marketing cost, (2) continuous feedback from the web enables rapid ..... however, points out the advantage of automated agents in managing an online course,.
Open Courses: A View of the Future of Online Education Farrokh Alemi Health Administration Program George Mason University Department of Health Administration and Policy · College of Health and Human Services MS: 1J3 · Northeast Module · 4400 University Blvd · Fairfax, Virginia 22030-4444 703 993 1929 PJ Maddox Ph.D. R.N. Health Administration Program George Mason University Department of Health Administration and Policy · College of Health and Human Services MS: 1J3 · Northeast Module · 4400 University Blvd · Fairfax, Virginia 22030-4444 Version of August 18, 2008
Abstract Open courses provide the entire course (lectures, assignments, syllabus, student’s discussions, and student’s projects) online without revealing student’s personal information. We report on our experience in managing 8 open online courses at http://hap.gmu.edu/open. Open courses have several advantages over password protected courses: (1) they are available through search engines and thus reduce the program’s marketing cost, (2) continuous feedback from the web enables rapid improvements to the course, (3) customer relationship tools, tied to open courses, radically reduce faculty time spent on one-on-one emails while increasing student/faculty interaction. We provide details of one course where in 15 weeks 803 emails were received by the faculty and 1181 sent by the faculty (all within 6% of a working week and 82% savings of faculty time). We show how open courses can be accessed through search engines, how students questions are answered on the web and how student projects, in popular sites such as You Tube and Face Book, improve course marketing.
An Alternative View of Internet The number of students taking online courses is growing.1 Online education has been introduced in a large number of health administration programs.2 - 16 Most online courses are delivered through closed platforms such as WebCT, Moddle and Blackboard. Access to these courses is limited to students registered for the course and who have the correct password and identification. Open online courses are different. Open courses provide all lectures, assignments, student evaluations and student comments online without password or login information. Students as well as non-students can browse the content without limitation. They can see videoed lectures, see software used to analyze data, hear instructions on complicated theories, leave their comments, see answers to questions posted by others, interact with other students, and in some open online courses they can teach by adding their own lectures or projects. Registered students are allowed to (1) interact with the faculty, (2) receive grades for their assignments (which requires logging in) and (3) receive course credit for their effort. Unregistered students do not have access to these three components but have access to all other aspects of the course. Because there are no passwords, many lectures in open online courses are assigned as reading material for face-to-face courses or as alternative lectures for students that cannot make an occasional face-to-face session. Open online courses are also available to faculty from multiple universities, who can use all or part of the material to teach their own courses. Most important of all, open courses quickly become a Web destination because of their rich content. Course content can be found in searches and because of University’s reputation and links to the course, they tend to be in the first page of the search. We have designed a platform for delivery of open online courses and have been using this platform to deliver several health administration courses. This paper reports on our experience with open online courses. Five years ago, in an editorial in this journal, I and colleagues called for syndicated courses, where a course offered from one university could be taken by students in another.17 We imagined a world where university professors can offer courses across programs, corresponding to their own research specialization. We imagined courses that are a destination on the web, where students everywhere can use them as a resource. For the most part, none of this has come to pass. To be true, there has been a proliferation of online courses. Many courses have generated a great deal of enthusiasm and at some fundamental level online education is no longer novel but part of many programs. But our call for syndicated courses has for the most part not resonated with faculty in various health administration programs. One reason we have pursued open courses is to facilitate the use of these courses by faculty elsewhere. Our open online courses have been used in their entirety by other institutions. In addition, several faculty have used components of these courses in their work. In this sense, open courses facilitate cooperation among programs and faculty. Open online courses are now available through Yale University, MIT and many other universities – and for the first time they are getting noticed by mass media.18,19 This paper reports on our experience of creating open online courses and invites others to do the same. When we talk of open online courses, the first reactions we receive from the faculty is often a concern about copyright issues. Faculty are concerned that the fruits of their labor will be used by others without attribution. Current course delivery platforms
lock up the content of the courses because of the mistaken belief that the Professor’s intellectual property is unprotected on the web. In reality, any web document is copyright protected.20 There is no need to hide the content behind passwords. Reading a web page or a book in the library is fair use of copyright material, but reusing it in a commercial endeavor is illegal. Some individuals may misuse web content but repackaging of a web page is prosecutable by law in the same manner that repackaging a paper or a book is prosecutable. Electronic access to an online course makes access and use easier but does not change the underlying copyrights. The fear that some faculty express about copyright issues may not be reasonable; putting web pages behind passwords is akin on insisting that libraries put locks on books.
