What I Like About My Online Class

I teach an on-line general education science course for non-science majors. The course is theme-based, and physchembio 101 principles are integrated into the course as needed to explain various phenomena in the theme.

It is considered a "hybrid" course. I have on-line lectures, discussion board post requirement and quizzes. There are also traditional homework assignments and short writing assignments. The hybrid part is this: every other week we meet on campus for lab. The lab meetings are used for laboratory activities, exams, and regular classroom stuff - help with homework, review of difficult concepts, and some introduction of material that is just flat out easier to do in person than on-line.

I'm very happy with this course, and one of the reasons it succeeds is the on campus meetings. These meetings give the class a sense of camaraderie and allow me to establish a class personality. They also allow us to do cool experiments, and ensure the students have an opportunity to ask questions in person, and give me a place to do organizational stuff beyond sending long explanatory e-mails. I also have the ability to give closed book exams. At our small college, we do not have a testing center or any similar setup, so there would be the possibility of a roommate doing an on-line exam - hence my preference for the in-class kind. In class, I can also help people learn how to use their scientific calculator, do cool in-class demos, and sit down with students after the experiments are over and work through stuff.

I recently added weekly on-line quizzes on the reading. I used the question pool feature of Blackboard to create a pool of questions, and the students may take the quiz as many times as they wish. Each time, they get a randomly selected set of questions, and I create enough questions that most quiz attempts will contain unique different questions, though there will be occasional repeats. As far as I can tell, students use this appropriately. The take the quiz once, study some, and come back an try again after some time is passed. When they come back, their score is usually much higher. When they are close to a perfect score, there will be multiple attempts in a short period of time, separated by 10 to 30 minutes. I'm anxious to see if this helps their exam scores any, and what they think of the whole thing.

Now, if I just had fewer classes to teach, I could offer this course more often.