ABSTRACT
The rise of online learning over the past two decades has had a profound impact on higher education. Most chief academic officers report that online learning is critical to their long-term strategy and that online courses are as educationally effective as face-to-face courses. Bringing a common intellectual experience into an online learning environment frequently driven by convenience, flexibility, and choice produces an inherent tension between the potential benefits of recognizing the student centered characteristics of many online instructional models and the significant limitations resulting from fragmented learning. This chapter provides a Narrative, Engagement, Transformation (NET) approach that applies a common intellectual experience to the online environment. Accordingly, in addition to narrative, engagement is essential to common intellectual experience and takes many forms. The master courses contain all of the course content, including syllabi, readings, instructional videos, discussion prompts, assignment descriptions, and any other content necessary to teach the course.
