Welcome

This little web page tells the story of the building of our first online course at the College of Communication at Boston University. The course is now being taught, during the fall semester of 2000, and as we teach and learn, it remains under construction. The course web site is posted at http://www.bu.edu/jlengel/cmc/onlineindex.html, through which my students and I conduct the work of the course. This web page explains how we designed and built this course, and why, and what technologies support it.

We took one section of an existing, required course for graduate students in the department of Mass Communication, and developed it into an online course. CM 704 Contemporary Mass Communication has been part of the curriculum at COM for many years. It is a broad introductory survey of today's mass communication industries: newspapers, books, magazines, film, radio, television, direct mail, outdoor, and the Internet. It is required of students majoring in advertising, communication studies, and other concentrations, about 50 students per year.

I taught this course in the classroom for two years, and in doing so developed a set of readings, lectures, assignments, and strategies that formed the basis of the online course. In fact, I'm teaching two sections of CM 704 in the classroom along with the online section. Our purpose in teaching this online course was to:

  • provide a way for students in our Master's degree program to take this required course even as they are working in the field or cannot get to campus;
  • force ourselves to learn how to structure and teach an online course;
  • develop the technological capabilities to deliver such a course within COM; and
  • better understand the promises and pitfalls of online education.

The structure of the course is based on ancient ideas of teaching and learning. For more information on the origins of these ideas, connect to the little lesson called Looking Backward. (This lesson requires Shockwave.)

The diagram of the course that you see on the left is your gateway into the story. The diagram shows the structure of the course; clicking on the "live" boxes shows you an explanation of the why's and how's of that part of the course.

Send your questions and comments to me, Jim Lengel, College of Communication, Boston University.