Excerpt: When HarvardX launches in less than two weeks, it will explore the advantages of online education with students around the world. However, the College is already experimenting with online education for undergraduates on-campus. Professor Ali S. Asani ’77, chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is teaching a General Education course this semester called Culture and Belief 19: “Understanding Islam and Contemporary Muslim Societies”; Asani has taught this course in four previous iterations, but this time, he has added online-only sections that change the dynamic of discussions.
“If you look at the profile of online students, they’re not the typical Harvard student: There are business people in there, there’s a fighter pilot from Afghanistan who works for the US Air Force there, there’s a housewife from Abu Dhabi, two people from South America, somebody from Calgary, somebody from Vancouver. It is a really diverse kind of a group,” says Asani.
This is the first time that a General Education course offered at the College has offered online sections, according to Asani, who feels that this course, because of its focus on international societies, is particularly benefited by online sections. Although Asani felt strongly that these sections would enrich the course, members of the administration were initially hesitant.
“I had to struggle to get approval for this. People were wondering about its impact; there was a great deal of caution about whether the College would appreciate this,” Asani says. Thus far, Asani has been optimistic about online sections and has received positive feedback from teaching fellows who led the first sections of the course in September. Using video conferencing technology, the sections function largely like on-campus sections.
In fact, Asani argues that online sections have certain technical advantages over their in-person counterparts. He gives the example of breaking sections into smaller discussion groups during class: With the click of a button, he can sort students into groups and allow them to discuss in private virtual classrooms, without the shuffling chairs or distracting white noise generated by neighboring groups’ discussion.
via EdX: Harvard’s New Domain | FM | The Harvard Crimson.
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