After some initial faculty resistance over quality issues and suspicion of commercial vendors, UC now is starting to create its own catalog of shared online classes.
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by other universities and companies can potentially enroll thousands, but usually not for college credit.
In contrast, the UC for-credit classes cap enrollments at between 30 and 430, and most require a weekly real-time discussion session online with a teaching assistant or professor via chat rooms or Skype, in addition to lectures and videos that students view at their convenience.
To ensure honesty, most final exams will be proctored in real classrooms, either on campuses or at test centers around the state.
UC Davis plant sciences professor Arnold Bloom taught his interdisciplinary course on climate change for years in real lecture halls and then adapted it for an online version, at first mainly for students on his home campus.
That took extensive work, he said, to create a series of 12-minute lectures on such topics as biofuels, economic analysis and polar animals, plus tutorials and videos that bring the material alive visually with images of dinosaurs, nuclear power plants and cloud formations. Students’ assignments include tracking the climate history of their hometown from online federal data.
Now Bloom said he looks forward to widening his audience throughout UC. Besides allowing students more access and flexibility in arranging their education, online classes help “campuses live up to their potential, particularly in a times of limited resources.”
UCLA senior Katya Lavine completed two previous online classes with a sense of internet education’s limits. “It’s a lot harder to stay on top of the work and be motivated when you are not going physically to a class. The lack of face-to-face classes makes it seem less real,” the English major said.
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