Professor Van Ry

The results are in. Inside Higher Ed recently released its third annual survey of college and university faculty members, focusing on perceptions of online learning. It showed that faculty:

• Remain highly skeptical about the efficacy of online education
• Consider the instructor-student relationship essential for learning
• Believe that ownership of online courses belongs with them
• Feel there is too little support for online course development
• Don’t want outside companies to create their courses or curriculum

I suppose these results could be taken as bad news for those of us in the online education world. But to me, they all make perfect sense.

I shared faculty skepticism about online education for many years. True, my mind has been changed in recent years by online courses I’ve encountered that are easily as rich and meaningful as face-to-face courses. But caution is still warranted. Without careful and creative design, online courses can – and often do – amount to a stale collection of materials with little power to motivate or inspire. <Read more.>

Via Marie Norman, Inside Higher Ed.