|
Creating & Using Multimedia in Online Instruction |
Types of Design Courses Online Use of Online Course Components
|
The use of online instruction in a course can vary. Not all uses of web-based instruction are the purely online course, where the student and instructor may never meet face-to-face and all communcation takes place digitally through the internet. One constant confusion in examining online course offerings from course websites is that it is not always immediately obvious if the course is a purely online course or the course requires some on-campus attendance. The purely online courses in the design field were concentrated in the knowledge-based content areas, such as the history of architecture and fundamentals of building construction.
 As these courses have been traditionally text and writing based instruction, they are easily adapted to the internet. All instruction, submission of work, communication, and student assessment transpire online. The University of Iowa offers a variation of this approach to online education which they term "Guided Correspondence Study. GCS Web Courses. It is similar to other online courses in that the students obtain course material via the internet and communicate with the instructor via email. However, no course discussion forum is used, and the student is doing essentially independent study via the internet. There was only one skill-based class I encountered that was offered purely online, and that was Introduction to AutoCAD offered online through the Parsons School of Design. It requires the student to log-in to a course web-site to obtain the instructional materials. However, it was not possible to examine these materials without being a registered student. The other uses of online instruction in a course varied. There were courses
in which all of the instruction and discussion takes place online, but required
on campus attendance for an orientation and examinations. Of this type,
the course of most of interest to me was Construction
Materials at Honolulu Community College. It is on of HCC initial ventures
into online course instruction and incorporates some interesting features.
There were courses in drawing that were "hybrid" type courses,
in which a portion of the instruction was delivered in online format, but
weekly on campus meetings were also required. Several of the skill-based
courses were what I would term, web-enriched courses, where a traditional
course utilizes a course website to enhance the instructional opportunities
of the course but typical twice weekly on campus meetings are required.
A good example of such a course is the Introduction
to Architectural Computer Graphics at the University of Oregon.
|
