Rising
demand for
distance education over the Web and a desire not be swept aside by
competitors from the commercial sector, means that institutions are
pressuring staff to teach courses online. Many faculty members have never
taught online, and therefore wonder what they are getting themselves into.
What are the differences between teaching online and teaching face-to-face?
What can faculty members expect from the experience of teaching college
courses on the Web?
Other faculty members have some
experience teaching online, but haven't shared their experiences, nor have they
read the literature on distance education. Their knowledge remains fragmentary.
Are faculty experiences with teaching online specific to their content areas, or
representative of the larger experience of teaching over the Web? This study
seeks to integrate the experiences of professors currently teaching online into
a qualitative description.
There are a number of
research-based notions of distance education. The first is that it requires a
considerable amount of time to design and develop an online class. The
instructor must shift from the role of content provider to content facilitator,
gain comfort and proficiency in using the Web as the primary teacher-student
link, and learn to teach effectively without the visual control provided by
direct eye contact (Williams & Peters 1997).
Moore (1993) suggests that there
are three types of interaction necessary for successful distance education: 1)
learner-content interaction, 2) learner-instructor interaction, and 3)
learner-learner interaction. Distance learning instructors need to ensure that
all three forms of interaction are maximized in their course structure.
Peters (1993) criticizes distance
education, saying that it reduces education to a kind of industrial production
process, lacking the human dimension of group interaction, and even alienating
learners from teachers. He compares distance education to a mass-production
assembly line process where a division of labour (educators and communications
specialists) replaces the more craft-oriented approach of traditional
face-to-face education. However, Peters' article predates the current Web-based
boom in distance education. His outmoded notions, like the computer themes in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, sound slightly like industrial age
paranoia toward computers. The personal computer and the Internet have probably
been a greater force towards individualisation than mass production.
We interviewed 21 instructors who had taught both
in the distance and the face-to-face format. The instructors ranged from
assistant professors to adjunct professors. Fifteen of the 21 instructors taught
in the context of the SUNY Learning Network, a non-profit, grant-funded
organization that provides the State Universities of New York (SUNY) with an
infrastructure, software, Web space and templates for instructors to create
their online course. The Learning Network also provides workshops on developing
and teaching online courses, a help desk and other technical support for
Web-based distance education. The remaining six informants taught Web-based
distance education courses in similarly supported situations at state
universities in California and Indiana.
Four of the interviews were conducted over the
telephone and 18 were done via e-mail. The four telephone interviews occurred
first and were used to develop a set of open-ended questions for e-mail
interviews. Since e-mail interviewing did not require the laborious process of
transcription, the e-mail interview process allowed the gathering of data from a
much larger number of participants than was possible from telephone or
face-to-face interviews alone.
By reading over the transcriptions of the
telephone interviews, the investigators found emerging themes that were
converted into 27 open-ended essay questions comprising the "e-mail interview."
The e-mail interview, as it is used in this study, is differentiated from a
questionnaire on several counts. It uses open-ended, essay-style questions as
opposed to the Likert style, fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice items common
to questionnaires. The informants averaged approximately 45 minutes to complete
the e-mail interview. The initial questions included some "chit-chat" and
informal questions designed to put the interviewee at ease. It also involved
some degree of interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee. The
interviewers sometimes e-mailed participants follow-up questions to particularly
interesting responses.
The investigators read over all the interviews at
least two times, looking for trends and consistencies and generating 39
categories of responses and mnemonic codes to symbolize these categories. Some
typical coding categories include ">WK," meaning that the online classes require
more work, and "N FUNNY," meaning that humour was problematic in the online
environment.
Three investigators coded the interviews and then
counted how many times each type of response occurred (not the number of
informants who said or wrote a particular response). So if one informant wrote
at three different times in the interview that online classes required more
work, that interview contributed three occurrences of the ">WK" category, not
one occurrence. The coding system was not done to be objective (this type of
ethnographic research is by its nature non-objective), but rather to uncover
trends in the data.
