To be Online or Not to be Oline

When using computers, there is a temptation to try to do everything on the computer. I am as susceptible to this as anyone. Computer programmers call this PAT (programming at the terminal). It has an insidious effect on effectiveness, productivity, and quality.

Computers are wondrous devices. I can find a paper on a hard drive in a blink, but it may take days to find on in my office. Keeping material on line can make it easier to find and accessible when you are away from your office. However, using material that is on line is another matter.

In one of my courses, I have a 200-page student guide. For many years, I had made this guide available to students in paper form. Last spring, however, I made it available online. The results were not so good. By tracking student accesses, I determined that many students were not downloading the reference. Instead, they accessed it every time they needed it, which was often. This introduced a time delay that certainly slowed their process and probably tended to break their concentration.

I suspect others downloaded the guide, but did not print it out. This leads to what I call the knothole effect. Imagine watching a baseball game through a knothole in a fence. You can see parts of what is going on, but can't see the whole picture. When accessing a 200-page PDF file on a computer, it is difficult to move from section to section. In paper form, it is flip-flip. At any rate, I've decided to go back to paper.

I've discovered a similar thing when managing an online course. All the pieces are there, but they may be slow to access and it is difficult to keep all the parts in sight. I just finished grading an exercise which requires me to keep six different files in view. I have dual monitors, but six files at once is just too much. I finally decided to have print copies of some of the files.

For example, I have a two-page grading sheet. The first part is a narrative. The second part is a grading rubric. For this, I had printed copies of the assignment and the problem. On my computer, I had LINGO (a mathematical programming application) to check each team's program file, a copy of the grading sheet from the previous phase, renamed as the new sheet, and the document I was grading. On line, I had the student team's presentation site, in case I needed to check supporting files.

After I did the narrative for a student report, copying phrases from the report as needed, I then looked at the previous narrative and commented on signs of progress. I did the same thing with the Rubric. After evaluating the report and determining the grade, I looked for and commented on signs of progress. Editing a copy of the previous grading document saved me a window and quite a bit of time.

Then, I printed out the grading sheets. These I will file away. However, another benefit is that when I entered the grades, I could look up the numbers quickly, rather than opening multiple files and scrolling down.

I've thought for quite a while that asynchronous education requires one to organize differently than for synchronous courses. I'm now thinking that another part of managing online courses is figuring out what to download and what to leave on the server, as well as what to keep as a file only and what to print out.