http://vcisrael.macam.ac.il/site/default_flash.htm

February 2, 2001

Mauri Collins

Distributed Learning Designer

Rochester Institute of Technology

Abstract

Many faculty are beginning to teach at a distance at a time when faculty roles are radically changing along several dimensions. If a teacher's role is no longer as the 'font of all wisdom' and the dispenser of knowledge, and if course content can be bought from textbook publishers, what value can a teacher add? This presentation addresses that issue in the context of distance learning, and the difficult transitions faculty are being called upon to make. From her experience as a faculty developer, the author discusses those transitions and suggests specific strategies to ease faculty through them.

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As a distributed learning designer working with both experienced and novice online faculty, I meet faculty with a wide range of teaching styles and expectations. Most realize that online teaching and learning activities are different from those conducted in a face-to-face classroom. Many instructors find that the step from a traditional classroom to online course delivery strains their ability to adapt their teaching style and activities. It is the role of the faculty development professional to provide assistance, encouragement and useful suggestions as instructors strive to attain competence in what can be an unfamiliar and scary venue.

When you add technology to teaching and learning - in classrooms or at a distance, it can open up conversations about how you actually prepare for and deliver 'teaching'. Some tried and true methods that are successful in the in-person classroom just don’t seem to work so well when mediated by technology. Facutly may fear that they will have to learn to teach again, from the ground up. Habitual teaching behaviors must under scrutiny in the light of the application of new delivery technologies. Faculty have the opportunity to preserve what matters most and works best and to transform what needs to change.

The shock of transition to distance learning doesn't seem to be as great when faculty are asked to teach on television. Many faculty are accomplished performance artists and their transition from classroom to televised teaching is, for them, just a case of thinking more visually and making the font size on their presentation materials a little larger. It is close to 'business as usual' - in their familiar place at the front of the room and staying within camera range doesn't pose many problems.

Most teachers now making the transition from classroom to online course delivery are part of the large body of 'mainstream' faculty. They are not the enthusiastic technology pioneers - they are not the 'lone rangers' who learn and use the newest technologies long before 'mainstream' instructors have even heard their acronyms (WWW, DVD, JPG, HDTV . . ) They are not prepared to take on a pioneer's lonely trek. This group is akin to the 'settlers' who follow the trails blazed by the pioneers. Settlers expect luxuries like graded roads, fences, city power, and water, to the lot line, with schools, churches and shops within easy travelling distance. Where 'technology pioneers' are willing to develop computer code and course development tools themselves, the faculty 'settler' needs the comforting structure of templates and HTML editors or whole course management systems, either purchased by the institution or homegrown. They also need 'guides' who can lead them gently by the hand, into these new and sometimes frightening vistas.

Software training - 'Building Web Pages 101' or 'Using Graphics on Web Pages' and, at many institutions, is easy to come by. What is troubling is that this appears to be assumed sufficient to effortlessly move a faculty member from in-person classroom teaching to online course delivery. Most higher education institutions have instructional development personnel, trained to assist in the technical translation of teaching materials used in the classroom for online delivery. Either the faculty person - or their graduate/ teaching assistant - is taught to do convert documents and other digital resources. Instructional developers can build or use course development templates and do graphic design work beyond the competency of individual faculty. These activities often result in what has been derisively called 'shovel-ware' - course materials translated in toto, with little knowledge or consideration of necessary design and process changes to accommodate them to new delivery technologies. Is this 'technical training and support' sufficient to complete the transition of classroom teachers to effective online facilitators of learning? I think not.

Over the past 10 years I have discovered that, for most faculty members, learning the layout of the software, what the 'buttons' are, and how to 'push' them in the right sequences takes about 30 minutes when done one-on-one and an hour or so in a group lab setting. Most instructors quickly become comfortable and confident in their use of the course management and delivery software. It doesn't usually take long to get a firm grasp of the structure of threaded discussions - the notion of conferences, items/topics and responses. Most threaded discussion group software can also carry images and sound files, animations and downloadable files, all of which can be dragged-and-dropped.

