Peer Review

The Reality of Designing and Implementing an Internet-based Course

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Overview:: This paper,published in the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration and written by Kay M. Perrin and Dionne Mayhew presents the qualitative and quantitative data collected from the professor and students involved in two upper division undergraduate public health courses and highlights the points deemed important when designing, implementing and facilitating an Internet education course. It also presents the experiences of being involved in an on-line learning format from both the teacher and learner perspective.
Type of Material:: Reference Material and journal article published in an online journal. .
Recommended Uses:: This paper may be used as a reference resource or discussion material for faculty development in preparation for online course development and delivery.
Technical Requirements:: Browser
Identify Major Learning Goals:: The Faculty Development goal of this paper is to provide faculty or faculty development programs with points deemed important when designing, implementing and facilitating an Internet public health course or an online course in general.
Target Student Population:: For individual faculty or faculty development programs interested in launching and/or possibly improving online public health courses or possibly online courses in other disciplines.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: Experience in teaching and teaching public health courses n particular.

Rating:
Strengths:: The authors touch on a very important point that online courses must be humanized: "By drawing out personal commitment, participant interaction, and enthusiasm, the instructor is seen as a humanizer working to personalize what is often feared to be an impersonal experience." Readable, realistic view of online course design.
Concerns:: Somewhat dated in regard to recommending chatrooms and email that are no longer the primary online means of encouraging social interaction. Today we have many more practical means of humanizing an online course than through personal commitment, participant interaction, and enthusiasm alone. It would have been helpful to the reader if the course objectives were provided as background information. Article's results are limited to two sample upper division undergraduate public health online courses analyzed. Since the sample size was only two, the general applicability of this article may be narrow.

Rating:
Strengths:: The table on the Advantages and disadvantages of the on-line course format may be useful to faculty who are beginning to teach online. Other tips such as opening the course to students at least five weeks before it began may be helpful, too.
Concerns:: The suggested design of 15-week courses into 15 modules seems to overlook best practices in online course design where chunking courses into learning- not necessarily time-based modules is recommended. The chatrooms were problematic because of their synchronous nature in an asynchronous course. No asynchronous discussion boards were used, only email.

Rating:
Strengths:: This research paper presents the information clearly and is arranged in an orderly fashion. It is well organized and logically sequenced.The content level is appropriate for the expertise level of undergraduate faculty.
Concerns:: This study does not present information in ways that would necessarily be attractive to undergraduate faculty who are beginning to teach. Some of the information is not easy to use or recommended in today's online classrooms.