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VARK Example #4
Course Title: Science
in Education Online Masters Degree Program
Physics: Investigating Motion
Available online at: http://scienceonline.terc.edu/demo.html#
Program: Developed in partnership by
TERC and
Commenter: Kathleen
Fox-Williams
VARK: Visual, Aural, Read/Write
and Kinesthetic
This online course was created with Blackboard. Before each course begins, participants receive kits in the mail that include investigation materials. The course description states that they use online video and Powerpoint. That could help students that fit the category of an Aural learner. The demonstration session is rich with pictures and diagrams, and includes a hyperlink to a video and powerpoint presentation, but these did not work in the demo. The homepage states that “Each week involves lots of journaling and reflection.” This is probably accounts for a sizeable part of their student assessment.
The course documents section contains the syllabus, bibliography, resources and other constant type information. This is certainly a different management style than what I have seen in the EDUI courses.
After reading the overview, you can begin the experiment for that week. Supposedly these materials were shipped out ahead of time. This is where the kinesthetic learners can excel.
Another neat thing they do is mail out a course map to students before the semester begins. The map provides a graphic of the Blackboard homepage, and descriptions of what each button can do for them. It also gives the students a color picture of their instructor(s). I think this is an excellent idea for new students. The “map” can help a student feel comfortable with Blackboard right away, and also feel like they have “met” their instructor. This is an excellent idea for the visual learner.
There are many concepts here that I could apply to my own
course. Mailing out lab materials, the
course map and the layout are all appealing.
The first thing that catches my eye is that the documentation for the homepage and the Blackboard pages are all done in maybe an eight point font. I found this difficult to read for any length of time, and my vision is fairly good. Surprisingly this did not bring a Section 508 error.
The “Announcements” page (that contains much of the classroom lecture material) meets Section 508 Bobby approval. The Assignments page that includes “This weeks plan” does not. They did not include alternative text for images, and there is a nasty message about using “structural markup to identify hierarchy and relationship in tables (6 instances)”, though there are no tables on this page. I did not test for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 because I have never seen anything (no matter how simple) pass that.
I looked long and hard for a course in radiation protection or nuclear physics, but this came close to my objective of finding an online course related to science. There are very few courses available in the nuclear field. I found one course that listed an available demo, but alas, there was not.