Last year my institution, McDaniel College, entered into a consortium with nineteen other liberal arts colleges (SLAC) that are members of CIC: the Council of Independent Colleges. Thanks to the Mellon Foundation, CIC was awarded money to fund this project that examined new online models of education and how they might work in a SLAC environment. I was one of the two faculty members from my institution who taught a course fully online. My course was entitled Ways of Seeing Byzantium.
My course was mentioned in a blog post by Bryan Alexander, who is a consultant on the project, helping faculty to find technological tools to support their pedagogical and learning goals for their online classes. You can read his post here. As he says, these are not "MOOCs"; if anything they are the antithesis. I will say this about my online class: I saw deeper engagement in the material because there was more time for students to think about their responses than the immediate and rapid fire expectation that a F2F discussion often requires. Even students who were concurrently enrolled in my F2F classes indicated to me that they liked the online class for different reasons, one of them being longer time to read, consider, and draft their comments.
This coming spring I teach the course again, this time open to students at the other nineteen institutions. I'm looking forward to what those students will add to our discussions.
