Tag Archives: closed environment

Consider these questions as you review the examples below. Try the quiz from the left menu: What Have You Learned? after you’ve spent some time with this section.

UBC offers hundreds of online courses using Web CT Connect.  These may be fully or partially online. Fully online courses are most often offered through distance education programs and are generally considered closed systems since they offer students the protection of only sharing their work with other registered students and the professor.

Depending on your learning preference, online learning can be an ideal way to interact with content, classmates and professors.  View the following video and list of pros and cons to decide if you think interacting and discussing in an online environment is a good option, and if online courses are right for you.

Video produced by: Mark Fullmer, posted by markobooko

Pros and Cons to Online Courses:

	Pro	Con
Convenience	when you want, where you want	requires excellent time management skills
Control	learn at your pace, skip what you know, explore what you want to know	be honest with yourself about what you do and do not know
Connection	dynamic content and interactive feedback from instructor and diverse, widespread peers	no face to face contact and requires regular online participation to benefit from communication
Cost	save money on travel, parking, maybe even food
Commitment	enhance personal growth, commitment and technological skill set

from OnlineCourses.org.

If you are thinking about learning online, check out some of UBC’s resources from the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. And on UBC’s Learning Commons to help you make an informed decision.

• Is Online Learning Right for me?: a short survey.
• 8 Things to Get a Handle On: Online Learner Competencies
• Communicating Online
• UBC Office of Learning Technology. Distance Learning. Student Profiles.

• UBC restricts access to WebCT Connect to paying students registered in particular classes.  Even in a closed system, it is wise to carefully consider what information you want to share before posting or mailing within the course.  Ask yourself whether what you’re writing is something you would choose to share with the group in a classroom setting.
• Proofread! UBC advises students to “watch typos and grammatical mistakes, especially when writing to your instructor, but also pay attention to phrasing and try to anticipate whether something you’ve written could potentially be misconstrued. Without verbal cues, sometimes email messages come across differently than the sender had intended, so be sure to reread before sending your first draft”.
• Be aware that when you publish your work within these systems, content is deleted after a period of time, so it can be difficult to access your work at a later date.  Always save important postings or documents in another place or format just to be sure.