Administration

Getting Started Survey

About four weeks into the course I posted an electronic survey, via Blackboard.  Surveys are similar to quizzes, but the responses are anonymous. This survey, titled "Getting Started," queried the students regarding matters of registration, fees, computer access, and so forth.  The anonymous nature of the survey did not permit separating the students who were on campus from those who were not.  I know four of the students did not come to Fairbanks in association with this course and that none of those had been registered at UAF the preceding semester. Three others resided in the Fairbanks area and might have come to campus, but to my knowledge did not. One of those had been registered the semester before, the other two not. Hence we would expect that 4 of the 15 students would be especially vulnerable to administrative difficulties and 2 or 3 more would be somewhat more vulnerable than the 7 who were on campus and registered for other courses.

The complete survey and response is available, here I have summarized the responses.

Residence. The four non-Fairbanks area responses were 3 Anchorage and 1 Juneau. (I know one of the students' lives in Kenai and works on the North Slope, so I assume she listed Anchorage.)

Of the 11 students who lived in the Fairbanks area, queried if they could have taken this course as a classroom course, one answered, "I could not have taken it because I travel a lot." One answered  "I could not have take it because of other scheduling problems or commitments." Two answered, "I might have taken in the evening." and seven answered, " I would have taken it in the evening."

ECMT/Blackboard.  2 of the students had taken some courses that were partly on-line.  8 of the 15 had used Blackboard or other ECMT for other courses, but 9 answered the question that assumed they had not used Blackboard before. 

Regarding Blackboard features:

In order for the instructor to enter students into the Blackboard system, the instructor needs the Email address of each student.  Also, this needs to be an UAF "Aurora" Email address.  This requires each student to contact the UAF Computing and Communications (C&C) to get an account.  For on-campus students who are registered for any course, getting the account is just a matter of filling out a form and turning it in to C&C and waiting a few days or standing in line briefly and getting the account immediately.  For off-campus students there are several roadblocks.  First, the C&C staff are not accustomed to handle the paperwork by Fax.  A Fax or mail was required, because a disclaimer signature was required on the account application form.  A second roadblock was that some of the off-campus students were registering for the course simultaneous with applying for the account, hence when the C&C staff queried the Banner (UAF global database system) system, the students were not shown as registered.  Both these items were compounded because the C&C staff was overwhelmed at the beginning of the semester and Banner access is limited to a few key staff.  The below represents the 8 students who did not have an Aurora account at the beginning of the semester.

Several of the students found this process very frustrating and emailed me to that effect.  Perhaps their frustrations were compounded because they could not start certain parts of the course without the Aurora account.

A further complication was that several on-campus students and all the off campus students preferred a commercial Email server other than Aurora.  They would not log onto Aurora unless they expected a course Email.  Aurora does have a method of referring Emails to the student's off-campus Email account, and students who tried this reported it worked without problems.

Registration

The telephone registration system worked smoothly and there were no adverse comments.  In order to register by telephone, an "Intent to Register" form needs to be signed and mailed or faxed to the Registrar's office.  The form can be downloaded from the web. There were no adverse comments about this process.

Fee Payment

There were two issues with fee payment.  One, there was some miscommunications about waiving the fees for off-campus students.  I had sorted this out by phone with the business office.  Originally all fees were to be waived and I told some student this.  Later a $15 technology fee was required.  Not all the business office people were aware of this and some confusion resulted.  The second problem is that in the normal course of events at other schools and almost all vendors of any type, after the student registers, if they do not pay immediately, some sort of bill is generated.  At UAF, the registration and fee payment are uncoupled, such that a student can register and not be billed or informed they what fees they must pay and how to pay them.  There is a brief note to this effect in the registration materials, but given the unusual nature of this transaction, the note is neither prominent nor explicit.  I warned all the students of this in the course announcements, but two students missed this and were dis-enrolled or charged extra fees.

Hardware/Software issues

The course syllabus and information told the students they would need Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), Word, and Excel for this course.  One student report buying some of this software, the others had it available.

The "other" response may have been on-campus students who use the computer labs.

UAF Library via electronic means

The course paper requires the students to use some primary literature and instruction material in the course encouraged the students to access this literature via electronic means.  Other electronic resources were available, via the library, such as database searches of the primary literature and news clippings, which were used for discussions.  For many of these resources, UAF has a site license, and the library's computer is set up to grant access to any computer that has a UAF IP address.  For computers off-campus, the procedures required varied with the database or service the user wanted.  This could simplified somewhat, if the off-campus user connected via a modem to a UA telephone number in Anchorage, Juneau, or locations with a remote UAF campus.  After connection the library's computer believes it is communicating with a UAF IP address.  However this process itself takes some time and is a long distance telephone call for students outside of Anchorage or the cities that have this connection.

I'll comment further on the library services below, but I presume the "Astonishing!" comment was favorable.

Student Estimate of Time Required

Here is a summary of the students' estimate of non-learning time required:

Next I tried to determine how many hours the students were spending on the course:

A similar survey is part of the IAS discussed below.  By using the midpoints and assuming that the "more than 5 hr" responses spent 6 hours, it appears that average student time per module for 2, 3, and 4 was approximately 4 hours.

TOC Course Evaluation