Online Learning Basics – Is Online Teaching for you?
I had dinner with a friend last night and we got to talking about my work. Having attended a traditional brick and mortar campus for both undergrad and graduate school, he was incredulous at the idea that students are now taking courses online. "How can you teach a course online?" he exclaimed! "How do you know what students are learning?" "Are the courses as rigorous as on ground courses?"
Amused by his line of questioning, I explained that online courses are just like onground courses and that teaching online brings with it some challenges that traditional classrooms don't. This brings me to my topic for this week's posting - Online Learning Basics - Is Online Teaching for you?
Assuming you already have a computer and internet access, you'll need to think about following items:
- Computer skills - What are your general feelings about the computer? Do you think its a necessary evil, or do you relish in the though of the latest gadget? Do you dread checking email, or are you excited at the thought of going online to purchase presents for the holiday season? If you're in the former group, in either of the instances previously described, you might want to take a basic computer course before teaching online, but if you're in the latter, you're ready to jump in with both feet. Either way, many of online programs require their instructors to attend some sort of training before teaching their first course, so you may be able to get the necessary training there.
- Time Management Skills - How are you with scheduling your own time? Are you able to stick to schedules and deadlines without physically being present on campus? One of the biggest shifts in going from the traditional classroom to the online environment is that you can actually do all of your course work, at home, in your pajamas if you'd like! While the upside is obvious, the downside is that you must be comfortable with creating your own schedule and sticking to it. Many of my colleagues use their Outlook to schedule 2 hour blocks and they hold those times sacred. They treat it like a traditional course - "I won't be available from 1-3PM, Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. That's my course time."
- Written Communication Skills/Styles - While there is written communication in a traditional class, the majority of communication in an online course is done through email, threads, and chats. Are you comfortable with communication that may be less formal than that found in a traditional setting?
- Instructional Delivery Flexibility - Are you a teacher who routinely changes up your delivery method for the same topic? Are you invigorated by trying new teaching methods? Or, do you prefer teaching the same content with tried and true methods? If you're part of the former group, online teaching would be a fun and challenging new tool for you. Online education offers a wide world of delivery tools at your fingertips. The web offers many exciting new tools for teaching traditional topics.
Ultimately, if you do venture into the world of online teaching, you'll probably learn more about yourself as a teacher than you ever thought possible. Online education has challenged me to present material differently, engage students thoroughly, and evaluate in a manner that effectively assesses their learning. I'm a better teacher for it.
Stephanie Pfeifer, MA
Academic Trainer and Consultant
Communicating with students
A column on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website recently reported that students’ #1 technology request is to have online chat capabilities with their instructor (here’s a report on the CDW-G study examining the role of technology in higher education). I’ve been kicking this around in my mind since first reading that CHE column. What does that result really mean? Since the study considered on-campus tech resources, I’m assuming that these are students in traditional classrooms that have in-person access to the professors, yet they still want more. Is it truly synchronous chatting that they are longing for? Or do they simply want additional ways to communicate with their instructor? And, do they want to know that their instructor will actually hear them and communicate back within a certain timeframe?
Communication between instructor and students is extremely important in traditional classrooms, and is even more important in online classes where instructors need to work to create and maintain instructor presence. For example, a recent study by Dennen et al. (2007) asked students to rank the importance of different instructor practices in online courses. Six of the eight most highly ranked behaviors involved communication, including: checking email, posting in discussions, providing timely feedback, responding to student inquiries, communicating rules and expectations, and modeling communication protocols (the other two factors related to information needs, and included providing examples and providing appropriate course materials and activities).
So for instructors who would like to build better communication with their students, these are good places to get started. You can examine these six areas to see if you’re doing all that you can to communicate with students… are you regularly checking and responding to email, or other student inquiries? Do you regularly post in discussions so students know you are there reading the responses they work to create? Do you provide timely feedback on course assignments? Have you communicated your rules and expectations for the course so students know how to be successful? And finally, do you model professional communication throughout the course? If this seems too much to tackle at once, pick a few things to focus on and get started. Remember that “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” (Lao-tzu). Both you and your students will be glad that you took that step.
– Gail E. Krovitz, Ph.D. –
Senior Academic Trainer & Consultant
Dennen, V.P., A. A. Darabi, and L.J. Smith. (2007). Instructor-learner interaction in online courses: the relative perceived importance of particular instructor actions on performance and satisfaction. Distance Education, 28(1), 65-79.
Narrative
Do you know the story of the student who kept taking his Final Exam after the class session ended? The instructor of the large, Freshman lecture called for all tests to be turned in on her desk. Every student complied, creating a very large stack, save one. He just sat in his desk, writing and filling in bubbles. After three attempts to get his attention and the student obviously ignoring her pleas, the instructor sat down at her desk and watched, excited to refuse the exam of such a petulant student. Finally, after twenty minutes, the student put down his pencil, stood up, and casually walked toward the instructor’s desk. As he began to extend his hand with the exam in it, the instructor spoke up. “Young man, I asked for these to be submitted twenty minutes ago. You took more than the allotted time and so your test will not be counted.” The young man cocked his head and chewed his lip. “Do you have any idea who I am instructor?” he asked. The teacher was indignant. “I don’t want to hear about how your parents donated a building! I don’t know who you are and I don’t care!” At that, the student said, “I didn’t think you’d know me…” as he lifted half of the stack of tests on the desk, placed his exam in the middle, and walked out of the room.