Examples of Open Online Courses We have developed a large number of open online courses at George Mason University Department of Health Administration and Policy and more recently at Georgetown University Department of Health Systems Administration. These courses can be examined at http://gunston.gmu.edu/healthscience/ A partial list of open online courses, that are directly relevant to Health Administration education, are the following: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Process Improvement see http://hap.gmu.edu/586 Decision Analysis see http://hap.gmu.edu/730 Risk Analysis in Healthcare see http://hap.gmu.edu/735 Introduction to Statistics see http://hap.gmu.edu/597 Introduction to Healthcare Industry see http://hap.gmu.edu/678 Health Data Integration see http://hap.gmu.edu/720 Management of Health Information see http://hap.gmu.edu/740 Healthcare Databases see http://hap.gmu.edu/709 Project Management see http://gunston.gmu.edu/healthscience/ProjectManagementInIT/default.asp ?E=2
A good example of an open online course is our course on Process Improvement: http://cqi.gmu.edu. A surprising example is the work of Dr. Neuhauser at Case Western reserve University, where students not only study from an online book but also improve its content.21
Advantages of Open Online Courses: Easy to Market By far, the most time consuming part of teaching is finding students who are interested in the course. Many distance education firms that built courses in the hopes that consumers will enroll in them were surprised at lack of enrollment.22 Marketing remains an important component of success of e-learning. A course may be marketed directly to students or to their educational programs. Marketing to the students is a direct marketing effort, involving advertisements, search engine marketing and many related activities. Marketing to programs is an indirect activity, typically organized around joint degree or joint Certificate programs. In this latter scheme, courses are relabeled to appear as if it is offered from the home institution. Traditionally, face-to-face courses need very little marketing as students enroll in the degree and de facto enroll in the course. But this
is not typical in online courses. Online courses require their own marketing as many enroll only in the course without pursuing a degree or while pursing a degree elsewhere. The most effective method of marketing online is to be open to search engines; thus students can find the course when they search for it. Most programs do not have marketing funds or have limited funds. Advertising a course seems out of reach of many programs, but search engine marketing allows a course to be marketed with no additional cost. It allows the content of the course to market itself. Current course delivery platforms password protect their contents and undermine the ability of search engines to find the course and its content. Many students use the content of open courses free of charge. In the process they become aware of an educational program. When they need to take a course as a substitute for one of the courses in their program or when they need to complete a certificate or a degree, they turn to sources they are familiar with. They would then pay for getting credentialed, even though the content is freely available on the web. The business model of open online courses is very similar to Amazon.com, where portion of a a book is freely available but to obtain the full book one has to purchase it. In a similar fashion, content of the course is freely available but to be receive credit for the course and to have access to the course faculty, the student needs to register and pay for the course. In this sense, open online courses create a reputation for the program, the reputation derives future students and the needs for graduate and undergraduate credits leads to course payment (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Open Courses and Free Marketing on the Web
Advantages of Online Courses: Computer Agents Make Course Management Easier Teaching online, whether open or closed courses, quickly becomes a one-to-one correspondence course. In online courses, if the professor wants to be successful, if the professor wants to check on students’ progress and answer their questions, if the professor wants to maintain the level of interaction occurring in a typical face-to-face course, hundreds of emails are exchanged. Table 1 shows the number of emails
exchanged per week in a graduate course on process improvement at George Mason University Department of Health Administration. This course involves weekly assignments, not uncommon in statistical courses. Emails from the Emails to the student to the student from the professor per professor per week week Average per student 2.23 3.28 Standard deviation 1.13 1.13 Table 1: Number of emails per week from and to a student in an online graduate level course with 24 students The emails exchanged between the instructor and the student include reminders to turn in assignments, additional reading material, explanation of points in the lecture, questions and answers, administrative changes (e.g. changes in student’s emails), correction of weekly assignments, reports on progress in the course, and notes to students falling behind in the class. In a semester (15 weeks), the professor had to read 803 emails and draft and send 1181 emails. Assuming that each email took 5 minutes to read and 7 minutes to compose, this is a total of 205 hours per semester only answering emails. In a 40 hour week, this is fully 34% of the week only dealing with emails. To remedy this, we automated many communications, and as we will see shortly, significantly reduced the burden of teaching online courses. Strictly these automated communications can be done on closed as well as open online courses; but they are particularly suitable for open courses as innovations in pushing course content to students can be used to enhance the delivery of the course. By separating online content from management of student activities, open online courses allow use of computer agents to facilitate course delivery. Online courses generate a blizzard of emails from students. In large classes, several hours might be spent per day merely correcting assignments, and corresponding with students. The tedious time spent in correcting assignment often takes away from real one-on-one interaction with the students. We have developed a platform that automates several repetitive tasks of the professor, including: (1) alerting the student to upcoming topic (pushing the course content to the student), (2) monitoring students’ progress with the course, (3) alerting students if they are falling behind, (4) communicating to the students about course assignments and (5) answering student questions. When the computer facilitates the administrative interactions, it frees the Professor to interact more with the student about course content. To enable the professor to do so, the platform will initiate conversations between the professor and the student beyond the reading material and assignments. It will do so by asking students about the application of the course content to their work, interest in reading additional material in a particular topic, and potential links between a topic and other courses the student is taking. The computer will trigger the conversation through an email and the Professor will follow up after the student has responded to the trigger email. In this fashion the computer actively engages the student and Professor in productive interactions, while simultaneously reducing the burden of most interactions.
