Online students I've met
What's new?
Want more out of life?
10/40 Window
Searching for God's will?
An African martyr's statement on commitment
Mission trip fund raising
10 ways to ruin a short-term mission trip
Youth in Mission
Nazarene Missions International resource pages
Linking to me
Caricatures of online student behavior
Behaviors like these will degrade the learning experience for everyone (with apologies to Snow White and her seven dwarfs)
- Busy
Busy always has something going on and is continually asking for deadline extensions. Her excuses sound legitimate (after all, life can get hectic for everyone), but classmates wanting to include her in conversations have to look in previous weeks' folders because she's late doing her own work as well as responding to theirs.
- Oblivious
Oblivious has trouble with homonyms. He also uses sentence fragments far too frequently. His proof-reading isn't all that great. Whenever someone happens to mention it, Oblivious just laughs it off. He doesn't realize -- or, worse, doesn't care -- that his errors weaken the impact of
his writing on other people.
- Wordy
Wordy thinks she's supposed to respond to every single post. Even when she doesn't say much, the time other people take to open and read her messages mounts up. Wordy occasionally has good ideas, but she writes and writes and writes. It's almost as if she cannot think without writing.
- Coarsely
Coarsely seems to think class is being held in the men's locker room of a high school gym. Inappropriate allusions creep into his posts. Then, when others protest that his humor needs cleaning up, he whines that he's the victim.
- Disconnected Dan
Right now Dan's got other priorities in his life. Days go by and he's not heard from. People ask him questions online and he doesn't respond. One gets the impression that Dan only reads enough posts each week to make everyone think that he is there.
- Trite-ly
Whenever Trite-ly responds to a post you know it's going to be on some insignificant detail. Her posts have little to do with actual course content. Trite-ly seems to always be in some kind of very loose association mode.
- End-times Edith
Edith's all-consuming passion is Eschatology (End-times). So she finds certain signs of the end in everything, even in numerical codes she derives from the letters in the names of the textbook author. Edith's passion is end-times and she's not about to let the subject of the particular course force her to concentrate on something else.
SNU missions course materials and syllabi
Howard Culbertson, Southern Nazarene University, 6729 NW 39th, Bethany, OK 73008 | Phone: 405-491-6693 - Fax: 405-491-6658
Copyright © 2002 - Last Updated: May 17, 2008 | URL: http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/online.htm
You have permission to reprint what you just read. Use it in your ezine, at your web site or in your newsletter. Please include the following footer:
Article by Howard Culbertson. For more original content like this, visit: http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert