engleski

As little as possible, as much as necessary : Communication Design of CARNet’ s Online Courses

The shift from face-to-face to online learning environment contains much deeper conceptual changes than simple transfer of materials from paper to screen. For the majority of students, electronic media (in which online courses are conducted), is new and undiscovered environment. In a case of misunderstanding an element of the course, there is no possibility of tutor’ s immediate response. Even if misunderstandings can be solved through Help tutorial, procedure of finding the solution is often slow and boring. Therefore, communication is probably the most important key for success of an online course. Communication inside an online course can generally be divided to personal and impersonal communication. Impersonal communication contains five different aspects: • Visual • Auditive • Language • Technical • Methodical. Personal communication contains two possible directions: • Student - tutor • Student - student. Impersonal and student – student communication require no additional costs, but student – tutor communication is rather expensive. Therefore communicational design of online courses must emphasize the use of impersonal and student – student communication, while the use of student – tutor communication should be minimized. In order to simultaneously maintain high level of course quality and low level of costs, this paper will try to give answers to several questions: • What is the minimum level of tutor participation in an online course? • How to design visual, auditive, language, technical and methodical elements of a course? • How to initiate the highest possible level of student – student communication? All recommendations and conclusions in this paper are based on experiences from development and practice of CARNet’ s online courses: • Searching of online databases • Development of online courses with WebCT • Development of web pages with FrontPage. Guest access to exemplary courses can be found on web pages of CARNet education center Edupoint (http://edupoint.carnet.hr/on_line_tecajevi/on_line.html).

communication design; education

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