EduBlog Insights

Belinda Davis Lazarus of the University of Michigan has an interesting study in the September, 2003 Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks. The study is entitled “Teaching Courses Online : How Much Time Does It Take?

An excerpt from the summary:

This study attempted to measure the amount of time needed to teach three online courses. The data collected across the three courses were fairly consistent and indicated that teaching courses online requires between 3 Π and 7 hours per week. The graduate level course required 30 √ 45 minutes per week longer that the introductory courses. However the time commitment is within reasonable expectations, but unlike live courses that meet between 1 and 3 times per week, the instructor needs to be online and available to students each day. Participating in and grading the online discussions takes the greatest amount of time, however, the discussions show that the students posted 4 to 5 times as many messages as the instructor. Consequently, consistent with principles of effective instruction, students had more opportunities to respond and interact in the online courses than in live, lecture-type courses.

This study piqued my interest. Students having more opportunities to respond and interact fits for courses set up on weblogs, too. As I am checking posts and comments made by our Literature Group, I’m using Bloglines to expedite the reading of posts but am wondering if there is a way to expedite reading of comments. Just want to make sure I am not missing something I should be aware of here.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2003 at 4:55 pm and is filed under About Weblogs, Imported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.