But there are deep-seated fears that grip many faculty members when they are told they are to teach all or part of their courses online via synchronous or asynchronous computer conferencing. It manifests as a deep sense of discomfort and dis-ease, often without being able to articulate its source or determine its remedy. Their discomfort may stem from fear that they cannot cope with the technical requirements, that they must learn to teach all over again and they will lose their role as the 'dispenser of knowledge' in the course. They express grave concerns for the quality of online courses. Embedded in those concerns is a fear that they cannot maintain what they believe to be adequate quality of instruction, and that they will not be able to control the quality of the finished product. And worst of all, that they may appear incompetent or inept in front of their students.

When preparing to teach online, faculty are confronted with a whole new way of teaching and interacting with students. To teach by using one's fingertips on a keyboard is awkward and different and especially intimidating for some faculty who are just getting used to using computers and to the notion of electronic mail - even more so for those who have never acquired keyboarding skills. As 'performance artists' faculty are used to keeping a close eye on their audience and making instant adjustments in their information delivery pace and style in response to visual and aural feedback. Suddenly they are confronted with a computer screen that doesn't have eyes to watch or 'body language' to interpret. Faculty generally teach as they were taught, and have comfortably developed a classroom teaching style that mirrors what they have seen demonstrated and have used with some success themselves. Because have to move out of their own comfort zone to use a delivery technology other than the 'chalk-and-talk' they are used to, they begin to fear that nothing they know has value any more.

This fear can be exacerbated by new developments in the publishing industry. For the cost of a textbook, instructors and students can buy access to an extensive array of information, course content, packaged by publishing houses and other commercial entities. Starting with their lower division, high enrollment courses, American publishers are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into the building and maintenance of extensive web sites to augment their textbook offerings. They have converted all their teacher supplements to web pages that also house chapter summaries, glossaries, reflection and discussion questions. These materials extend far beyond paperbound faculty and student supplements. PowerPoint presentations - some with voice annotation - are ready for student or faculty use. For student assessment these sites provide web-based quizzes and self-tests. At some publishers' sites, teams of faculty are constantly sifting through emerging information and adding to those resources. Publishers are also building discipline-specific, rather course-specific web sites, with yet another elaborate layer of resources. Some sites even have chat and discussion forums embedded in them so they can become self-contained course management systems. I doubt that any one faculty person, college or university could afford so great an investment in developing content and resources for individual courses or programs.

Any faculty member who still thinks that a large proportion of his/her job is to pass along to students - almost verbatim -their accumulated wisdom and knowledge is walking in the wrong direction. It is an epiphany when teachers realize they can’t teach any body anything! There is sometimes no correlation at all between "teaching behaviors" and what the students learn. If the teacher is no longer the source and dispenser of knowledge, and if course content can be purchased, what value can a teacher add? How can they best assist the student’s own learning?

Faculty development professionals can take instructors 'gently by the hand' and show them how to adjust their personal teaching styles and turn their considerable intellectual resources to building learning environments for their students. Faculty, particularly senior faculty, are loathe to admit their fear aloud - especially in front of their peers. Taking them gently by the hand is to help them to articulate and deal with that fear. Sometimes it means determining that teaching online is so antithetical to a faculty member's personal teaching style that they should not be asked - or coerced - into making the transition. It involves reassuring faculty that many of the teaching methods and techniques they use successfully in the classroom really can be translated into computer-mediated classes. It involves helping them see - one step at a time - that there is much that they will not have to relearn or re-develop.

I believe the best preparation for teaching at a distance is to become a distance student. This can be an illuminating experience. When I work with adjunct faculty who have very recently been online students themselves, they quickly accept suggestions to diminish the size of the readings package and expanding the time spent in discussion and problem-solving. Building those complex problem scenarios takes time and careful thought, and, like real life, the best don't always have tidy solutions. Taking faculty 'gently by the hand' means sharing examples and principles with them and serving as a sympathetic audience and rigorous editor.

