Should online courses have a Beginning/end date to enroll?

Should online courses have a Beginning/end date to enroll?

by Victoria Loisi -
Number of replies: 16

Hello everyone!

It feels to me like an online course, should not -or could not- have an enroll date. An Online course is meant to be completed by the student in a free way.

How do you setup your courses? They have a tight schedule, with limited time to register, or maybe the course "opens" each month?

In the last case... how do you setup your chats and forums? You just put together all the students or you separate them by class?

I´m sorry if this is a silly question to those who teach in online courses for a long time, but I´m just setting up an online course, and I´m afraid that I do not understand the way it should work. Maybe I can´t get out of my head the way that traditional courses are done...thoughtful

Can you briefly tell how did you overcome this challenge? What are your thoughts?

Thanks for your comments!

Victoria

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Victoria Loisi

Re: Should online courses have a Beginning/end date to enroll?

by Ray Kingdon -
Yes, you asked some good questions there. The term that's used here informally is RORO courses - that is Roll On, Roll Off students. I think the term is useful as it provides focus for what could be happening in an on-line/distance course.

First, I don't think we're supporting that type of course at the present but we may not be too far off thoughtful. What needs to change is that the key course date becomes the date the student enrolls. The course as seen by any particular student needs to be relative to that date. So absolute deadlines become relative deadlines.

As I say that's not too difficult. The student's enrolment date is already recorded. So assignments, quizzes, etc need an option(?) of storing their deadlines either as absolute dates or as periods. So, in a RORO course an assignment would close, say,  in 30 days time and the "clock" starts ticking when the student enrols on the course.

There are possibly lots of other implications, back to you...

Ray

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Ray Kingdon

RORO is SoSo

by Ger Tielemans -

I have some doubts about the success chances of these RoRo courses:

  • Is SC not about the discovery of the social aspects of learning?
  • Most people learn better in a group of peers, especially older people: sharing experiences, going together on knowledge hunt, trying to stay in the course because of these new friends...
  • More and more learning activities are group activities, how will you organise that? Wait a week until someone..
  • Most important issue: every course has its own rythm of starting carefully, then getting inspired and then working hard on the last finalisation: How to combine people with different RoRo-rythms? 

All I know is that we always lost all our - individual - distance students before X-mas, until we started 6 years ago to use a VLE, based on groups. A group of three of these new students graduated - as distance student - in the normal time for a day student!

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Ger Tielemans

Re: RORO is SoSo

by Sylvie Kasztan -

While I understand the social aspect of learning is important, many parents are not interested in their students socializing online, especially junior high students in a distance learning environment.

I have been part of a distance learning program acting in the capacity of an administrator for the past 6 years. I can tell you for a fact that the majority of our high school students have enrolled with us because of the appeal of self paced courses. . .especially the seniors who often scramble during their last semester, realizing that they're a half or whole credit short.

Home schooled students who are often more advanced and disciplined are very much in favor of self paced courses as well.  The parents will go elsewhere if they believe their child is being held back. 

I do believe there is a real need for the RoRo approach as you call it, and hope that the possibility for this to become incorporated into future modifications happens soon.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Sylvie Kasztan

It has been a while since ...

by Victoria Loisi -

... this topic started. I´ve found very exciting the discussion here.

I know that in so many cases it is possible -and desirable- that students could share their experiences, but it is not my case.

I´ve been working with online students since Nov'04, when I first installed Moodle on my server... and (at least here in Argentina, or maybe here in my courses smile), people don´t want to talk. They don´t chat, they just complete the surveys and do the questionnaires...

So, I want to do my courses available anytime, no matter if there are 10 students, 100 students or just 2 students.

The thing is: I still have the problem of availability. I loved Ray´s idea. I believe that´s exactly what I´m looking for...

So, my question is... erm... is there a way to do that since october?

Victoria

(I do apologize for my bad english, hope you did understand what I meant wink)

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Victoria Loisi

Re: It has been a while since ...

by cdx cdx -
We have the exact same need, urgently.  Will this be a feature in 1.5?

Victoria - your english is very good.


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Sylvie Kasztan

Re: RORO is SoSo

by Tim Wilson -

We have recently started a self paced course using RORO. It seems to be working OK. Community involvement is very important in our training model and is an integral part of the course. In our experience so far, a community can consist of people at different levels moving through the course at their own individual pace. We have set a generous overall time limit for people to complete the course in.  At this point of time I am more than happy with the community involvement aspect of our course.