The course described in Table 1 was delivered using our platform.1 Most of the emails sent by the professor were generated by the computer and tailored to the student’s information automatically. For example, the professor would receive an assignment using Microsoft Outlook. He would record a grade and a comment about it within the email program and the computer would transfer this information to a database. Later that week, an email is generated automatically to all students. If they have not completed their assignment, they are asked to send it in. If they have, correct answers are provided and the professor’s grade and comment are provided. To the student, the email appears to have generated from the professor. It refers to the student by name and provides grade or other information unique to the student. But from the professor’s perspective, little time is spend in creating the email. Figure 2 summarizes how computer agents facilitate responding to the student’s emailed assignment.
Figure 2: Computer Reduces Burden of One-on-one Communications If the course in Table 1 was not offered using our technology, it would have taken 34% of a 40 hour week to manage the emails. In contrast, it took only 2.5 hours a week to address all the emails (that is 6% of a 40 hour week). In this case there was an 82% reduction in the effort needed to manage the course. In other courses, the burden of emails were not as large and the reduction in the burden was less. The example, however, points out the advantage of automated agents in managing an online course, specially an open online course. While online courses often require one on one instruction, advances in information technology and customer relationship management software have made one on one interaction a lot more feasible and a lot less time consuming. A good example of how we have tried to reduce the burden of the course on the instructor is how we address student’s questions online. When a professor walks in a face-to-face class and lectures, often with little apparent preparation, all students benefit from the lecture and associated interactions. Every interaction is witnessed by the entire class. When a student asks a question it raises doubts in the mind of another and answers to the question addresses the concern of still another student. In many existing online courses the answer is provided to only one student and the opportunity is not used to teach all students. Often, right after answering one student another student emails and asks a similar question. In our open online courses, we made sure that questions asked by one student are answered so that all students, in fact the entire web community, can benefit. The web site collects the students’ questions, alerts the instructor, queues the 1
The platform for delivery of open online courses is based on Microsoft Word, Microsoft Access and web pages. Information unique to student’s performance (sites visited, grades for assignments, etc.) are kept online under codes. A desk top database includes the student’s personal information. Microsoft Word’s merge letter feature is used to send tailored emails to the students about their progress in the course.
questions, records the instructor’s answer to the questions, posts the question/answer to the course web site and alerts the student who asked the question that his/her question has been answered. In this fashion, we made sure that questions asked by one student were answered for all students, thereby reducing multiple questions on the same topic.
