This series of courses provides best practices for online instruction, student engagement and virtual community building; effective uses of asynchronous and synchronous technologies, social media and other emerging technologies; and data analysis techniques and student performance measurements to individualize instruction in an online or blended environment. The courses in this Specialization may be taken in any order. Each course can be taken independently. The Specialization concludes with a final project that will give you the opportunity to integrate and apply the skills you have gained throughout the courses.
Very basic and quite out of date with some silly content, like who founded Phoenix University. Also, it is a good example of un-engaging online teaching. Still, there was some useful information.
Quite well designed. A lot of information to use when designing virtual classrooms. Discussion forums were missing. So couldn't learn from fellow participants.
It is really an interesting course for understanding the students and their handling techniques
Excellent Course. It provides in depth knowledge to the instructor. The course explains each concept clearly
This is a great course for educator's aiming to broaden their knowledge and skills in the realm of virtual teaching!
Alhamdulillah dengan belajar dasar dasar kelas virtual saya menjadi mengerti tentang ruang lingkup kelas virtual. Terimakasih atas bimbingannya
Unlike the previous course in the Virtual Teacher Specialization, this course was pretty well organized, the instructor was articulate and well-versed in the subject she is teaching.
Content justified the title of the course and the excellent job done by the Authors. Thanks
This course allowed me to rethink on online evaluation. But the course could have incorporated some online evaluation technologies. Over all, it was impressive.
This is a great form to put on practice our learnings
Interesting course, and has given a lot of information about various options available for tutors and how can education practices be built further.
It gives me insights about the emerging trends that we may use in teaching. It also give me the list of possible OER and MOOCs that I can visit to get instructional materials to aide me in teaching.
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It is ironic that a course about virtual instruction is one of the worst online courses I have taken. The content was good, if a little outdated (hence the two stars vs only one), but the course design and delivery were lacking.
The videos were excruciating for visual learners (or really any non-auditory learners). The video for Week 2, Lesson 2, for example, had a single static image on the screen for eleven minutes. Words were added to the image during that time, but all in all there were 26 words of text on the slide. Really?!? ELEVEN MINUTES. 26 WORDS. Give me a transcript or make it an audio file. Don't keep me chained to my laptop watching a static image for ELEVEN MINUTES!
The instructor droned and was clearly reading from a script. She did not even use the video to highlight key terms or spotlight key references. Whenever she mentioned a reference I wanted to look at, I had to either hope it was on the course reference page (many of them weren't there) or try to figure out how to spell the author's name based on her pronunciation of it. It was just really, really hard to get through.
The tests were also poorly designed. What states do x y or z. Who cares? I don't live in those states. Which online school has this policy? Again who cares? Maybe a question about why states/schools have different approaches or how outcomes differ between states/schools, but memorizing a laundry list of which state or school has which policies and practices is useless and did not advance the learning objectives in any way.
A paradox that a course about virtual instruction is the worst course I've done on Coursera. I am on a verge of quitting it. 1. Despite lots of good information, there is no effort to present it in an interesting and engaging way. 2. Virtual educators say that the students should interact with the platform every 3-4 minutes and yet they give you 15 min video to listen to and look at the same picture. 3. No forums available but the notice about forums interrupts all the videos.
Although the content is good, the course itself does not reflect in any way what a good asynchronous course should be. Where is the discussion board? How can one communicate with the instructor or with other classmates? Although peer review of an assignment is one aspect of asynchronous and synchronous education, said assignment should also be reviewed by an instructor, especially when said instruction carries so much weight. In addition, I think overall the tests are unfair. I was marked wrong twice for a question that asked my opinion! Also, in the "check all that apply" questions, if one misses one of the answers, the whole question is marked wrong. Finally, many of the test questions themselves are irrelevant to the content of the course. One last thing- the course says it's a five week program, but there are only 4 weeks. Something needs to be adjusted.
I'm learning this from Canada. It would be nice if some of the content was more general and not so US-specific.
Also, I found the testing methods frustrating. It required very specific details that weren't necessary for understanding the material.
Some of the quiz questions do not measure what I know, especially when the question is a "choose all that apply" question. Sometimes I know I got some of the options and maybe missed one, but the question marks it completely wrong. Those types of questions are difficult to answer. They shouldn't be used or should be adapted to a different weight in the grading system.
Some materials are useful but the teacher has no idea of teaching techniques and good presentation. Very bad choice for the University of Irvin, California to entrust such an interesting course to such an incompetent and feeble instructor. She is reading in a monotonous way and nothing more. Her presentations have no meaning. She does not appear in the video lectures. She can not introduce animated elements. The materials she selected are sometimes and only somehow relevant. The most of the materials have only percentages, and small details on history. A course of poor quality.
out of date, and REALLY boring...
