July 20, 2008
TECHNOS QUARTERLY Spring 2001 Vol. 10 No. 1
Log On and Deliver, But Rest First (An Article about Teaching via the Internet)
by William E. Byxbee
I've just finished teaching my first online course, and I'm exhausted. But why?
It's not like I'm new to teaching. I've been doing it for the past 32 years, and I've taught every imaginable schedule at every educational level. So why am I so exhausted after having taught just one graduate-level online course with only 15 students? The only logical explanation is that it requires more work than any of my previous classes and requires it almost around the clock from the start of the course until the end.
The Course
The course, EDUC 501, “Teaching and Learning,” is a part of a master's degree in education offered online by Bowie State University, a part of the University System of Maryland. It is a core course for degrees in both school administration and supervision and secondary education. The degree in school administration and supervision is designed to prepare school personnel for positions as school principals and/or instructional supervisors. The program meets NASDTEC (National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification) and Maryland State Department of Education certification requirements and leads to full certification as a principal and supervisor in grades K-8 and/or 7-12.
The
degree in secondary education is primarily designed to serve secondary school
teachers at the high school and middle school levels who desire to remain
as teachers in the classroom. The goal of this area is to provide for the
classroom teacher the expertise, program, and opportunities to enable movement
toward the position of master teacher.
The Delivery
Course delivery through the World Wide Web has been found to be a viable alternative method that can be very advantageous to students and institutions alike. But, as with any new delivery technique, distance education via the Internet presents both challenges and opportunities when compared to the conventional classroom presentation. It is my belief, and one thus far shared by students, that the opportunities far outweigh the challenges.
My course, as with all the courses, was taught entirely online through asynchronous communication, which basically means that it is not delivered online at the same time to all of the students. The rationale for this is very easy to understand when you realize that our students are in every time zone in the world and it would be impossible for any teacher to find a time when “real-time” education would be a possibility for all of the students involved. This type of delivery requires adjustments in nearly every area of program development and delivery, including course and syllabus construction, types of assignments and grading, developing group cohesiveness, promoting interaction, providing timely feedback, recruitment, hiring of faculty, retention of students, and determining specific course requirements. Of significant importance is the effort needed to keep the content and spirit of a traditional course intact while making the necessary changes for an Internet course.
In this model, specific campus-based courses are converted to courses suitable for online delivery; the online master's degrees are the same as the campus master's degrees. By basing the online course on the existing traditional course, academic credibility and consistency are assured, while at the same time the online instructors are allowed enough freedom to tailor the courses for the Internet and the international teachers who take them. Typically, the online professor is given a copy of the campus syllabus and textbook(s) and then adjusts the syllabus to make it effective for online delivery. The typical adjustments that are made to the campus curriculum involve making the course materials more relevant to the actual educational experience of the international teachers. For the most part, the campus curriculum focuses on U.S. education with an emphasis on the Maryland educational requirements. Therefore, for the online courses, an international dimension is added. I found that the best way for me to do this was to use various “clipping services” from the Internet. In Excite (www. excite.com), I found that I could enter in the key words education, international, curriculum, and teachers, and each day check the results of the search. When I found something that was of interest, I would broadcast it on the homepage for the course or email it to individual students, based on what I had learned about them from their assignments or conversations/postings on the course bulletin board.
All the materials and requirements are uploaded to the course homepage, including written assignments, topics for discussion, and other pertinent matters. An appropriate text and/or current articles and other readings are assigned. Sometimes, due to their size, the texts must be sent to students; other times timely materials are available online. When textbooks had to sent, they were usually sent via courier (such as FedEx), to make sure that the materials arrived well in advance of the course. Many courses involve research, both through online and traditional sources. The latter can be a problem for some students, depending on their location and hence their access to resources in the English language. Depending on where the student lives-China, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia-he or she may find that access to the World Wide Web is rather limited, and therefore, so is the ability to do full searches for research projects. When this occurs, my colleagues and I try to assist by sending students some research via email that we conduct based on their submissions to us. Fortunately, we are finding that this is becoming less of a problem with each passing semester.
The advent of the Internet and the subsequent design of programs that take advantage of the power of this technological tool have allowed individual students to take programs that previously were offered only on campus or to large cohorts in remote locations. A typical course includes class “discussions” via a bulletin board on the Web, where students can post their messages and read messages from other students. This was the most exciting aspect of asynchronous communication in the course because it took on a life of its own. Once students started posting assignments and commenting on the articles that I had posted for them to read, the course started to heat up with lots of messages from one student to another or to the entire class, challenging this, questioning that, and in general really communicating across the globe. Students are required to have access to their own email account (not shared with family members or others) and to have access to the World Wide Web. All written work including the final paper is submitted to the professor via email as attachments.
Challenges, Opportunities
Keeping the campus faculty happy with the same course offered online presents challenges that need to be resolved to the satisfaction of all concerned. One of the most important aspects of delivering online courses is to make sure that the content of the course is as close to the campus-based course as possible. Because most of the students are teachers in international schools, the course is tailored where needed and possible to account for unique cultural differences, mores, and customs in the various countries where the students are teaching. The use of bulletin boards to share these differences-and the methods and materials that the teachers developed to cope with them-proved to be an unexpected strength of the program. In many cases, in fact, the campus-based courses incorporated these “new learnings” into their new syllabi.
