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The Internet Is Not a Classroom: Online Education and the Challenges of Socialization - The Key: Creativity and Flexibility PDF-NOTE: Internet Explorer Users, right click the PDF Icon and choose [save target as] if you are experiencing problems with clicking. Print

The greatest challenge that we faced in shifting from a lecture to an online format for “Introduction to Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Religion” was establishing social parameters in an online space effectively and quickly. Despite this challenge, we found that a small number of our students thrived in the online course environment. These students took the assignments seriously and crafted thoughtful responses. In particular, we noticed that students who did not have access to campus for reasons such as health, work obligations, or international travel were grateful for the intellectual engagement and exceeded our expectations. With this in mind, we see online courses as an important opportunity to expand education beyond traditional campus borders.

These students were a minority in our courses, however. Overall we were struck by the problems that emerged from a lack of classroom socialization, like proselytizing and plagiarism, and frustrated by our limited ability to adjust the course to respond to these problems. Given the incidences of proselytizing, we would encourage online religious studies courses to include content on appropriate ways to talk about religion. We recommend an assignment that asks students to put this into practice, perhaps through an online quiz asking students to identify scholarly and nonscholarly statements. To address the problem of plagiarism, we suggest an assignment that would require students to evaluate each other on proper citation practice and to check for possible plagiarism. This could be done early in the semester using students’ online posts. In order for this to work well, students would need to be provided with a checklist of tasks including Googling key phrases and checking for proper citation format.

Online pedagogy is a rapidly expanding field, and we are confident that teachers are developing creative ways to respond to just the sort of problems we experienced, but the model of online education that we experienced disincentivized seeking out these pedagogical tools. While we understand the financial reasoning behind these policies, we can't help but wonder about the priorities: Are the students being adequately served? Are graduate students given the opportunity to develop into the kind of professors that an institution like the University of North Carolina would hire? We argue that these questions need to be taken seriously by institutions providing online courses. Even though the field of philosophy of religion, for example, changes very slowly, online instruction requires innovation and flexibility. We encourage institutions to incentivize online courses to evolve with the pace of changing technology and pedagogy.



 

This website contains archived issues of Religious Studies News published online from March 2010 to May 2013, and PDF versions of print editions published from Winter 2001 to October 2009.

This site also contains archived issues of Spotlight on Teaching (May 1999 to May 2013) and Spotlight on Theological Education (March 2007 to March 2013).

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