This Foundation of Virtual Instruction online course provide me the flexibility to learned on my own schedule. I learned a lot from this Foundation of Virtual Instruction course.
I would have given this course NO stars at all if that option were available!!!
The course is designed in contradiction of all the principles it preaches--there are no forums for the students, there is no way you could contact the instructor, the instructor keeps reading badly, stammering like a first-grader, speaks monotonously and there's no interaction whatsoever!
Furthermore, there are mistakes in the quizzes and you have to choose blatantly wrong options if you want to get the 100% score!
Although the subject matter about Virtual Instruction is pretty interesting and the instructor made it sound like the most boring thing in the world!
Many of the links are outdated or not working at all and often the documents she refers to are 10 or more years old. Bear in mind that Virtual Instruction is a fast developing field and the technology as well as the legal framework are changing very fast too.
In a nutshell, if this course were not a part of a Specialization track, I would not have paid for it.
Unless you want to do the specialization, I wouldn't recommend this course or any by the UC Irvine because all of the lack forums and no channels for communication with the instructors!!!
In one word BAD!
From all that I could gather, this course has not been updated since 2014. It is currently 2020. The world of Virtual Instruction is changing daily. This year more than any other, I would venture to say that there are teachers looking for information in Virtual Instruction due to COVID19. I was very disappointed. There was not a single link that I clicked on throughout this class that was still accessible. This would be a perfect opportunity for teachers across the world to spend time in discussion boards hashing out what it is that we are supposed to be doing to help our students grow. This course has been a waste of my time and the money of my school system. I can only hope that the material and its presentation becomes more relevant as the program continues.
The course Foundations of Virtual Instruction is very significant and basic course for me, and I am glad to complete this assignment successfully.
This helped me see where the lines are. I used to get things all muddled. I still do a little. I am excited at how much I'm learning.
The videos talk about forums but there is no forum. It leaves the impression that the course was designed and then abandoned.
I found much of the content to be interesting and timely. However, I thought the quizzes were poorly written. There was no feedback, so as a learner it was hard to grow from errors. Also, there were many that required more than one answer, if you missed one, you missed entire question. Without feedback, it was difficult to know which one you missed. The week 4 lesson content was a bit dense for an introductory course. It was dry and could've been more global. Last, the large lesson assignment was only graded by peers with no feedback from the instructor.
This course is the best resource of virtual education knowledge, which was very well managed by Cindy Carbajal by providing material in her presentations and important interviews.
Great learning experience , though its just a beginning to pave the path towards a an unlimited science and art of teaching online...yet found very interesting.
there is one challenging assignment at the end of week 3 which required application of knowledge gathered so far in the course. However, there should be scope for more such assignments and inclusion of 'Student Forum' or a 'Discussion Board' within the course for the learners to interact with the instructor and the other co-learners taking course simultaneously with me. I have experienced the usefulness of such a Discussion forum available in the other course offered by Coursera.
The course provides a good basis for understanding online instruction. The videos were informative, though I recommend reading the lecture transcripts first then watching the videos as the video slides were basic and didn't really add to the lecture's organization.
Good explanations of material, instructor and instructions are easy to understand. A lot of focus on state/gov't regulations that could be more condensed.
Quiz questions were bit confusing. I would appreciate if we could have got the answers of all those wrong answers question....
I'm surprised how this course got 4+ rating while I had to go for 1 rating....the entire lectures were so boring and the instructor always used to speak behind the scene..no connection with presentation. Among as many course I've attended, this one was the frustrating and I regret taking this course.
The following reasons why I didn't like this course:
The questions in intermediate quizzes lacked relevance with the lectures.
The end quiz contained 40 questions! and many were with multiple correct answers, if you missed or tick one extra answer you lose entire one mark. I mean "what on earth is this". Simply waste of time trying to attempt again and again just to pass...I was annoyed, tired, losing patience...pathetic organization of quiz.
There were not a single questions from the interview. Most questions are so irrelevant that I had to search line by line to find an answer for a single question. Again waste of time.
The instructor did not even show her face at all, as if who is she speaking to?. A perfect example of contradictory lesson.
Now a days Blended Learning is becoming popular, but nowhere she spoke about it apart from just one minute introduction. But in the quiz there is a question which was not even there in the video.
Complete waste of time. I'm really dissatisfied. Sorry.