was available.
I think history classes could be done very well as an online class. Since much of it is reading and discussion, with lecture to fill in the gaps, it lends itself to an online venue quite well I think.
I think many people (outside the education establishment) believe that you can take just about any class at any school anywhere online. A number of people have made comments to me that lead me to believe this. Few of them seem to know how few classes really are offered.
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Heh, I tried doing the 45 minute long lecture in the past and it didn't go over well at all. Long readings don't over well either. I can break things down into smaller tasks and lessons, but it's really hard to get into the substantive meat of a topic by using short segments and still have it all fit together nicely so that the student can see the connections, etc. This is something I wrestle with all of the time.
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