According to the readings this week, I learned much about how the courses are classified. I’ve noticed an advantage of online teaching compare with the offline one, which is timing. The online learning makes asynchronous courses become possible. Students who are not good at quick thinking in class have enough time to think and respond. One disadvantage of asynchronous course is, if the course is cnetralized at the same time, students have absolutely no chance to interact with each other. That is a bad learning environment for students who prefer to learn in discussion. But online learning do not need to be fully asynchronous. For example, most of the courses in Uvic shift to online courses after COVID. Professors record their lecture and post them on brightspace, students in different time zone can watch the record anytime. But the live courses are still available for students prefer instant respond from professor and their classmates. One example is my physics course this year. The course is designed to be asynchronous, professor record all of the teaching videos before the course starts, but we still have tutorial class twice a week. Students who cannot understand the concepts individually can discuss it with their professor and classmates at a certain time.
I think it is also a good way to find the key point of a course through its course structure. This can be useful for the learning in university. For example, if a course is centralized, then most of the information you need can be found in the materials applied. If a course is decenralized, you may get the key point in discussion. This method helps people to know where they need to focus on at the beginning of the course, so they don’t need to struggle on finding the core knowledge of that course.
I also have a question about the second reading: If technology enhanced learning can be classified as a part of E-learning, is that means all of the courses using computer to demonstrate their concepts (e.g. powerpoint) can be classified as E-learning?