Preserving the Seminar Experience

ABSTRACT

This article presents a new approach to online graduate education. With hopes of recruiting a larger cohort in order to preserve a graduate program struggling with low enrollment, we began offering a limited number of seats to students who would attend class in real time but from remote locations, using a videoconferencing platform. Unlike traditional asynchronous course delivery, we believed that videoconferencing would allow distance learners, with very little intervention, to enter into the give-and-take of classroom discussion and to receive instructor and student feedback in real time. We present some preliminary reflections on our initial experiences with this mode of course delivery and review the data collected from a survey distributed to students enrolled in these courses. We argue that these findings suggest this model serves as an effective hybrid option for distance learners that may help to preserve the traditional graduate seminar for programs across a variety of disciplines.

KEYWORDS:

• Graduate education
• distance learning
• seminar
• instructional technology
• synchronous course delivery

Notes

One of the most difficult arguments for funding entities to accept was that this idea was in fact innovative. Grant reviewers challenged that this proposal merely combined two traditional delivery platforms and thus lacked true technological innovation. The department argued that marked enrollment growth requires innovative curricular strategies to facilitate student access to quality programs. The experiment was highly innovative in two distinct respects. First, it took a successful model developed in the hard sciences and modified it to meet the pedagogical needs of highly interactive disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Secondly, it provided graduate students with a hybrid option for course delivery to meet their specific educational needs. While this approach might not seem innovative to faculty in other colleges, it is incredibly innovative for faculty in the liberal arts.

No online students registered for POS 6006: The Study of Politics in Spring 2014, so this course has yet to be modified.

The university’s Information Technology Services Department, for example, currently includes two staff members who specialize in videoconferencing support. The University Academic Technology Center also provides support to faculty who use Elluminate to offer blended course delivery.

These courses were CPO 5990: Democracies, POT 5207: American Political Thought, and INR 5992: US-Asia Relations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Ramsey

David Ramsey is Assistant Professor of Government and Pre-Law Advisor at the University of West Florida. His teaching and research interests include constitutional law, political philosophy, and American political thought. He received his PhD in Political Science from Baylor University in 2010.

Jocelyn Evans

Jocelyn Evans is Professor of Government and Associate Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of West Florida. Her teaching and research interests include American politics, Congress, women and politics, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Meyer Levy

Meyer Levy is MA candidate in Political Science at the University of West Florida, and will enter the Political Science PhD program at the University of Notre Dame in Fall 2015 where he plans to focus on the study of American politics and religion and politics.