What do we know about students?
photo by Robert Scales courtesy Flickr.
We know (or think we know) the following things about students in DE&T delivered courses at UBC:
• More than two-thirds are women
• Average age is 33
• 77% are also taking courses on campus
• 23% are studying purely by distance
We also know, via student report, that:
• most of our students think their instructors are accessible
• instructor expertise and feedback is highly valued by students
• about 30-40% of surveyed students felt that instructor feedback on assignments could be more helpful.
From anecdotal evidence, we also know that many of our learners are not as technologically savvy as some reports would have us believe. The age of many of our students mean that they are not part of the NetGen. However, NetGen or not, students do not see the inclusion of technology as a replacement for good instruction. In a recent Educause report, authors Oblinger and Hawkins encourage us to do better to understand students IT preferences and to be aware that technological saavy does not equate with a preference for the impersonal. Quite the opposite.
Students apparently want access to their instructors and their peers both inside and outside formal learning environments. We see evidence of this in the use of online discussion boards and chat tools within online courses and the explosion of interest in social networking tools like LiveJournal and TrekConnect .
For more about establishing and maintaining a teaching presence in a distance course, see the OLT website: Instructor’s Guide: Establishing Instructor Presence