When faculty can start at least a term ahead, they can add communications technology to their classroom teaching and to reexamine and re-think what they are already doing. Much of it will map over seamlessly. Some actions and activities won’t. As technologies are phased into classroom offerings, both faculty and students have a "safety net" as they acquire the necessary technological skills. Students and faculty are comfortable with the familiarity of the classroom. They can maintain this safe haven as they experiment with new technologies and the inevitable raids by the machine deamons aren’t so frustrating. Overheads can be replaced with PowerPoint presentations in the classrooms, and later be re-purposed with a voice over track for storage on a CDRom or a webpage) as mini-lectures. If the facilities are available, adding television/video recordings for material that can only be shown or demonstrated adds only one more layer of technology to instructor's the tool kit and generates recorded material that can later be edited down and stored as clips and streamed, or distributed on tape, CDRom or DVD.

Faculty can start with small steps like taking all their existing 'digital instructional resources' — syllabi, schedules, documents and handouts that are already on floppies and save them as HTML in a word processor, do the final editing on those html files and have the word processor publish them to web pages. This used to be a long and tedious process, but improvements in word processors are making it more and more transparent. Many course management systems make even this step unnecessary.

Students find ‘lecture notes’ a valuable resource. They can be downloaded ahead of time, brought to class and annotated during class discussion, and used for review afterwards. The way around an instructor's fear of "if they have my notes they won’t come to class" is to encourage them not to lecture in class and expect students to come prepared to "perform" — report, discuss, pose questions to each other, debate, argue and defend and share stories about their experiences with the topics under discussion. These activities will translate effectively into synchronous chats and asynchronous threaded discussion groups.

The use of email can be phased in for the submission of assignments and homework, for sending out course announcements and commenting individually on students’ work. Students and faculty can start by copy-and-pasting file contents into the body of email messages and graduate to sending those files as attachments. Mail distribution lists allow a single message to reach all class members and can be used effectively for brainstorming and discussion.

Where an online conferencing program is available, instructors can be helped to discover that classroom time can be significantly extended. Course content that needs to be read/watched/listened to/thought about/talked about/written about can be dealt with very effectively by using a mailing list or an asynchronous online conference that does not require everyone to be all together at one time. Both faculty and students can practice formulating questions to stimulate the discussion, and summarizing what has been "said"/written. I have watched faculty over two or three terms realize that they can cut down their in-class time from two or three periods a week to one. The step to a completely online course is then a small one.

Regular writing assignments throughout the term, peer-critiqued, can often provide a better record of student growth and learning than point estimates taken in the form of tests and examinations. Instructors get to know most of the students better than they ever could in a classroom and can quickly detect radical changes from their usual style. When they discover the hassle of scheduling proctored examinations, they are willing to discuss alternate forms of assessment that, incidentally can provide a broader view of student learning.

These technologies should be fit into the course where they can help both students and faculty do things that couldn’t be done in a classroom before, or to do them faster and more efficiently. Phasing in technology allows students and faculty to become familiar with their use while in the safety of classroom.

If a faculty person has been phasing technology into the classroom, the move to teaching online is a change in degree, but not kind. At first that technology will be used to do old things in new ways, but as comfort grows so does the realization that instructors have a greater potential for augmenting the learning situation and can start doing new things in new ways. Teachers relieved from rehearsing course content online can model appropriate behaviors, structure activities, pose questions and realistic problems, and act like a journeyman overseeing the learning activities of their apprentices. Students can be enculturated into the language, behaviors, assumptions, and activities of their discipline as they practice them under their teacher’s watchful eye and expert feedback.

Teachers can do what they do best - map the students' path through a bewildering array of learning resources, provide mentoring and feedback on their learning performances and model the best in professional behavior. As with most adult learners, when confronted by a new situation, faculty appreciate help from a faculty development person who can offer them structure in the form of process suggestions. Many faculty quickly develop the confidence to proceed by themselves, especially if they have started their practice in their classrooms, before they have to teach online. There are always those who need to be taken gently by the hand and 'fussed over and reassured' for a while. Time invested in giving individual faculty who need it a lot of individual attention up front - in their own office - in their safe space - pays off bountifully. Credibility is built with faculty who, in turn, encourage their peers to take the same first steps - and often become the strongest advocates for teaching with new technologies.