Technically, we are just using a topic based course and ignoring completion dates for course elements.  A satisfactory assessment is required at the end of each topic before a student is allowed to move onto the next topic. To achieve this we required a few code hacks to control individual access to topics. At the moment, assessing and switching students to the next topic is done manually but eventually we will automate most of this process leaving the facilitator to just do the value judgement aspects of the assessment. 

 I will post these hacks onto the developer forum once I get around to tidying them up and ascertaining that they are bug free. 

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Tim Wilson

Re: RORO is SoSo

by Gina Bennett -
Tim, we are very keen to have a way to control students' individual access to topics. We look forward to working with your hacks as soon as they become available!
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Tim Wilson

Re: RORO is SoSo

by Brad Zehr -

Tim,

I emailed previously with interest in your topic locking hack that you were developing.  Someone has just completed the initial phase of an activity locking hack that I downloaded and tested a bit - a couple of bugs yet.  You two might want to collaborate and get the best of both worlds on this locking thing - I think it's wonderful.

Brad

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Ger Tielemans

Re: RORO is SoSo

by N Hansen -
I share these concerns too. I am going to be offering a course which is Roro. Considering the difficulty and time that this course will require, this is the best format. I do understand the issue of socialization though too, and that is why I have set up a separate course where they can discuss general (Egypt-related topics). This I hope will satisfy the social aspect of wanting to hang out with new (and old) friends. 
Average of ratings: -
In reply to N Hansen

Re: RORO is SoSo

by Ger Tielemans -
Why not setup groups in a course and start every week or every month a new group inside the same course? Setup special actvities to socialise as group etc..)
You can choose to make the activities of other groups visible or not for other (= newer) groups. 
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Ger Tielemans

Re: RORO is SoSo

by cdx cdx -
Since our courses are not time schedule based, any student can enroll at anytime for a fixed period of time, we need a relative offset approach - RORO.  Our course forums are therefore more a historicalknowledge base rather than a fixed resource for a specific semesterperiod. 
Average of ratings: -
In reply to cdx cdx

Re: RORO is SoSo

by Tim Wilson -

Craig

There are two hacks related to your problem that I know about. It may be worth looking at them.

They are the  block  module  and the Activities linking and regulate rights  hack. Here are the future plans for activities linking and regulate rights.

Regards

Tim

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Tim Wilson

Re: RORO is SoSo

by Victoria Loisi -

I would like to know how is this feature being developed... (I´ve already click on all those interesting links that you´ve posted Tim... but ... blush I must admit that I didn´t quite understand what to do...)

The community features are very important, but the possibility of allowing people to enter a course whenever they want it is the most important feature I think Moodle needs.

Ger´s idea is very good, but I´ve already tried it, and faced this problem: Some weeks are very good ones, a lot of people enrolls, but other ones are just very ... poor ones, and I find myself working (a lot) for just a bunch of students....

Any thoughts about this?

Victoria

ps. Thanks for your nice comment Craig! wink

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Victoria Loisi

Re: RORO is SoSo

by Victoria Loisi -

I´m doing a bit of brainstorming here, and (maybe this is a wako idea)...

Is there a way to set just one big course when you can access the next module if (and only if) you complete the correctly the questionnaire? This way all modules would be available forever and new students just would have to complete the tasks to pass the level...

Any thoughts?

Victoria

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Victoria Loisi

Re: RORO is SoSo

by Caleb Simonyi-Gindele -
I won't be much help other than to add my 2 cents.

I believe I am looking for the same thing as Victoria. A RORO option would open up Moodle to the world of informal educators. Those of us that can teach things which people want to learn but are not necessarily part of a formal education. I appreciate the social aspect, but some of that that could be kept in place at a teacher <> student level even if the larger forum was lost.

As a PHP programmer who is a Moodle newbie, I am wondering what would be involved in a RORO implementation.

Failing that, as Victoria has asked, what is the best way to achieve something similar within the current framework?

Regards,
Caleb
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Victoria Loisi

Re: Should online courses have a Beginning/end date to enroll?

by cdx cdx -
Hi Victoria,

just to let you know i just posted a request for administering enrollment dates in the general developers forum: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=26040
it might be helpful if all the RORO folks support this request by in the post above so the Moodle developer community knows how broad the need is.  i am at the Moodlemoot outside of Boston right now and Martin said it should be fairly easy since the date is stored in a table.  what is needed is for us to describe what is required.  i tried to do so in the post above.

thx!
craig
Average of ratings: -