Online Non-Discussions

One of the strengths of online education that especially attracts me is its potential to stimulate rich interactions between professors and students and among the students themselves. When class time is not restricted to the several hours a week during which students and instructor gather in a college classroom, good discussion does not have to end because a bell rings. The conversation can keep going as long as anyone has anything to add. Furthermore, students do not need to feel frustrated because other students’ questions are using up valuable minutes. Individual students’ concerns and requests can be handled via private emails without taking away any time from the presentation of course content, and confused students can ask for clarification as many times as they need to. Finally, students who are not good at speaking “off the cuff,” or who feel self-conscious about speaking up in a class setting, can formulate their contributions in writing and can take as much time as they need to present clearly what they want to say.

However, it occurred to me recently—to my surprise—that this very advantage of online education might also work against student participation in meaningful discussions. Precisely because learners and teachers are not present together in the same physical space, professors are not able to call on reluctant respondents in the same way that they might in a traditional classroom. Students are insulated in cyberspace from the looks and prompts that a professor might use to get them to speak up. Similarly, because they are not sitting together in the same room, students do not feel the awkward silences that can ensue when nobody attempts to answer a professor’s questions. When a course is presented via the internet, the non-responsiveness and the silences can go on for days!

How can online instructors compensate for the absence of these incentives to get students involved in meaningful dialogue? Several suggestions come to mind:

  1. Professors can still call on students through personal emails, encouraging them to add their ideas to the ongoing discussions. “I’d like to hear what you think” could be just as motivating if stated in an email as stated in a classroom.
  2.  Instructors can set a pattern of positively acknowledging every contribution without dominating the discussion. A simple “Thanks for sharing that thought” or “Good question! What do the rest of you say?” lets the respondents know that someone is actually reading the dialogue and appreciates their efforts.
  3. Establishing a series of deadlines for responses might help to keep conversation moving. A professor might remind the group, “By Tuesday at midnight we need one idea from each of you about this topic.” Then several more deadlines could be set for responses to the initial items.

Instructors do have some leverage when students are being graded on the frequency and quality of their input, but even so, stimulating genuine communication among online course participants is relentlessly hard work. The very structure that enables students to participate whenever they choose from wherever they happen to be also allows them hide from instructors and classmates alike, and to safely not participate in the discussions at all. This reality presents a new and unexpected challenge for online instructors.

Previously published in http://academii.wordpress.com/2012/04/10/online-non-discussions/

Online Learning Communities

Without a doubt, the biggest and happiest surprise for me as I began to research online teaching was the unanimous emphasis in the literature on building “online learning communities.” Here for example is a quote from The Online Teaching Survival Guide (Boettcher & Conrad, 2010):

Nurturing a learning community as part of an online course is almost as important as being a significant presence. A learning community in a face-to-face environment often develops spontaneously as students generally have more opportunities to get to know one another and develop friendships outside a particular course. More explicit nurturing and planning is required in the online environment for a learning community to develop. (pp. 38-39)

When I first began to seriously consider online teaching as a career, my greatest concern was the isolation that I imagined would be inherent in the job. I pictured myself sitting alone at home in front of my computer day in and day out. Of course, students and faculty colleagues will not be present with me in the room while I am teaching online, but now I have every reason to expect that I will be surrounded by friends nonetheless.

A fascinating analogy came to mind, derived from the title of a little book that was published some years ago: The Mac is Not a Typewriter. This book tried to convince readers to use the unique strengths of word processing software to accomplish more efficiently and accurately what they formerly did manually with typewriters (such as using a right tab stop with a dot line leader instead of typing a row of periods). It occurred to me that “online teaching is not a correspondence course” in the same sense that “a computer is not a typewriter.” That is, using the internet for education offers advantages that far exceed a faster way to mail assignments back and forth!

Online teaching is designed to facilitate and actually improve rapid and frequent communications between instructors and students as well as among the students. The quieter and more reflective students may feel more confident to enter into online conversations. Instructors can literally “call on” every student for a given question. Students can read and comment on each other’s work. Professors can (and are encouraged to) set up separate sites where students can interact informally beyond the course content.

So what seemed to me a potential drawback of online instruction may very well turn out to be a great advantage instead.

Online Content Delivery

I had an idea for creating a brief online Bible course in which members of our church could participate concurrently with a preaching series from the book of Acts. This course would serve the dual purposes of supporting Bible learning in the congregation and giving me much-needed practice in using online learning management software. Thus I set about designing a six-module course called Introduction to Acts, using the free Open Source software called Moodle.

I made slow but steady progress as I planned the topics of each module. Then I began to develop the content and student assignments for the first module, Background of the Book, and learned another valuable lesson about online teaching. I spent most of a day studying half a dozen commentaries and summarizing what I learned from them about the title, authorship, date, theme, purpose, and so forth of Acts. Then I divided all this information into brief topical segments and start to upload each section of information into the course management system—and realized immediately that this approach to teaching simply would not work online.

