Seeing Australia – An Online General Education Course

Background to project

Off-campus students need access to general education courses to complete their degrees. Seeing Australia is one of the courses developed for online access to meet this need. This project was developed as a result of an award from the PVC Education. The award included design and production support from EDTeC. The course has no requirements for on-campus attendance and many of the students have been based overseas. It deals with ideas of culture and ideology, and how these ideas shaped the way Australia is seen through art and literature. It has been an interesting challenge to offer this course to students who have seldom or never visited Australia.

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'Why go online?'.

Strategy

To come to an understanding of the way culture and ideology shape perception, students need to read, reflect, develop and review their ideas consistently during the course. To achieve consistency of focused effort, in preference to a quick spurt for an end of session paper, online discussions were included as an assessable component of the course. As these revolve around the weekly readings and artworks, students needed to do the reading and study the artworks to make an effective contribution to the online discussions. Another part of the strategy was to introduce a group assignment. Students used the online discussions to develop and share their ideas and to complete a group task. This helped to maintain an active focus on the course materials and idea sharing among the students. An individual essay was also required giving the students a range of assessable tasks during the session.

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teaching strategy

Application of educational technologies

A WebCT course site was established to provide the students with:

• guidelines for online study and group work

• course modules that detail the activities for the week mostly revolving around reading, viewing artworks, and discussion

• online discussions for the whole group and for small groups to discuss group assignments. Access to small group discussions was restricted to the group and the tutor to prevent cheating

• assignment submission online

• a survey for student feedback after course completion.

The course also had a reader which could be purchased from the bookshop, or downloaded through MyCourse. All communication, assignment submission and return, was carried out using the WebCT courseware with limited use of e-mail.

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use of WebCT

Outcomes and benefits for students

The online course was effective in providing the students with an active learning process based around reading and online discussions. An interesting outcome was that the development of the students understanding was more visible through the online discussions than it would have been in other course formats. This meant that the introduction of new topics could be timed to allow the students to reach an understanding of earlier topics before moving on. By focusing on learning outcomes relating to specific analytical and expressive abilities, it was possible to observe their development and to time the introduction of new topics to mesh with student needs. It was exciting to see specific turning points at which students attained new levels of understanding.

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outcomes

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Graduate Attributes

Problems encountered

When the course is delivered to large groups several problems emerged:

Enormous fluctuations in numbers within the first four weeks made the composition of groups impossible.

Solution: the first four weeks should focus on information sharing with each discussion topic occupying a 'topic' in the WebCt discussion area to which the whole group contributes. When numbers have settled smaller discussion groups can be allocated.

Access. Inevitable problems with access to WebCt

Solution: Comprehensive directions should be posted before session starts and as enrolments increase. This was done but numbers tripled in the first week.

Technical access issues: Problems between Dis-Connect and WebCt need to be resolved at an executive level.

Pace of course: it became impossible to operate the course on a weekly basis

Solution: Content was sacrificed in favour of developing particular learning outcomes. The intention of the course was to emphasise the achievement of learning outcomes over delivery of set course content.

Feedback and improvements

An evaluation questionnaire was completed at the end of the course. Questions relating to content and online discussion are included below.

The online discussion and group learning tasks elicited a strong favourable response (see Table 1). While the content itself was regarded as difficult by this cohort, the online discussion meant that students felt that their learning had been facilitated. Typical responses were:

I am very satisfied with the online Group Project method of learning. It was something very new to me and my group members. I would not have acquired such a method of learning if not for this online Group Project. Thank you.

I am happy with the group learning tasks. I enjoyed working with the other group members.

Consequently, although content was often regarded as difficult, the response to the content was very positive.

Table 1 Student feedback on online collaboration

Although the content was reduced the responses to the questionnaire confirmed the fact that the learning outcomes were met by allowing longer time to discuss difficult concepts (see Table 2).

When I enrolled for this subject, I thought Seeing Australia was a ‘holiday subject’ not requiring any effort to learn new concepts. It was in the thick of the subject that I learned that Seeing is not necessarily what I used to think but a whole new concept which I never knew existed.

Table 2  Student feedback on learning from the course

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evaluation