On-Line Graduate Physics Teaching Courses, Are They Right for You?Having lived in three different states over the past three years has made it difficult to do alot of things. Finishing my master’s degree was one of them. I found myself looking for alternative means of getting course credits to finish my master’s degree and came up with a goodsolution. The University of Virginia On-Line offers a series of courses targeted at Physics Teachers. There are many courses that are offered on-line from UVa and you can even get a degree by spending one summer at UVa and taking the rest of the classes on-line. From more information check out the following web address: http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/Education/Outreach/MAPE/In Fall 2005 I was able to take “How Things Work I” from UVa’s on-line repertoire. “This course is a practical introduction to physics and science in everyday life. The course considers objects from our daily environment (baseballs, frisbees, roller coasters, vacuum cleaners, rockets, clocks and much more!) and focuses on their principles of operation, histories, and relationships to one another. This course emphasizes motion, mechanics, liquids, heat, gases,and sound. The demonstrator and lecturer is Professor Lou Bloomfield, who has originated and developed the courses How Things Work I and II at UVa.”13A simple google search led me straight to the websight were I could pick out the course that I wanted to take. It should be noted here that not all colleges will expect transfer credit fromUVa, it is important to get prior approval if you wish to take this class for credit. I decided on UVa’s How Things Work I because I wanted a course that I could use in my classroom and I am currently teaching General Physics. The more hands on/practical application demos I can give these students, the better.Registering for the class was simple. Once I found the UVa’s webpage I was able to browse the courses that they offered and after reading the description, I picked the course I wanted to register for. There were links on the main web page that connected me to each course’s web page, and from there it was easy to find registration instructions.The course was a bit pricey for out of state students. My 3 credit hour course ended up costing me $937 plus the cost of a book. For this price I received access to the webpage and web assign, the program used to turn in and grade all assignments and tests. I also received 10 discs that were copied lectures of Professor Louis Bloomfield’s introductory Physics course for non-majors. My CD’s arrived promptly in the mail and I was able to begin watching the CD’s with plenty of time before the course started. Some students were not so lucky and received their CD’s late. I am assuming that they registered late for the course. They had to use only the textbook for the first few homework assignments. At first I was leery of taking an on-line course. I’m literate with computer’s but that’s about it. If I have to install something I usually call re-enforcements, but I found the instructionsfor operating this course to be fairly straight forward, only providing a few glitches along the way.The following requirements were necessary to take this on-line course. You needed a computer with internet access, an e-mail account, some sort of media player on your computer for the CD’s and the ability to read and follow directions. Not only are instructions to get to everything else you need for the course available on the course web page, the instructor made sure that he e-mailed separate, more detailed log on instructions to each student. The only program that I needed to download was the Horizon Wimba Chat Room. This program allows you to have a conversation with your fellow classmates and teacher on a weekly basis. I hadsome difficulty getting this program to load properly and one week the system was down and no one could log on. This was the biggest head ache I had as far as technology goes. The Horizon Wimba Chat room was not required for the course, but it was nice to get to have some verbal conversations with classmates and the professor. In order to be able to properly use this technology you needed speakers and a microphone for you computer. The chat rooms were poorly attended with at most 7 people showing up out of ******. This lead to much frustration on the part of the teacher. At one point I was the only student in attendence. The chatrooms were held on Wednesday’s Nights at 8pm. The material was challenging for students who did not have a Physics background, and relatively simple for those students who did have a Physics background. I was able to do the first assignment without reading the book or watching the videos. (I did this anyway) However the later topics of Fluid Mechanics and Heat I have had relatively little experience in, and I foundthat I learned a great deal conceptually from these classes.The classes on the CD’s were at a very elementary level, in fact I found them to be rather boring, so I ended up doing other things like laundry, dishes, grading papers, etc. while I watchedthe videos. It was nice that I could do such things guilt free, where as bringing your laundry to lecture and folding it would be considered rude, it was perfectly acceptable to my computer. The homework questions were mostly all conceptual based, with a few simple calculations. I found writing up the answers to the conceptual based questions challenging, but not stressful. Have to write all of your answers out required much deeper thought than to explainan idea to someone. I found this helped me solidify the concepts in my head. You weren’t completely alone in trying to answer the questions. The professor was able to help out in the Chat Room every Wednesday, and you could post questions to your fellowstudents and the instructor on blackboard. The good side to this is that you could read and reread the responses that you were given. The down side is that sometimes no one responded to you and it took a day or two get a response. This means that completing your homework at the last minute left you with little to no help on your assignment. Your only hope was that someone more responsible asked the same questions you had.There were on average three hours worth of lectures to watch a week, plus about 50 pages of reading. Since homework was due every other week. I ended up
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