Teaching Tips

What Online Students Say About Class Organization

• A clearly organized class is very helpful for students: "The key to successful learning though online courses lies in the organization and the time the professor puts into the course. Professor X presented an organized, detailed and clear web site."
• Students want a clear syllabus: "Busy adults could use a course syllabus to plan class work according to other responsibilities."
• Clarity on deadlines is essential: "Please be more specific with dates. Days of the week without dates confused mostly everyone."
• While deadlines are important, allow students to work at their own pace as much as possible:
  "I also like it much more when each unit of a class is open for the length of an entire class-some professors open and close sections, so you can't get ahead of your work load, or review past work."
• Students want to understand the workload: "This course gave us all of the assigned reading material at the beginning which I particularly like because I was able to do more reading at certain times during the semester than other times."
• Some would like a head start: "It would be beneficial to the students if the classes were made available a week or two in advance of the start date. This would give the students time to look the class format over and get the required resource information, such as ISBN #'s for books. This would help the student be more prepared at the start of the class.
• The major reasons students give for taking online courses is the flexibility they afford. They want a workload that takes that flexibility into account: "The workload for this class was much too high. There were assignments due almost every day, and there was little or no flexibility for the student with regard to study or online time."
• Instructors need to think about their role in the class: "The fact that my instructor was there to support me and not spoon feed me the information, placed me in a more responsible position."
• If instructors use synchronous chat sessions, they need to take into account students differing schedules: "They had chat sessions, which were hard to make."

Quotes come from the CTDLC's Spring 2001 Online Student Evaluation Survey
Prepared by Diane J. Goldsmith, Ph.D
Director of Institutional Research, CTDLC