Sample Summary

Students, below appears an example of the kind of summary discussed in class and on the course website, here.  I found it when I was drafting the midterm exam for my sections of ENG 099 in the Spring 2013 term; that it appears here ought to indicate that it will not be the one which appears on the exam.

The editors of the New York Times published "The Trouble with Online College" on 18 February 2013 in the online version of the newspaper.  The article asserts that fully online courses are not effective with such classes as first-year composition.  Noted in support of the assertion are remarkably high attrition rates, the disjunction between student skills and online course requirements, research conducted by Columbia University, and the perils of poor course design.  Also noted, if slightly off-topic, is the potential success of hybrid online/traditional courses, although difficulties in implementing hybrid instruction are identified.  Although the deployment of information from Columbia University, a noted research institution, would normally make the article eminently credible, the research referenced is of limited scope, discussing only two of the fifty states and potentially only those in community colleges.  The possibly non-representative sample limits the effectiveness of utilizing Columbia's data, which, with the slight deviation from topic, sharply reduces the effectiveness of the article.