Each course presents unique problems and opportunities. Issues such as class length, frequency of offering, and entry requirements for these classes had to be discussed. While many universities have a rolling enrollment that allows the student to enter a class at his or her convenience, at our school, we elected to maintain the traditional semester setting, again trying to make the traditional course a virtual course. We found there is much more acceptance on the home campus of classes that are run and evaluated online just as they are on campus. To this end, not only were our class dates similar to those offered on campus, but our requirements for hours, tests, papers, and projects also conformed to the campus-based course as closely as possible.
We tried to run the course in a manner that would allow students to “drop into” the campus-based course as seamlessly as possible, if they so desired. The real point is to attempt to make the strange (virtual classes) become familiar (campus-based classes) so that the real focus is on learning the content and not on the methodology.
One of the challenges in managing an online course is to make sure that the bulletin boards and other “from-the-heart” postings from the students are managed and controlled so that they are always brought back to the purposes and objectives of the class. Because the students in this class ranged from very senior, experienced international teachers to rather junior, new-to-the-field U.S.A.-based teachers, it was to be expected that philosophies and cultural differences would be exposed and challenged in various assignments. There were times when some of the class felt that one or two exchanges between other classmates were going a bit too far and in the wrong direction, and they would interject words of wisdom and tolerance. Other times, it was up to me to intervene to ensure that we did not get distracted by the wrong topics or to encourage students to continue the discussion via personal email as opposed to public postings.
The Students
The 15 students who took my course were residents of 15 different countries covering a broad spectrum of time zones. All but one were full-time teachers in international schools; the other was a former teacher living in Germany and preparing to re-enter the classroom. They ranged in age and experience-some with more than 25 years of teaching, while others were still new to the field with less than five years, the average having closer to 12 years of experience. The one thing they had in common was a desire to earn a degree without having to take time off from job and family responsibilities.
Another thing they had in common was a desire to communicate. And this trait was the start of my exhaustion. Unlike a traditional course, where only a small percentage of the total class participates, an online course encourages-and in fact demands-full participation by all members. This participation is not limited to the discussion forums on the homepage but extends to follow-ups to assignments, reactions to my comments and concerns on their formal papers, interaction among all of the other classmates, and the normal communications regarding course progress, degree requirements, and other counseling concerns. Every time I logged on, there were seldom fewer than 20 messages from 15 students regarding some aspect of the course! I felt it was necessary to respond to these messages immediately so as to diminish the sense of alienation that distance education programs can engender if not handled properly.
This course also had, in addition to the normal communications, lectures, and chats mentioned above, a requirement of four formal papers and a semester project over the 14 weeks of the course. I was not prepared for the amazing in-depth analysis, insightful commentary, and sheer length of these papers. I suppose I should have been, given that this was the principle way that the students had of really showing how much they were integrating the material, but it was a shocker to me. Providing timely and complete feedback represented the bulk of the time that I spent on this course.
Using
Outlook Express for email and Word 98 for Macintosh(tm) as my word processor,
I was able to open all the attachments that contained reports, projects, papers,
and other documents and then save them to individual student files. When a
paper was received, I gave myself a 24-hour turn-around time by which I would
have the corrected paper returned replete with comments, suggestions, and
encouragement. What a joke that was! I was perhaps 25 percent successful at
getting things back to the student within 24 hours. Most of the time, it was
72 hours-and then it was only because I was either on the road and away from
the office, or it was a weekend. I found that trying to run a very extensive
worldwide professional development program seemed to be inconsistent with
being the perfect distance education professor. But I did learn that timely
communication is perhaps the keystone to any distance education program, one
that is expected and appreciated by the students.
I also learned an enormous amount of additional information about creating Web pages and Power Point(r) presentations and how to send and receive them via email. I was taught how to set up a clipping service so that I could have the Internet search for the topics we were studying and then forward hotlinks to the class that contained up-to-the-minute news, commentary, and research on the topics so as to supplement the text materials. I also learned-and this was the most critical to me-how to highlight passages of papers with the yellow highlighter that Word provides, and then to write my comments in a different color text, so that when I returned the paper, my comments were strikingly obvious. This was a paperless course, and I can prove it: I do not have one scrap of paper for any student-which also forces the professor to really learn how to organize electronic folders, assignments, and returned assignments.
What I really liked the most about this type of instruction is what I know about my students. In fact, I know only what they want me to know. I don't know or particularly care about their race, color, creed, or national origin. I don't know if they are tattooed or have pierced body parts; I don't know what they wear, how old they are, or how long they have taught. If they choose to share any of this information, that is great, but for the most part, everyone focuses on the assignments, the forum discussions, the readings, and the emails.
Would I do this again? Yes, but with caveats. First, I would arrange to do it in the summer, when I have fewer administrative responsibilities. Next, I would be sure to organize more before the course began, and I would limit the class size to 12 students. I would, to the best of my ability, make sure that everyone in the course had access to the Internet on a consistent and reliable basis. And last, I would make sure I was well rested.
Illustrations courtesy of Barry A. Stark/Stark Realities.