Joanna Cabot has been taking online courses for the
last seven years. In a blog post for TeleRead, she claims they haven’t gotten much better over that span.
Her biggest complaint is how the courses are
implemented. A check of the gradebook function for her latest online study
required a variety of clicks and scrolling, then waiting and more scrolling,
before the function was accessed.
“It would be like driving to the grocery store and
finding that all of the fruits and vegetables had been taken out of the bins
and replaced with paper copies of a map you can use to drive to the farm,” she
wrote. “Why on earth would somebody design a forum software this way?”
She also had issues navigating the digital content, the
course readings, and library databases that were not integrated into the
software.
“I understand that technology is harder to do right
than most people think it is,” she concluded. “I understand that there is no
perfect system and there will always be bugs and glitches in something like
this. I am not saying everything has to be perfect just yet. But it startled me
just how little things have improved in all the years I have been taking these
courses online. It’s not that we should have progressed to perfection just yet.
But we should have progressed a little.”