Advantages of Open Online Courses: Continuous Improvement Part of the burden of online courses is maintaining and updating the lectures over time. In face-to-face courses this happens gradually as the instructor adjusts his lectures as he learns new information. In online courses, the process is different and lectures sometimes precede the instruction by several months. The effort that goes into planning and preparing a lecture is almost equivalent to writing an entire chapter of a book. Then, either the instructor, or often others, put the lecture online. It is our experience that sometimes within days of this enormous effort, the lecture is out of date, errors are identified in the presentation, and quality of recording is criticized. The whole work has to be repeated. We had to redo the work, only to find still other improvements are needed. To remedy this problem, in open online courses we anticipated a constant realtime (meaning collected and analyzed while the course proceeds) feedback and change. In this fashion, the instructor improves the course as he proceeds, somewhat similar to face-to-face courses. Each improvement is a small change and over time the course improves significantly and stays current. A continuous improvement requires a continuous feedback mechanism. Open online courses allow students to evaluate each session of the course through the Minute Evaluation survey.23 A typical face-to-face course is usually evaluated at end of the semester. The feedback is of little use in day-to-day management of the content of the course. In contrast, our open online courses are evaluated weekly. Students rate each session and write what worked well or what needs improvement. Each feedback would be concerned with a specific lecture and would provide direct advice on how to improve that lecture. Over the years, this continuous process of constant feedback leads to gradual improvements. This has been our experience with all of our online courses. The first offering of the course tends to be little more than the skeleton of what the course eventually becomes. Online courses start with a set of lectures but over the years they accumulate a great deal more (new discussions, links to others, re-explanation of various points made in the original lecture, revisions of the lecture, etc.) What emerges over time is a rich tapestry of lectures and information that could only be accomplished because there is a constant improvement process afoot. Here are examples of student comments in a recent week (complete list is at http://gunston.gmu.edu/healthscience/708/CourseEvaluations/feedback.asp): Lecture on P-charts: Well overall I found P Charts to be very confusing. When I clicked on Probability Charts, the layout of the webpage completed just overwhelmed me. There is a lot of information. If there is a way to spread it out on different pages maybe would be nice, it would look appealing. This was the longest chart I did all semester. This comment was left on 11/26/2007 8:36:41 PM.
Lecture on Tukey chart: I thought that the explanation of a control chart and then showing the difference with the Tukey chart was done very smoothly. I understood it very well. Any questions I had about control charts are answered because it was explained very well. And also the example that we had to do was really helpful to do the homework. Nicely done. This comment was left on 11/26/2007 7:57:26 PM. Lecture on XmR chart: Just as the instructor predicted we have made so much progress in our ability to analyze data/plot charts. I feel so much better having learned how to use formulas in Excel This comment was left on 11/21/2007 8:48:16 PM. Lecture on Tukey chart: Took me a while to understand this chart. I think I got confused b/c a couple of slides needed to be updated. I like the chart but it took longer to understand than other charts and still feel uncertain on some details. This comment was left on 11/21/2007 1:06:16 PM. Lecture on XmR chart: The video was helpful. This exercise helped the light bulb go off on why certain charts are better than others depending on what it is you are looking at. This comment was left on 11/18/2007 5:16:43 PM. Note the level of detail and the frequency of these evaluations: Students comment on every lecture as they are given and not just at the end of course. This creates real-time information on how the course could be improved. Comments of one student may lead to improvements even before others in the same class see the lecture. It is not surprising that online courses, which receive detailed and frequent feedback, do improve over time.
Satisfaction with Open Online Courses The data in Figure 1 show how 3 courses (Process Improvement, Decision Analysis and Health Information Systems) were rated over time. The maximum possible rating is 5 and the minimum was 1. The data show that these course were consistently rated quite high.
Figure 1: Average Student Rating of 3 Online Courses (5 is best possible score)
Conclusions There are always good and bad courses. We do not claim that open online courses are always exciting or always better than other delivery methods. There would be faculty whose work are more novel, more entertaining, more informative. There would be extraordinary courses prepared and delivered in a closed environment, as well. What the open environment does do well is to allow these extraordinary courses to get the attention they deserve. It transforms these courses from a local event to a national or international event. Open courses allows universities to advertise their faculty – the very people who attract students to their programs. Today universities compete for students. Open online courses allow universities that have first rate faculty to advertise their most important assets. It allows universities to show off specific niches in which they lead others. Open online courses allow professors who research the field to become leading content providers in the Internet, and thus create web sites that play the same role as universities play in the physical world: educate the public. For the faculty, open courses reduce the burden of maintaining the course, increase the interaction with students, and create an atmosphere of continuous improvement. It is not surprising that open courses receive a lot of comments. What happens to these comments is what makes online courses great. If student and nonstudent comments and questions are added publicly to a site, then over time faculty are encouraged to improve their work. In the end, over the years, courses with better quality emerge. If our claim is right, over time we should see more open courses and a gradual shift of students from closed courses to programs that offer open online courses. We have already seen this in the content of Internet, where sites that have better open content attract more viewers. It is possible that we can see the same in online courses.
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