Some of the most important, most
emphasized and most frequent responses made points we had not directly asked
about. A lot of issues related to bandwidth limitations and the dominance of
text in Web-based classes. Some instructors feel as if a lifetime of teaching
skills goes by the wayside. They can not use their presence and their classroom
skills to get their point across. Nor can they use their oral skills to
improvise on the spot to deal with behaviour problems or educational
opportunities.
Because of the reliance on
text-based communication and a lack of visual cues, every aspect of the course
has to be laid out in meticulous detail to avoid misunderstandings. Every
lecture must be converted to a typed document. Directions for every assignment
must be spelled out in a logical, self-contained way. Therefore, Web-based
distance classes require considerably more work, often including hundreds of
hours of up-front work to set up the course. On the other hand, the development
of an online class, especially one that began as a face-to-face course, makes
the instructor confront and analyze the material in new and different ways.
Once the course begins, the long
hours continue. Online instructors must log on to the course Web site at least
three or four times a week for a number of hours each session. They respond to
threaded discussion questions, evaluate assignments, and above all answer
questions clearing up ambiguities, often spending an inordinate amount of time
communicating by e-mail. The many instructor hours spent online create an
"online presence," a psychological perception for students that the instructor
is out there and is responding to them. Without this, students quickly become
insecure and tend to drop the class.
This great amount of work sounds
intimidating; however, most online instructors looked forward to their time
spent online as time away from their hectic face-to-face jobs. One respondent
commented: "This is why I like the online environment. It's kind of a purified
atmosphere. I only know the students to the extent of their work. Obviously
their work is revealing about them."
The Web environment presents a
number of educational opportunities and advantages over traditional classes,
such as many informational resources that can be seamlessly integrated into the
class. Instructors can assign Web pages as required reading, or have students do
research projects using online databases. However, it is important that the
instructor encourage the students to learn the skills to differentiate valid and
useful information from the dregs, as the Internet is largely unregulated.
Some instructors also
had online guests in their classes (authors, experts in their field, etc.)
residing at a distance, yet participating in online threaded discussions
with the students in the class. All these things could theoretically be
accomplished in a traditional class by adding an online component;
however, because online classes are already on the Web, these
opportunities are integrated far more naturally.
Other advantages of
online classes result from psychological aspects of the medium itself. The
emphasis on the written word encourages a deeper level of thinking in
online classes. A common feature in online classes is the threaded
discussion. The fact that students must write their thoughts down, and the
realization that those thoughts will be exposed semi-permanently to others
in the class seem to result in a deeper level of discourse. Another
response stated:
"The learning appears
more profound as the discussions seemed both broader and deeper. The
students are more willing to engage both their peers and the professor
more actively. Each student is more completely exposed and can not simply
sit quietly throughout the semester. Just as the participating students
are noticeable by their presence, the non-participating students are
noticeable by their absence. The quality of students' contributions can be
more refined as they have time to mull concepts over as they write, prior
to posting."
The asynchronous
nature of the environment means that the student (or professor) can read a
posting and consider their response for a day before posting it. Every
student can and, for the most part, does participate in the threaded
discussions. In online classes, the instructor usually makes class
participation a higher percentage of the class grade, since instructor
access to the permanent archive of threaded discussions allows more
objective grading (by both quantity and quality). This differs from
face-to-face classes where, because of time constraints, a relatively
small percentage of the students can participate in the discussions during
one class session. Because of the lack of physical presence and absence of
many of the usual in-person cues to personality, there is an initial
feeling of anonymity, which allows students who are usually shy in the
face-to-face classroom to participate in the online classroom. Therefore
it is possible and quite typical for all the students to participate in
the threaded discussions common to Web-based classes.
This same feeling of
anonymity creates some political differences, such as more equality
between the students and professor in an online class. The lack of a
face-to-face persona seems to divest the professor of some authority.
Students feel free to debate intellectual ideas and even challenge the
instructor. One respondent stated that "In a face-to-face class the
instructor initiates the action; meeting the class, handing out the
syllabus, etc. In online instruction the student initiates the action by
going to the Web site, posting a message, or doing something. Also, I
think that students and instructors communicate on a more equal footing
where all of the power dynamics of the traditional face-to-face classroom
are absent."
Note intentional use of hyperlinks above to illustrate one
advantageous characteristic of web mediated teaching.
To be Contd.
