What is involved in an online course?

It is a reasonable expectation that students spend between six to eight hours each week working on an online course. This includes both class time and time spent at school in study periods as well as essential homework time.

The online delivery of our courses includes:

1. Live Lesson / Tutorial Sessions. These are an essential part of the teaching/learning process and involve students logging in with the teacher to a ‘live’ online discussion of course work for a one to one and a half hour session each week outside school time, usually in the evening.

2.    Pre-recorded Lessons.  These are also an essential part of the teaching/learning process and involve students logging in to view lesson content pre-recorded by the teacher for a specific topic or area of study. Students are able to view these recordings either at school or at home in their own time. Each recording would have activities attached to complete later.

3.    Weekly Quizzes and/or Homework Exercises. These involve short questions that are answered online and deal with essential concepts in the course. Student responses to the quiz also act as a “roll call” component, indicating that the students have logged onto the course website, at least once in the week.

4.     Weekly Tasks. The course websites present a schedule of weekly readings, tasks, forums and journals throughout the course. The solutions to these tasks are also available. Students are expected to complete all tasks to the best of their ability. Some tasks are self assessed. Students then seek help, through email messages or during tutorial sessions. This is unquestionably the most important process in the online delivery of the courses.

5.     Topic Assignments. During and at the completion of each topic students may be required to submit for marking an assignment which will focus on the material from the preceding weeks’ tasks. The assignments will contain HSC examination style questions.

6.   Formal Assessment Tasks. There are up to five formal tasks which combine to produce the course assessment mark. These include tests, projects, essays and a final exam. The assessment schedule will show you the dates, content and value of each of these tasks. It is available on each course website.