Distance Education Myths

Well, if I may suggest one of Mark's, actually, I thought he had a great assignment in Fall 2008. There were specifics, of course, but essentially students were writing about a California proposition (i.e. one of the ballot measures). I thought this was a good idea for a few reasons:

1. It gets students involved in something of immediate and local importance (after all, propositions are put on the ballot by California voters, are decided on by a popular majority of Californian voters, and it directly affects California residents). I think it'd be difficult for a student to say that they were not directly affected by any proposition, whether they were interested or not.
2. It's timely. Propositions become topics of discussion over the course of a couple of months. There may be students out there writing essays about them, but it's doubtful that these essays would trickle out into the online paper purchasing mill in time. (Note: One con for the timing, though, is that several of us NewCommAve editors noticed that some of the papers grew less interesting as we got further away from election day. Plus, they might not be of interest to a non-Californian audience, unless they involve a particularly hot-button national issue. For example, it's easy to see why someone from New York or Florida or Idaho or anywhere might get fired up about California's Proposition 8 from 2008, but who from those states would care about our Proposition 1A: to create a highspeed railway system that runs from LA to San Francisco?)
3. There are a number of readily available sources. Especially as the election draws near, proponents and opponents of a measure want voters to read material related to the issue. Granted, it may be biased, but that in itself is a great teaching point.

The biggest drawback for an assignment like this, though, is that you can only assign it once every couple years. I can't see students getting particularly fired up about writing on a proposition this semester, for example, with the possible exception of Prop. 8, whose number people still remember. Given that these types of essays exist, I would recommend against creating an assignment like, "Choose a prior California proposition, and write X."

Sidenote on that, though, I did employ this idea once, in a different way. We had been looking at different arguments about specific topics (including biased arguments), so what I told them was that their in-class midterm would be to analyze/dissect the pro/con arguments found in the voter pamphlet for a particular California proposition (and these can be found online on the California government's website). They might have been able to guess the proposition and found the argument in the few days prior to the midterm, but that would have required going through every proposition available online, and guessing really well, so it was pretty safe. For an in-class midterm, I thought it went very well.

This is a tough issue. The particular arrangement I would worry about is someone having a friend/spouse that would simply take the course. In a hybrid course, the in class diagnostic (and other in class activities) I think really helps out (even an unpolished writer has a distinct voice). In a fully online class, I just don't know. If a student participates in some online activities, or completes some assignments, then turns to help for others, that can be caught, but for those who are committed and have someone else simply take the course, I don't know what, if anything, could be done.