Preserving the Seminar Experience

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis 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.