A Thousand Years in Thirty Virtual Days: Summer Online Courses and the Sophomore Survey
Rigid Flexibility
The most frequent comment in student evaluations in our first summer was for greater flexibility. In attempting to avoid a self-paced upgrade of a '50s correspondence course, we established an overly rigid schedule of due dates and deadlines. The scheduling for the 5-week and the 10-week courses moved students through a single module and discussion every 2-3 days before beginning the cycle again. The routine itself provided a useful structure or framework for our semester, but it ignored two important aspects of summer teaching: summer work and summer travel. In their final portfolios, students talked of the expected technology-related complications, but we were surprised to learn more than half of our students—even in the 5-week course—were working full-time as well as taking other classes online or in town.
Summer online programs must strike a balance between this kind of strict control, moving students through a course in lock-step, and the isolation an absence of deadlines and interactions can produce. Bender has speculated on the potential disconnect between the openness and flexibility of asynchronous learning and the very idea of a deadline: "The asynchronicity of the online environment induces reflection and encourages one to respond when ready, when one has thought deeply, when one feels stimulated, when one is inspired. In this context then, does not a due date seem rather jarring?" (Bender, 2003, p. 108). But she goes on to argue for a balance between a student's "convenience" in a course and "certain time obligations" natural to the particular class (p. 109). In a summer term for first and second-year students, the absence of any accountability would only encourage procrastination. The answer is not to do away with deadlines, but students taking on their first summer classes along with first full-time jobs for many require some built-in flexibility. One student from a 5-week section described the early anxiety:
I was extremely nervous at the beginning of this semester. The first few assignments really scared me and made me feel like I was going to be spending more time than I had allowed for this class. I later found out that if I worked hard enough, I could get it all finished and turned in on time. I learned a lot about time management in this class. I have been working a full-time job the entire month that this class has been in session and have still been able to get every assignment finished, well and on time. I am extremely proud of my success in this course. . . .
The workload in this course was by far the most challenging. I felt that I barely had enough time to finish one story before I was supposed to be starting another. . . . I think that my initial reply would be that there needs to be a lighter workload. Now that I really think about it though, I think that maybe there just needs to be a little more time for each assignment to be worked on.
Greg Kearsley warns of inexperienced online teachers and heavy workloads filled with "online collaboration, research, or writing that are very time-consuming, without realizing how long it takes to complete these assignments," especially he notes, "for novices and newcomers" (Kearsley, 2000, p. 127); however, after educating students in the reality of summer school, one alternative to content concessions would be greater flexibility. In our final debriefing sessions, course instructors representing more than 70 years of teaching experience agreed that the course would no longer be a survey if we assigned students less.
In our second summer, we moved from our 2-3 day assignment cycles to 1 or 2 week units in which all of the modules for each period are open and available though discussions still "begin" every few days. Given a week or two to complete the assigned reading and online discussions, students are unlikely to work too far ahead unless driven by work schedules or upcoming travel plans. Students able to maintain multiple IM conversations simultaneously will hardly be phased by responding to new posts on Dr. Faustus as they are working through Shakespeare's sonnets. An additional concession allowed students to skip a discussion just as they might miss a face-to-face class as long they kept up with readings and material presented in the modules. Missed classes for illness or travel are already an expected part of on-campus surveys but have not yet been factored into our online program.
Whatever the allowance, some consideration must be made for the exigencies of summer online. As one 10-week student memorably suggested,
Make it more flexible! If I have a wedding to go to in Mississippi, I don't want to be worrying about getting online to make posts between cutting the cake and catching the bouquet. If I am traveling across the country for a week, I don't want to be worried that my grade will suffer because I couldn't access the work to complete ahead of time. If my computer crashes and I have no internet access for two weeks, I don't want to be worried that my grade will suffer during that time, or that by the time I have access, I'll be too far behind the rest of the class.
Just how much "absence" to allow depends largely on the duration of the course since, as in this example, dropping out of a month-long class for a couple weeks would represent almost half the semester, but the cries for flexibility should be heard.