Online Course Technology: The World at Your Fingertips
Posted by Sharon Cece on February 10th, 2009
Imagine munching a chocolate bar and sipping a cappuccino, wearing your favorite old sweats, hair unkempt…while at the very same moment you, with your class, are drumming alongside the Ashanti tribe in Africa or celebrating the Reykjavik Arts Festival in Iceland.
Online learning fuses three entities–your education, your computer and the entire world. The technology utilized by online programs is remarkable in itself, and the information and learning gleaned through this technology is as good if not better than some received locally. Why, it’s virtually global.
When you’re an online student, almost everything–your class work, your communication, your testing, your research–is done, well, online. The exception is that you do make use of textbooks in most online courses of study. You may also use programs such as Word or Works, Excel and PowerPoint to turn in coursework.
Blackboard is the mode of transportation between you and your online courses. When you log onto blackboard, it “drives” you to your classes. This is where all your learning and communication takes place. Initially, you meet the class electronically via threaded discussions; you do this in parts as you may log on and enter your class when one or two (or no) students are there and then start or continue a discussion via a post, which in the beginning is usually an introduction. Then when you log back on, you see other students left discussions or answered your posts, which you can read and answer at your convenience–the many discussions and parts become a whole. It’s a neat way of holding class without having to be at a classroom at a particular time. Threaded discussions were used often in nearly all of my classes and were very effective in interacting with professors, TA’s and other online students about the course content. I particularly liked that I could log on when it was most convenient at a time of my choosing; in this way, I was more effective at communicating and participating as a student.
Instruction and learning takes place using a variety of other technologies. Java was very cool. With Java, all the online students logged in to a real-time class whereby we would discuss the coursework very much the way instant messaging works, except with a huge group. Also, the professor can electronically “write” on a whiteboard that everyone can see (that’s a bit bizarre at first to witness, like a ghost is drawing in front of you) but very effective in creating the classroom atmosphere from a virtual medium.
In my very first online course at Florida State, Music World Cultures, the professor utilized web technology whereby his students could study international musicians from within their own nations and tribes. My instructor was the Distinguished Research Professor Dr. Dale A. Olsen, a world-renown Ethnomusicologist and Guggenheim Fellowship Winner who conducted fieldwork in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Aotearoa, Fiji, Rarotonga, Tonga in Polynesia, and elsewhere around the world. It was quite an honor to have been one of his online students; even the textbook we used was authored by him. From our screens straight into the world, we studied the music of the Warao of Venezuela (Song People of the Rain Forest), the beautiful Kinko-ryû shakuhachi from Japan, Brazilian’s Samba Parade at Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, contemporary Chinese bands rock out in Beijing, and indigenous Australian Aborigines perform the dijeridu. It was an exceptional program which, unless you had thousands of dollars to spare for travel, was savored through a technological window. In the best sense possible while sitting in my little home in Willow Spring, NC, I didn’t just learn about these cultures from a book… I literally experienced them online.
