Elements of Quality Online Education cation

The Real-Time Case Method: The Internet Creates the Potential for New PedagogyThe student participants included 63 undergraduate students, 12 on-campus MBA students, and 34 offcampusgraduate students, most of whom were taught exclusively online.Table 1Student Count at Participating SchoolsUndergradMBASchool On-campus On-campus OnlineUMass 43 12 13WPI 11 - -FAU 9 - -UNB - - 21VI. METHODA. Educational ObjectivesThe case developers created this new type of case study to accomplish several objectives in theclassroom. First, the developers wanted to bring students to a new level of energy, engagement, andparticipation. By doing so, they hoped to create a course that was more appealing than courses to whichstudents were accustomed. Second, with RTC’s in-depth, multimedia coverage of the case company, thedevelopers hoped to teach students lessons that were difficult to teach using conventional methods. Inparticular, the aims were to instill in students a greater appreciation for the complexity of businessdecision making, to portray a more realistic view of business, to take a more interdisciplinary view ofproblem-solving, and to teach all these lessons in a way that is more memorable than the conventionalcase method is.To determine whether the educational objectives were met, a number of data sources were analyzed.These sources included the following: (1) a student evaluation survey located on the case website, (2)standard course evaluation forms at each university, (3) a focus group interview with the on-campusMBA group at UMass, and (4) phone interviews with UMass online MBA students. Unfortunately, apresentation of findings from the in-depth interviews is beyond the scope of this publication.The developers plan to conduct more systematic inquiry using experimental design to evaluate the effectof future efforts to use a real-time case. Our main objective in the initial study was to assess whether thebenefit to students justified the cost and effort of producing the case.1. Data CollectionBefore presenting the results, it is necessary to explain a few important details about these data. Althoughstandard course evaluation forms were completed at each university, only data from those evaluationstaken at UMass were available. These data provided important insights into how the experience ofstudents who used the real-time case compared with the previous experience of students taking the samecourse with the same instructor but using the traditional case method. Data from the web-based evaluationsurvey was the primary means for understanding students’ experiences of RTCM across all sites.36