As URI welcomes students to campus this semester, online courses seem to be here to stay. PHOTO CREDIT: Contributed by politico.com
While a majority of courses at the University of Rhode Island have returned to in-person instruction this semester, some courses have remained online and will most likely continue to be so.
For Vince Petronio, an associate professor of communication studies, online courses are nothing new. Describing himself as a pioneer in the field, Petronio has been teaching online courses since the 1990s.
According to him, the pandemic helped to improve the resources available for online classes. Today, professors can use streaming services, online learning management systems such as Brightspace and many other services to aid online learning, none of which were available to professors when he began.
He said the success of online classes heavily depends upon how prepared the professor is to teach an online course.
“Initially it comes down to faculty being prepared, [and] being willing to rethink what they teach and how they’re teaching,” Petronio said.
He believes that online courses tend to break down when faculty do not interact with their students directly. Posting lectures and class notes without having contact with students is not enough to create a good online class, according to Petronio.
He noted that professors must also retool their courses to work online, which can be a lot of work. He said that it is necessary to do this if professors want their classes to have the same impact though.
While some professors may think they will have to update their courses every year, Petronio said that they only have to retool a course once to set a blueprint for future online sections.
“I think that’s what some faculty are afraid of,” Petronio said in reference to restructuring for online courses. “They think, ‘Oh my god I’m going to have to do all this work,’ and that’s really not the case if you use the learning management system effectively.”
With technology advancements and adaptations made during the pandemic, Petronio did find that teaching online was made easier during the pandemic.
Computer science Professor Vic Fay-Wolfe, who has also taught online for more than twenty years, has seen some of the benefits that online courses offer.
“We found that significantly more students came to help hours when the course was online than when they had to walk to a building on campus for help — so we will keep online help hours even after the pandemic,” Fay-Wolfe said.
However, like Petronio, he said that while things have been smooth over the past 18 months of online courses, students are eager to return to in-person courses.
Petronio said that one of the complaints he has heard from students in online classes most often is that they feel they are not given the opportunity to meet their professors and classmates in the same way that they can in person.
“Group work is important; having students talk to each other online is important,” Petronio said. “The idea of an asynchronous online class needs prompts for students talking to each other rather than feeling like they are on an island all by themselves.”
Fay-Wolfe agreed with this sentiment but pointed out that being online can make it hard for some students to collaborate on projects. But overall, he felt that many of his students were able to adapt and do well, despite the challenges.
“I sense that students are more accepting and accustomed to more of their education being online than they were pre-pandemic,” he said.