A Thousand Years in Thirty Virtual Days: Summer Online Courses and the Sophomore Survey
The Course
Proponents of distance education suggest that one of its principal benefits is the time online students are allowed to consider, reflect upon, and then respond to course material. As Tisha Bender notes in her Discussion-Based Online Teaching , "Time means something different online than in the campus class, as the online class exists within the more elastic and subjective realm of a virtual dimension. This, though, can prove to be advantageous in that it does not call for immediacy; rather, due to its asynchronous nature, students have time to reflect and think deeply about issues before responding" (Bender, 2003, p. 180). Paradoxically, summer school by its very nature is compressed, trading the luxury of prolonged reflection for intense focus and (ideally) single-minded attention.
A typical summer course at ACU meets 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 4-5 weeks. Introducing on-campus students to a "survey" of important authors and texts in the summer is always challenging, requiring both creativity and compromise. Early in the development process I understood that our summer online course would entail its own unique challenges. Many of the courses we consulted in development would take the first week of a long semester to familiarize students with the syllabus and begin building community. Course units or modules would then follow, one a week, providing students the opportunity to do the assigned reading before reflecting in group chats or online discussions. At this pace, I feared my survey would barely have time for Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Swift, the equivalent of a Western Civ. class that covered the last three centuries with short summaries of the Industrial Revolution, World War I, and the Cold War.
The obvious challenge becomes how to allow students time for careful reading and reflection within the abbreviated summer format. In 2002, we developed a barebones outline of 15 reading assignments that could cover key themes and genres from the Anglo Saxons to the Enlightenment. As a compromise, the summer online program developed a model that would allow students to take courses either in the typical one-month summer semester or in a newly created two-month term that would present the same assignments at a pace still twice that of a long semester. Teaching these sections side by side provided us a unique vantage on the challenges that accompany course duration.
Given the number of readings we hoped to cover—already pared down from summer surveys on campus—we chose to follow the same basic assignment cycle for each module, allowing the readings themselves to introduce variety to the course. Each module moved from a short lecture or learning activity meant to introduce background material or key themes from the reading to a culminating small-group discussion. Asynchronous discussion was chosen as the principal communication tool because it can be easily adapted to the model familiar to our classroom teachers, would encourage students to engage individual texts more deeply while allowing some flexibility in when they contributed even at the break-neck pace of the 5-week course. Though two alternative assessments were introduced in place of major exams, the discussions that accompanied each module represented the main venue for students to process their reading with peers and with the professor.