By Hollis Pyatt
Department of Geography
Hollis Pyatt, Department of Geography
When I first heard about teaching online, I was skeptical. I had visions of taped lectures, impersonal interactions, and the hassle of getting students all together for a chat session. After doing some research into the subject including talking to those who had successfully taught online, I realized that there are just as many ways to teach and learn effectively online as there are in a face-to-face (FTF) setting.
One of the best things about teaching online is its asynchronous nature. Today many students have career or family obligations that would otherwise prevent them from attending a FTF course. In an online course, students can work from anywhere at anytime. For example, in my class, students have a weekly learning module with scheduled due dates for assignments and discussions, but they otherwise complete their work at their own pace. Another positive aspect of teaching online is the enhanced interactions amongst the students as well as with the instructor. Discussions in the classroom can be challenging at times with little student participation. In an online environment, students have more time to think and process their thoughts before sharing their opinion in a written form. In my online course, weekly discussion topics are assigned. They vary in scope from “hot topics” such as global climate change to watching and sharing observations from a video demonstrating the laws of radiation. Students in my online course were more willing and comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions than in my FTF course. My online students felt much less “on the spot” and had time to develop their thoughts more clearly before contributing to the discussion.
From a pedagogical point of view, while creating and teaching my online course, I used the concept of backwards design. This method of course design focuses first on identifying the most important concepts and ideas of a particular topic, deciding how to assess student understanding of these main objectives, and then designing the instructional activities that will enable the students to learn the material. This design method has enabled me to focus on the big picture: what I want the students to know when they are finished with the class. This has allowed me to streamline my instructional activities so that each discussion, lecture, and assessment works hand in hand to lead the students to the desired end goal.
I have of course run into some challenges in my online teaching. The biggest challenge is the lack of instant feedback. When I am lecturing FTF, I can pretty quickly determine by looking at my students how well a concept is understood. Because online interactions take more time and are asynchronous, it is harder to get that instant sense of how much a student understands. Another challenge has been the actual technology. Sometimes Blackboard breaks. Other times it is operator error (either myself or the student). Most of the time, any problems are resolved fairly quickly, but I have noticed that some students can become frustrated when a particular feature does not work correctly.
Next fall I will be teaching a hybrid course which blends FTF meetings with an online component. I am truly excited because the hybrid model offers the best of both worlds. My Weather and Climate course is extremely content heavy, and in a completely FTF class, I spend the most time delivering that content. A hybrid model will allow me to better focus lectures and leave more time for other types of in-class interactions. During the time outside of class, I will have the students read material on a topic and then take a basic comprehension quiz. Using the results of the quiz, I can tailor my in class activities, both lecture and group work, to address the parts of the material that were not well understood. This solves a couple of problems: students will need to prepare outside of class in order to participate when inside the classroom, and I will know what areas need more instruction. After the in class activities, I can reevaluate the level of understanding with another set of assessments.
I will also be using some online technology in all of my courses during this upcoming semester. Students will be doing group projects where each group will explore a different climate type. In Blackboard, every group will have their own discussion board where they will be able to discuss details of the project and share information such as documents and images. This will cut down on the amount of time each group will need to physically meet, which tends to pose problems due to scheduling conflicts. The culmination of this project will be for each group to create their own wiki to educate the rest of their classmates about their assigned climate group.
As an educator, I am constantly exploring new techniques and technologies with the end goal of giving my students the most fulfilling learning experience possible. My experience teaching online has led to me to carefully consider in all of my courses what I want my students to learn and how to create new and interesting activities to assist them in that learning process.
This article is part of ASpect’s February 2009 issue, The Cutting Edge in Research and Teaching.
1 response so far ↓
1 Perry Glasser // Feb 27, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Hi Hollis:
Nice article, reflective and enthusiastic.
Online teaching poses particularly thorny challenges to those of us who teach skills, however, as opposed to those of us who teach, as your article emphasizes, courses built around knowledge, concepts and ideas.
It’s an important distinction.
I’d agree that online concept/knowledge courses can benefit from asychronicity–it’s a commonplace among the digeratii that the Internet has obviated time and distance as obstacles to collaborative work, and teaching is indeed collaborative work. Papers and question-response tests are easily designed for assessment of student progress in acquiring concepts.
But having taught three different graduate-level workshop writing classes as “pure” online experiences as part of what SSC called The Laptop Initiative, I’d note that when the object of the online class is a performance skill — in my case, writing — teachers need to be forewarned that managing online mechanisms are difficult and inefficient.
Content and concept courses to a large extent are empty-vessel teaching, but workshops engage Socratic methodology, ongoing dialogues.
If Discussion boards are the equivalent of classroom participation, then online environments create an impossibly labor-intensive environment. While distance-learning is the hope of every administrator who wants to to liberate teaching from bricks-and-mortar, all of us need to be aware that much of the cost of going forward with distance-learning for Socratic courses is in faculty labor, a resource that is neither free nor plentiful. (see http://perryglasser.com/html/body_medieval_strategy.html , my essay originally in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1999)
For example, a class of 8 students in a writing workshop might reasonably be expected to submit 3 stories/essays/compositions/articles each per 15 week semester. Say all together, 24 artifacts for class discussion.
Those 24 artifacts posted online on a schedule devised by the professor invite discussion. A single artifact garners a minimum of 7 student responses and 1 faculty response. As in a vital class, several responses will also garner further responses, requests for clarification, debate, etc. At a seminar table, this interaction might take an hour–online, this interaction takes hours and hours–for each artifact. Each Discussion board entry is itself a mini-essay–so say a single artifact draws 20 responses. Just as a matter of arithmetic, that class now in a semester creates 480 Discussion board entries to be read (20×24), each monitored, composed and commented upon by the instructor. That calculation does not include postings for cognitive content while initially creating the online course–theory, if you like, or organized reading of a textbook, with the consequent clarification, conversation, etc. In practice, my classes of merely 8 produced nearly 1,000 discussion entries each. At 15 minutes per entry–far too little for students expecting considered thought– my time to teach an online class came to 250 hours–and that was just for discussion, not email or the actual reading on the artifacts.
Double that, if I had been crazy enough to try this in Freshman Composition with a registration of 16.
Some of those discussions were redundant content, as well. A conversation point made by student A is repeated by students B, C, D, and E, making nearly the same observation, while student F chooses to disagree. Online, where students are compelled to participate because dialogue is the modus operandi of the class, the less-able echo their peers, but there is no silence or eye-contact to generate further thought–just an asynchronous comment perhaps entered days later by a professor or by a peer. Which of us has not looked at a student and said, “And…?” and gotten better participation? Online, that comment is meaningless and has no efficacy. But at a seminar table, the faculty facilitator can instantly request further thought or clarification from any of the respondees, and the writer–student A — might do the same. That’s superior instruction, I think.
What can be accomplished in meat-space in minutes in virtual space takes hours. And my calculation for 8 is a dangerously low enrollment, terribly expensive by an administrative fee structure that charges students the same amount for online or traditional instruction. Imagine trying this with 18 students in Freshman Composition, each of whom is writing 5 or 6 essays. At some point, the quality of instruction has to fall off a cliff because of the crush on the teacher. At the two largest colleges in the US — Phoenix and Kaplan, both accredited, and both “for profit–Composition sections are closed with a registration of 6.
Best, and thanks for your provocative article,
Perry Glasser
English
Leave a Comment