Walter Fisher (1995), arguably the most notable story researcher of our time, discusses the narrative paradigm in great detail. He suggests that all people are essentially storytellers who make decisions on the basis of (their perception of) good reasons. History, biography, culture, and character determine what we define as “good reasons”. The world is a set of stories from which we choose (and constantly re-create) our lives.
In education, story is powerful. Story creates context. Examples define paradigms. Illustrations generate meaning. In other words, narrative bridges learning style preferences, increases attention span, helps retention, and integrates curriculum across disciplines. If the world is full of storytellers and narrative is how we make sense of that world we live in, the question of usage in the classroom is obvious.
How often do you tell stories in your course? For my online teachers out there, this becomes even more relevant. How often do you tell stories in your online class?
What a great potential for audio clips in the online course. Adding a link at the top of a difficult concept with “Listen To Fred’s Story” or “Here’s A Real Life Example of Statistics in Action” might be one way to incorporate stories. Voice threads from Web 2.0 sites like www.voicethread.com might offer a way for teachers and students to share narratives in the online course. Or a simple text box, highlighted by color or bold font might be enough to emphasize your point through illustration.
No matter how you slice it, stories are important to our culture and our world, so they should be peppered throughout our courses. They can be personal (which then creates a nice tie to Instructor Immediacy…but that’s another blog) and they can be from outside sources (creating a good venue for modeled credibility). Just try not to “hear” my message today, instead really “listen” to it!
A Congressman once publicly criticized the Department of Agriculture for wasting the taxpayers’ money printing useless pamphlets. According to the politician, they printed pamphlets about “everything except the love life of the frog.” Following the Congressman’s speech, the Department of Agriculture began to receive orders for The Love Life of the Frog. As more and more orders arrived, the department eventually had to make a public statement announcing emphatically that no such pamphlet existed. After the public denial, letters requesting The Love Life of the Frog began to arrive by the hundreds. Finally, the Secretary of Agriculture, in a national address, stated that the department had never printed such a pamphlet and had no intention of ever doing so. Following the broadcast, thousands of orders for the pamphlet arrived in the mail.
See…listening is crucial…and so is storytelling.
Jeff Borden, M.A.
Director of Academic Training & Consulting
Fisher, Walter R. (1995). "Narration, Knowledge, and the Possibility of Wisdom" in Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the Disciplines (Suny Series in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences). (Fisher & Robert F. Goodman as editors). New York: State University of New York Press.
Implementing Competency-Based Learning
Over the past few months I’ve been reflecting and writing about assessment accountability and its intersection with workplace competencies. I believe today’s post on competency-based learning nicely integrates these two topics and provides academic leaders with a progressive assessment model that dovetails nicely into learning outcome management systems which support the more rigorous demands of accrediting bodies.
The figure below, taken from a 2002 U.S. Department of Education report, is a graphical representation of a pedagogical model showing the progression of learning from the engagement with one’s prior knowledge to the demonstration of acquired skills, abilities, and knowledge following a learning experience.
Source: U.S. Department of Education, 2002.
Many traditional, course-based learning models stop after conducting some form of assessment to verify that basic knowledge transfer from faculty to student has occurred. More progressive programs extend this assessment to a more granular level and actually prove that students can demonstrate performance of required competencies. An additional benefit of the more granular, performance-based learning outcomes is that it forces faculty to write specific, observable, and measurable learning goals.
One of the key barriers faced by institutions who are considering a move to competency based learning is the challenge of moving beyond the course-based assessment model along with the subsequent issue of how competency based learning units transfer into traditional academic programs. Western Governors University (WGU) has moved the furthest along this path by defining competency domains required both for general education and major area studies. While WGU is widely recognized as being at the forefront of this movement, other institutions such as Rutgers University, Alverno College, and Maricopa Community College have chosen their own paths and provide alternate implementation strategies (A. Voorhees, 2001, p. 84-86).
Dr. Richard Voorhees, a published author in the field of accreditation and assessment of both distance education and competency-based learning models, provides a twelve point list of actionable best-practices for those considering a move into this paradigm. It includes suggestions that range from obtaining senior level management support to ensuring that multiple assessment points are embedded within a degree program so that meaningful data analysis can inform curriculum enhancements (2001, p. 12).
While many may be reluctant to embrace a degree that didn’t come with a traditional course-based transcript, I believe employers would be impressed with how these graduates could both demonstrate general knowledge as well as the ability to perform required workplace competencies at a higher level than traditional program graduates. Has anyone been directly involved with implementing a competency-based learning model? I’d be interested in your comments on what you learned and how students responded.
References
U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Defining and Assessing Learning: Exploring Competency-Based Initiatives, NCES 2002-159, prepared by Elizabeth A. Jones and Richard A. Voorhees, with Karen Paulson, for the Council of the National Postsecondary Education Cooperative Working Group on Competency-Based Initiatives. Washington, DC: 2002.
Voorhees, A. (2001). Creating and Implementing Competency-Based Learning Models. New Directions for Institutional Research. 2001(110), 83.
Voorhees, R. (2001). Competency-Based Learning Models: A Necessary Future. New Directions for Institutional Research. 2001(110), 5.
Brian McKay Epp, M.Ed., Academic Trainer and Consultant
