Web-Based Courses

Thursday we had the pleasure of listening to Donald Girouard and Sophia Palahicky speak about web-based courses (wbc's).

Link

What are web-based courses you ask? It is very simple: a course that is based on the web! With a WBC, a student can be in a small town and can be taking a course (over the web) with an instructor in a larger city that is out of their area. This allows a lot of the smaller communities without the high enrollment numbers to be able to offer all courses to students even if they do not have a teacher in the school to teach it. That instructor can be responsible for students across the province all from one room.

What's the definition of distance under these circumstances? It is simply when a student and teacher are separated. I was somewhat shocked by this definition because according to it, a student could be at one point in the city and the teacher could be at the other end of the city, maybe twenty minutes away, and that is even considered distance learning.

Who needs it? Well here are just a few examples that we talked about:
- Students from rural schools where there isn't enough enrollment to appoint a teacher to that class (ie. Physics, Psychology, etc). This allows the students to engage in all (or most) of the courses they want that may not be offered at their smaller and/or rural school.
- Students who's timetables do not allow for them to take the course. This may be due having another optional class scheduled during that time slot, or if the course is optional and from a different grade level they may be a higher chance for it not to work.
- Students who may not be able to attend class for a period of time (ie. student pregnancy, travelling for athletics). This way the student is still able to keep up with their studies even though they have no face-to-face contact with a teacher.


These seem like that could be a useful tool if used correctly. I know for one of my student teaching placements my cooperating teacher had a fancy machine for having students from other schools join her during grade 12 Pre-Calculus class. She said at the beginning of the year she had 3 students with her, but by the time I showed up in October, the machine was pushed into a corner of the room, with a stack of chairs in front of it, and a nice layer of dust on top. So obviously this wasn't used properly, but if it was, maybe it wouldn't be sporting the dust on top.