Online College Course Forum

Writing materials for online college courses is not easy. At first glance, you would think that you simply take the teaching materials that have been used in a classroom and put them onto a web site. In fact the reality is very far distant from this.

Obviously you have to start with good factual materials, but designing a learning package means that you have to work out the best way to present these materials so that they can be understood and absorbed by the student. You have to make things very interesting because it's so easy to get bored with online materials, and you have to make assissments interact with your students so that they can work out what they have learned and what they need to go back and learn.

On top of this you also need to think about the other parts of online learning - using email, messaging, chat rooms and how to do online collaboration. All in all, online packages represent a real investment in time, effort and money on the part of the college you are studying with.

Well, after the "aha" moment it's back to the slog of carrying on with my online degree. I'm starting to do some of the new line of research that is suggested by this new line of thinking. It means that although I'm deviating from the path that I thought I would be researching, I can see in the long run that it's likely to cut down the amount of research overall that I need to do for my online PhD.

However at the moment it's just shear hard work, plus the necessity of tracing out a new research plan. I'm trying to retain that feeling of excitement that I had during this new development, but at the moment it's hard. When I get into the new line of research, I'm sure I'll recapture that feeling.

For my online PhD I'm owrking on a subset of management that my supervisor has researched and published extensively. We have many heated discussions about what he says in theory and what I have done in practice - I am lucky enough to be researching a subject that I have some practical experience of.

Yesterday we were in the middle of one of these heated discussions on the telephone and suddenly my supervisor had an "aha" moment. This bought about a serious amount of illumination into what I am working on, and it really means that I can progress very very fast in my line of thinking.

This was so exciting. I had no idea that ideas could be so powerful. I actually think that yesterday was one of the most important days of my life.

Onwards and upwards with my online PhD. Because I have been registered for a year, I need to put my proposal before a research committee. This is quite an ordeal, because I have had to prepare a document outlining the research topic, what the background is, and how I propose to deal with the research.

For a year I have simply read around the area, working out what the present body of knowledge is and where I want to increase this body. The area I'm studying is relatively new, and there's lots of room to add to the knowledge.

So to get the questions focussed enough is quite difficult. I'm going to write a little more on this in the following days, so you'll see why this is such a problem.

At work we're investigating a case of plagiarism. This used to be called copying, but in fact today it covers a whole spectrum of different actions, all about passing off work as your own that belongs to someone else.

Working on an online program leaves you open to a particular form of plagiarism that many people do not recognise - that is copying material directly from websites. I've talked to many students, and even to their shame, some tutors, who did not understand that taking material directly from websites without permission and without referencing sources was perfectly OK. It isn't.

Intellectual property theft of this kind is becoming a major issue, and as we use instantly accessible information we are going to find new laws protecting rights and laying down rules for use. Be aware of this issue, it will affect you.

One of our departmental groups has been discussing the difference between online learning and e-learning. It's funny how phrases are used and not really thought about or understood, and to some extent this is what is happening to the jargon that is accummulating around online courses.

Online learning refers specifically to programs and courses delivered using the internet or some internal intranet - the materials are transmitted from some central server to the user, and the interaction happens in some real-time (or similar) timeline.

However e-learning refers to all the possible technologies that use electronic methods - computing, telecomms, tv, and media such as cds, video, DVDs and other devises. This is not necessarily done in real time, and in many cases can bear a resemblance to distance learning, when materials were sent out to the user and the work was done in isolation, with the results sent back to the institution that was delivering the course.

Working and studying can give you a workload that becomes very difficult to manage. You need to be both ordered and disciplined in order to be able to do this well. I find it very difficult to let my work go and start thinking about study without a break.

For this reason I try to separate the days that I work and that I study. My study times are based around weekends, although I also try to do other things as well. However I find that other activities allow me to study, such as travel in planes or trains, and overnight work trips.