Defining Online Composition Courses

Interestingly, an increase in the amount of technology used in a course does not necessarily mean an instructor has more flexibility in teaching a course. Although instructors of completely online courses often have the flexibility of teaching where and sometimes when they prefer, the content and environment of the course are often firm and unchangeable. For example, the more funding, administration, programming, video production, graphic design, and structured curriculum go into creating a course, the harder it is to change that course’s content. Therefore, the instructor’s and students’ flexibility to change or adapt the course to their own needs is, ironically, often more rigid in a fully online course. This tendency for online content to become fixed and inflexible, especially for large-scale courses, is yet another reason that evaluation must be incorporated into the design of an online course. In fact, I submit that the more fixed a course’s content and environment become (whether the course is traditional or online), the more evaluation becomes absolutely necessary because the instructor and students become increasingly restricted in their ability to adapt the course to their needs.

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