So far my experience teaching online Economics has been
exciting! I really like the challenge of finding good material for the course
and creating a course structure (with a lot of help!) that maximizes the
learning potential of the online education experience. On a personal level I
have just finished completing my Masters degree online, so the biggest
adjustment has been the transition from student to teacher in the virtual world
of education. Rather than planning my time and my week around completing
assignments, I’m now planning when I can answer questions about the material
and when I can grade completed assignments.
The
biggest surprise for me so far has been the amount of front-end work it takes
to get a course like this up and running well. It has also been surprising in
that I have had to curtail some of the content we would get to in a normal
everyday class and rely on good guiding questions for discussions and prompts
for blogs to make sure that it is covered. This is, of course, part of the
opportunity cost of having an online course. As is noted in Naked Economics “The real cost of
something is what you must give up in order to get it, which is almost always
more than just cash.” (Wheelen, p.11) So all of you not only pay a fee to
participate in summer school, you also give up some of your “free” time. Your
opportunity cost is even higher if you consider the fact that instead of coming
to summer school you could get a job, an alternative that would actually earn
you money. From a teaching perspective, a major trade off between online
education and classroom learning is that an intensely structured course such as
this one lacks the opportunity for us to have in depth learning on spontaneous
issues that may arise. For example, because of the myriad of financial
calamities that occurred, 2008 was a really interesting year to be in economics
class and we had some intense current events discussion, something that we
might not have time to cover so intently in an online course.
I’m
going to answer the last question by taking the easy way out (I don’t advise
you do this) and say that so far things are great and I wouldn’t change
anything.
