Serendipity35

A course at the University of Texas at Austin offers 24 "lucky" students a seat in a face-to-face classroom for an introductory psychology course that enrolls 1,500 undergraduates who take the course each semester online. The course’s professors, try to make the classroom entertaining ("like it’s a TV show"), according to an article on chronicle.com. The article is titled "Same Time, Many Locations: Online Education Goes Back to Its Origins" and it is categorized under the old-fashioned heading "Distance Education."

To many of us, this move to large-scale, real-time distance education for introductory courses is a throwback to the pre-broadband era of the mid-1990s. Then we relied on synchronous offerings in distance learning (that was often the name of the department that organized the offerings) because the technology didn’t allow us to do much more. ITV, instructional television, was another term we used and many campuses had ITV rooms dedicated to hosting a F2F class that was sent out to other locations.

In my early days at NJIT, we sent classes to area high schools as dual enrollment and many schools that had several campus locations, especially community colleges, used it to offer low enrollment courses on one campus to other campuses to keep the numbers up - and the cost of faculty down.

UT Austin has been doing this flashback since 2012 and sounds committed to synchronous online courses. It seems strange since the appeal of online learning is very often its asynchronous nature. In synchronous courses, students must watch remotely at a set time. Many of those early courses were videotaped at he end of the 20th century and then repackaged as asynchronous courses.

As the article states: "Most of the excitement, support, and growth in distance education has come as a result of advances in courses that students can watch at their own pace: asynchronous online education."