And So It Goes

For the online Intro to eLife class, only 14 more hours remain. The face-to-face class takes their final in just 5. The quarter winds down!

I can tell from the length and quality of the course work that many students devoted a lot of time to doing well in this class. As for me, as the perpetrator of the online version of the course, I can't even begin to tell you how much effort went into creating each week's lectures. I can tell you the number of hours, though.

The short lectures generally only took a couple of hours to research and maybe a half hour to record (both the video intro and the audio). Add another couple hours for collection of graphics. If any videos were included, add another hour or two (after I found them). And then add about two hours to edit everything together in Final Cut and, lastly, about two more hours to convert the edited video to a format that I could upload to Angel.

You do the math.

For the weeks when the lectures approached an hour, I was quite literally spending 60-70 hours just on the lecture for this course.

Of course, one of the advantages of being so immersed in the material is that I was able to deliver a non-stop ad-lib lecture in the face-to-face class. I always was an off-the-top-of-my-head speaker... don't you just hate teachers who read their notes or work right out of a textbook? But for this class I could mix "sage on the stage" with whatever interaction the class had.. and investigate whatever seemed to be interesting. Often I could take the week's content off in wild and crazy directions and, to the amazement of all—including me, bring it all right back to the topic at hand.

The time I spent on the online class (which included reading papers, preparing guided notes, and developing other paper content) all came out of my personal life. I only saw my wife during dinner (or as we both headed out the door in the morning), and there were days when I got only a couple of hours of sleep. No wonder I'd collapse on the weekend.

But the excitement of putting together the material and then being able to explore the Web interactively in the classroom was a terrific thrill. The only thing that could top that was reading the dialog on this blog and watching the wiki grow. I am d*mn impressed with the caliber of the students who came along on this journey.

One regret was the number of students who signed up for the course who couldn't find the time or put in the effort to even watch the lectures, let alone interact. Not everyone has the dedication to the self-study effort that online education requires. For those who made it this far (only about half of the original enrollment), I applaud you.

I'm already starting to upload the content for next quarter's online class: digital photography. We'll be experimenting with different kinds of lecture techniques and I plan on adding a synchronous (i.e., live) component for those who can participate. Yep, more Web 2.0 tools. Goody!

I plan on keeping this blog open, too, and see what else we can learn about education online. As Joseph Campbell might have described it, this was truly a "Hero's Journey." Only it's been you, the students, who have made the journey and who are my heroes. Well done!