Facilitating Successful Online Computing Courses While Minimising Extra Tutor Workload

A key problem in facilitating a successful online course is the highly time -consuming nature of the administrative and pedagogical tasks involved. It is also difficult to achieve a community of learners online, since the lecturer has to overcome the natural reticence of students to post in shared class spaces. In computing courses an additional factor is the tendency of some students to work to deadlines rather than allocating a weekly time for study. This paper suggests constructive methods of ensuring the success of online computing courses. These include repeating course content in a variety of integrated media, scheduling or automation of course content, encouraging weekly student participation and encouraging students to become active members and contribute to the class. We report results (from 1999-2003) from three undergraduate and two postgraduate computing courses that each have a significant proportion of the course taught online using the Learning Management Environments (LMEs), WebCT and Blackboard CourseInfo. These courses are studied by students with a wide range of ages, ethnic backgrounds, life and work experiences. We report widely ranging student participation rates in a variety of online discussions and course exercises and discuss the contributing factors. To save our valuable time we need strategies to utilise the automation available to us in the LMEs and to recognise limitations of the LMEs and opportunities for new strategies.