Kearsley gives several topics of research for online education. Those topics include: student achievement, school-level impact, class interaction, virtual conferences, and learning communities. He talks about how technology has an effect on all of these topics and how we can research them in order to determine where the future of technology and online education is going. But it’s not just technology that we have to research. We also need to research how the class is being taught and evaluate who the course is being taught by. There are a lot of factors that come into play when it comes to online education.

Even though I don’t really speak in the chats I think they are important. They keep the class connected as a whole and allow a sense of being involved in a class. With online education it is hard to know the opinions of others, and the chats let other classmates know how their peers feel about certain topics and give them better insight to the topics they are unsure about.

I found this article on the OLDaily blog and thought that it was interesting (http://www.universityaffairs.ca/2008/11/03/how-technology-is-transforming-the-lecture.aspx). In this article, a professor at York University makes web videos as lectures; however, his students gave him feedback on the lectures and told him that they did not like them. So he started doing some more research and looked into things like the students’ attention span and what they liked. After his research he decided to break his lecture into parts and allow “funny” breaks in between.

I think this would work for a lot of online courses. Teachers can get feedback from students as to what they liked and didn’t like and teachers could adapt to what the students have suggested or make improvements based on their suggestions.

After reading the article on fear and humiliation I have realized that this is a major part of learning. We need to learn to get over our fears and the fact that we might be humiliated to accomplish the things that we need to do in life. If we never get over our fears then we will not grow as humans. We will sit idly by and watch others who are fearless get the things that we deserve. Same goes for teaching, I know that it is hard not to be nice but sometimes we have to push and be mean because we care and want to see these students succeed. I know that we can not make students go places that they do not want to go but we have to try. We have to push them, make them see that they need the material and the lessons to get by in life successfully. But then there are those times that we need to stop force feeding them and let them fend for themselves, because as much as we want to believe it, there will be those times that we are alone and we have to do it ourselves. That goes for school, work, and life. Its a tough world and as teachers we need to prepare our students for that. We can make learning fun but it also has to be serious.

The global nature of the web, I think, does have some effect on the way that we teachers evaluate our students. Since there are times that sites may not work and students have a hard time accessing the things that they need for class then we are more lenient on the grading. However, the evaluation can be hard if we find that the students have been searching the web and stealing information with giving credit. Since we can find almost anything that we need online then we have to be a little bit more careful when it comes to plagerism and things of that nature.

Comparing the goals and objectives of an online course and a classroom based course, I don’t see much of a difference. I think that they will be the same. There may be some slight differences but still essentially the same. The basic goals are to have students learn, which is the same in both situations. How we get them to learn maybe be different since our objectives in the classroom invlove hands on materials, lecture and social interaction, where with the online course we have to use technology to get students to be self motivated to learn.