Returning to college, I found taking Online Courses to be more convenient and flexible.  This flexibility allowed me to work around my everyday commitments.  I didn’t have the restriction of a set class time and I could get a lot of the work done ahead of deadlines, which allowed me to spend larger blocks of time with my family.

Unfortunately, I have also experienced a negative side of online courses.  In about 50% of the online courses that I have taken, there is little or no feedback from the instructor.

Your syllabus and course documents are posted. You complete your assignments and upload them into Blackboard, or some other website.  Your grade, often much later, magically appears in the “grade book”.  You are left to guess what you did well and what you could improve on or didn’t understand.
Now, I understand that instructors are busy.  I understand that they are often pressed for time when grading assignments.  I also understand that they are getting paid to teach me, and part of teaching is giving feedback on performance.

I look at it this way:  If I do well on an assignment, it only takes a few seconds to jot down something like “well-written, you have a good grasp of the subject matter” in the comment box when grading the assignment.  If I don’t do well on an assignment, I deserve (because I’m paying for it) to understand what I need to do to improve my performance and understanding.

In one of my recent semesters, I had one instructor in an “easy” course that could not even reply to email questions concerning the ambiguity of her course documents and assignments.  I also had one instructor in a “difficult” course that not only replied quickly to email questions, but would send encouraging emails on his own when you did well on an assignment.  You can’t tell me that the first instructor could not have at least given feedback.

Here are my thoughts:  If you have the opportunity to take courses face-to-face with your instructors, do it.  In my experience, instructors are much more engaged with their traditional course students.  If you need the flexibility of online courses, try to get feedback from advisors and other students on which instructors to choose.