One of the best ways to kill an online course is to try to replicate a lecture-based f2f course. Imagine the students in that online class - in isolation, watching online lectures and taking notes, writing papers and exams. No interaction, no collaboration, no sharing, no community, no instructor presence - a set of possibilities not explored or realized.
Does that mean that online lectures have no place in e-learning? I think not. While I would never want to have a whole course consisting solely of online lectures, used judiciously, online lectures can be extremely useful. I would broaden what I think of as a lecture to include the more general category of presentations given by experts in their particular field, who are excellent, engaging speakers, talking about topics directly related to the course material.
Hearing and watching someone speak about a topic can bring it to life - witness the many TED.com presentations that do a wonderful job of describing, evaluating, and synthesizing material. Some examples that I have included in my psychology courses are Phil Zimbardo's talk on the potential of ordinary people to commit evil acts, or Martin Seligman's presentation about the potential of positive psychology. A 20-minute presentation (plus a complete transcript) by an accomplished speaker who is an expert in his/her field can open up a world of possibilities to students.
A couple of good sources for online university lectures are Academic Earth and Lecture Fox - both of these offer lectures or entire courses from a number of top universities such as Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, UBC, Oxford, MIT and so on. You could easily incorporate snippets or pieces of lectures - most include transcripts as well.
I use online lecture/presentations as the starting point for online discussion. For example, when we cover social psychology, students read in our course textbook about Phil Zimbardo's famous 1971 Stanford prison experiment - a prison simulation using undergraduate subjects who played the roles of guards and prisoners. They then watch Zimbardo's recent TED presentation in which he shows how conformity to group norms and institutionalized expectations can create situations that encourage behaviours such as the prisoner abuse that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison by US soldiers. This provides the basis for an online discussion in which small groups of students apply what they have learned to analyzing the psychological basis for conformity and its consequences in other historical instances, and the situational and personal factors that promote nonconformity.
Used wisely, online presentations are a winning combination of technology in the service of pedagogical goals. What are your success stories?
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