Boise State University: High-Quality Online Education Anytime, Anywhere

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Transcripts:

Stephanie: I think the most fascinating thing and the best thing about online is it it builds the access for students who can’t make it to campus and that access that they can have doing it online I think it’s just gonna continue to grow.
Tami: my name is Tami Saunders and I’m from Sugar City Idaho. The online program was super doable for me, you can get the other things done you need to and go home at night and do your homework when you can do it. I spent a lot of time studying because I wanted the content not just necessarily to bust through a class. My classmates were awesome we got we we formed such a bond we’d meet in Google Hangouts and and talk on blackboard and discussion boards and stuff we really got to know each other well and and created such a good support system. I got offered a job in a private practice clinic I’m gonna be doing some clinical counseling as well as being a counselor at a high school.
Kimberly: my name is Kimberly Penrod I’ve done a lot of research online about other programs and this one was one of the more affordable programs. Being a single mom working two jobs I was concerned as to whether or not I would be able to carry the load, the staff was very accommodating quick to get back and answer my questions. It pretty much sold me on it.
Clyde: anybody who’s skeptical about online teaching you’ll hear a certain number of criticisms and one of them is I’ll lose the personal connection to the students. How can you recreate that in an online course the answer turned out to be you can’t, you don’t recreate that, you use the tools at your disposal. The blackboard interface compels the students to interact with each other in writing on the discussion board my students now write much much more than they do in a face-to-face class, they interact more, they give eachother more feedback. When you teach a face-to-face class there are the five kids in class who do all the talking, the five kids who never say a word and everything the rest of us like me in between. In an online class everybody talks about the same
amount. The people who would be a shy students for example, who just I don’t speak in class oh no they’re completely present. The personal connection the the creation of a kind of community among them which is important and and where you’re part of the community too. You don’t need to be physically present. This connection can be just as real as the face-to-face connection and since I started teaching online using all the tools I was taught to use to make the personal connection the reaction by the students has been oh no I feel very connected to the teacher
and to my classmates.
Corinna: being a convert from not believing in online to getting my master’s degree in an online format – to now actually building and designing online courses, I would have to say I’m one of the biggest cheerleaders of online. First we meet with the faculty and we go through and figure out what the need is, we help them understand aligning the course, we teach them lots of different video techniques interaction techniques group techniques to make it a high intensity very well developed, defined, good course and then the second half is developing the course. Build it, put it in blackboard and we’ve got a team at ecampus that helps do all of the different steps and walks them through it and the third part of it is teaching it then we go through a quality
matters review and have somebody else review the course and pass it off and we make little changes and edits and and then they continue to teach. Stephanie: our big focus is quality of online education and the biggest piece of that is the technology and now we have a lot more in collaborative tools so to build that engagement with the students and allow them to have that interaction rather than just feel like they’re sitting in front of a computer. Patrick: so it used to be when online learning the early courses, someone could give you a course shell and a learning management system and you would have a textbook and you could just fill in some text and you’d have something at the time that was good enough to go. The reality though is really good sophisticated courses nowadays have media they have all these aspects where it’s really hard for one faculty to do it by themselves like it once was. Nowadays it really takes a team it takes a village and so I think that the institutions that really are going to continue to grow their programs be continuing to meet their students needs, their community needs, they’re gonna have those resources and they’re going to dedicate those resources to create this high-quality online learning experience. Jennifer: a lot of people ask me if an online degree in genetic counseling is going to be cheaper than a traditional face-to-face program…