Meghan Louttit is a Senior at Ohio University majoring in Journalism. Meghan is also one of our student employees at Ohio University Without Boundaries. I asked Meghan to prepare a page or so on her experience with online learning. Meghan had taken a couple of undergraduate Blackboard-based courses. My goal was to see through the constant discussions of technology, marketing and everything else we as educators fill our time talking about and to get right at the student's honest perceptions and experience. There are many things that can be taken from her experience. I will clam up and let you be the judge of how Meghan could have been better served. --- Christopher

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ONLINE LEARNING
By Meghan Louttit

Two years ago I watched the 1959 movie Ben Hur from the comfort of my dorm room loveseat. In every way I should have really enjoyed this movie – Charlton Heston and religious overtones. Instead my friend and I sat there watching with our heads wilting, every half hour getting up and raiding the mini-fridge. By the time it was over I couldn’t tell you anything new about the film. I don’t remember one significant scene, even though I can still quote lines from The Ten Commandments, which I haven’t watched in about 10 years.

This is all there is to say about my first online class. Other than the fact that we got to watch When Harry Met Sally one week (the class was about American Cinema), I can’t recall much of anything I was taught that quarter. This is not meant to be an insult to the professor, who did all he could to encourage discussion – we had to answer discussion questions, make posts on blackboard (our own, and ones responding to others) and watch videos of his lectures.

Like any other class, online classes really come down to what you want to get out of them, and more than any other class, you only get out of it what you put in. Not to say that part of the reason I didn’t get as much out of it as I could have isn’t at least in part, my fault. I could have paid more attention and I could have put more effort into my posts.

However, the core value of most classes is the discussion. If I had put that same amount of work into a class that I actually had to go to, I would have inherently gotten more out of it simply from watching the movies with my classmates, talking about them and hearing others’ opinions and thoughts, in addition to the professor. There’s something about how one comes off in a forum post that doesn’t quite translate into actual conversation.

The class turned me away from online courses. It wasn’t that the professor was bad or that the work was too much. But no matter how much work I put into it, I couldn’t see myself really getting out of the class what I wanted to. I had no motive to pay attention already understanding that I wasn’t going to get what I was looking for, or what would have made taking it in the first place worthwhile.

The thing about learning is that the most important part of it is not just facts, dates and figures, but the time in the classroom that you spend interacting with the professor and other students.

Yet, here I am again, a senior, taking another online class for my Tier III requirement. I thought about the decision carefully – did I want to put myself in that situation again? Ultimately my answer was yes, mostly because while I would like to learn something from this class, and while I understand I could learn more from being in the same room as my classmates, I am honestly just looking to fulfill a requirement. The best thing about this course is that it has been tailored appropriately, there is no false discussion and it is research-based, which makes it much more likely that I will learn something valuable, as long as I complete my assignments.

In the end it comes down to what a student wants to get out of a class, but my experience has shown that taking an online class automatically puts a handicap on just how much one can learn in the big picture.