What was wrong with my approach was the same as what would have been wrong if I had followed the identical procedure for a face-to-face class: I had done all the reading, thinking, selecting, synthesizing, and organizing of the materials, and now I was trying to tell the students what I had learned. In a live classroom this flaw might be partially compensated for by several important factors, such as that I could deliver the information accompanied by animated facial expressions, voice inflection, and gestures; I could “read” students’ nonverbal cues and respond to their spoken questions and comments as I explained the material; and I could stop at any point in my presentation and ask for the students’ input and involvement. However, none of these enhancements are possible when one presents the same information online in the form of written text, thereby exposing the imparted content in its barest—and most boring—possible form.

The good news pedagogically is that this exposure of the bare content also exposes clearly what is wrong with the method, namely that I am doing all the work of gathering, evaluating, and compiling the material for the students instead of teaching them how to carry out the investigation for themselves. An energetic public speaker might be able to get away with this method in a face-to-face classroom, but in the absence of all the compensating factors operating in a classroom, online teaching simply does not allow it. Thus I discovered yet another unexpected strength of teaching via the internet: it forces active learning pedagogy that is (unfortunately) optional in on-ground classes.

Content Clarity

As part of my self-directed learning plan to become an online professor of Bible and Christian education, I decided to practice by converting one of the courses that I had taught as an adjunct classroom instructor into an online-ready format. I chose my course on Pauline Literature because it was one of my favorites and because I thought it could be adapted easily.

As I struggled to rework my old syllabus, lecture notes, assignment pages, handouts, and review quizzes, I was chagrined to discover how confusing it all was. Granted, I had not looked at these materials in several years, but still—they had seemed organized at the time! The course had been structured in such a way that every weekly three-hour session in the semester focused on one of Paul’s epistles. It should have been simple to convert these self-contained sessions into online learning “modules,” but it wasn’t easy at all.

When I figured out what the problem was, I discovered yet another potential benefit of online instruction. I realized that, in spite of the fact that in-class instruction in a given week centered around one epistle, materials pertaining to that epistle often appeared in lecture notes for the previous week as well as the following week. This happened because at the end of every week’s session I introduced assignments that the students were to work on in advance of the next session. In addition, if I did not cover everything that I wanted to present about an epistle one week, I carried the remaining information over into the next week’s lecture. Also, every week’s session opened with a review quiz over information presented the previous week.

And then I realized that this sort of content confusion could not happen in carefully crafted online teaching! The weekly or topical modules into which online content is frequently organized are not constrained by available in-class time. Assignments are given and completed, information is delivered, discussions are moderated, and review quizzes are administered—all within the same block of learning experiences designated as one module. All the activities pertaining to the subject matter of one module are finished before the next module begins. The content of every module is clear.

Journey from Expedient to Extraordinary

When various individuals suggested that I consider online teaching as an option for employment in Christian higher education, my initial (unvoiced) reaction was “No, I want a real job.” However, given the fact that my husband and I had recently relocated from Michigan to Washington for his career, and that pursuing teaching jobs in other parts of the country was not feasible for me, I decided to give distance education another look. What began as a concession that teaching online might be an expedient alternative for me quickly evolved into a strong conviction that this form of college teaching could be truly extraordinary! My journey took several definite and significant leaps.

The first shift in my thinking occurred when I realized that if I taught online, it would not matter where I lived. As long as both my students and I had internet access, I could teach people anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world. Suddenly my job search was not limited to the greater Seattle area. Subsidiary benefits quickly occurred to me: no driving in bad traffic or weather, no worries about classes early in the morning or late at night, no conflicts with trips or conferences. Instruction could continue uninterrupted even if I was sick in bed.

The next major shift in my thinking came about as a result of reading an article that I found online about Instructional Design. The author compared the potential of online education to the early days of motion pictures: at first motion pictures were regarded mainly as another way to present stage performances to different audiences, but soon the inherent advantages of movies over live performances became evident. In the same way, online teaching is not merely a way to relay traditional classroom presentations to a larger audience, but has unique inherent advantages. For the first time, I began thinking about ways that online teacher could actually be superior to classroom instruction. Advantages that came readily to mind included more immediate and individualized interactions between professors and students, and increased conversations among the students themselves. The more I studied about online pedagogy, the more impressed I became with the level of active learning that it demands from the learners—pedagogy that is certainly possible and desirable in face-to-face classes—but that is inescapable in online course development.

A third leap occurred when I read the book Conquering the Content: A Step-by-Step Guide to Online Course Design, by Robin M. Smith. In her Preface this author described an adult student of hers who, while working three jobs to support his family, logged onto her course every night at 11:00 p.m. in order to fulfill requirements toward a college degree. In his case (and for many other students) online education represented the only available path to career advancement and a better life for his family. I realized that online teaching could be a ministry to students who might never be able to attend a college campus.

Having traversed the distance from “expedient” to “extraordinary” in my attitude toward online teaching, I am now eagerly building a career as an online professor.