May 22, 2002

Tough Transitions for Faculty and their Courses

Mauri Collins

Online Faculty Development Specialist

Rochester Institute of Technology

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 exclusive presenter 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 hybrid courses, 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.

Introduction

I was thrilled to listen to Murray Goldberg's presentation this morning. I chaired three conferences at Northern Arizona University - NAUweb97, NAUweb 98 and NAUweb 99. I met him first when he presented on the WebCT course management system at NAUweb97. He remembers that conference as the first conference in the United States that was oriented towards teachers, rather than technologists, and to teaching and learning on the Web. Murray is a pioneer thinker and is still out there on the frontier, charting the way for others to follow.

I, on the other hand, live in an office in the basement of the library - big enough to hold me, my computer and desk, the beanie babies, the quilts over the backs of chairs, the bookshelves, and the whiteboard. At work we have two initiatives that I am involved in "Improving the Distance Learning Experience" and "Best Practices in Online Teaching and Learning". I have chosen to focus my efforts on the interface between teacher and learner as the prime leverage point where significant and lasting improvement can occur. To that end I mentor faculty one at a time, designing and redesigning courses and suggesting online teaching and learning methods and strategies.

The title of my presentation today brings together three threads that have been of great concern to me over the past four or five years:

1. the changing role of course content
2. the changing roles of faculty as they transition from classroom teaching to online teaching, and
3. how faculty development persons can help that transition be as painless as possible for all concerned

Since 1995 I have been writing and talking about faculty role changes to meet the demands of the online teaching environment. The adage of "sage on the stage to guide on the side" has long since become cliché. There even seems to be a general recognition that the epoch captured in the title of the web conference I chaired in 1998 at Northern Arizona University "From Pioneers to Settlers" is in full swing. That is what makes my remarks all the more pertinent. For many of us here, all this change is "old hat", so much so that we forget the profound impact that this transition has on many teachers when they are confronted, for the first time, with the stresses of online teaching and learning.

This was dramatically brought home to me by two related incidents:

Last year representatives of two of the leading text-book publishers came to the RIT campus. Their presentations were designed to encourage us to recommend that our faculty purchase their "enhanced" textbooks. These publishers had gone far beyond just tucking a CDRom into the slip jacket. They proudly showed us their integrated web sites with chapter summaries, self-tests and their associated grade books, and constantly up-dated collateral content. They even had discussion forums set up ready to be used, with discussion starter questions in place. The cost was covered by the textbook purchase price - students bought their user id and password. Hundreds and thousands of dollars were being put into these very attractive web sites that went along with many of their high volume textbooks - like those for business and many of the introductory courses. As I sat listening to the publisher's reps, I reflected on what they were promoting, and what it meant: "course content" had become a commodity in a way that was far different from the sale of static, reference textbooks - even with all the associated teacher aides.

My mind wandered to MIT's announcement that they would be putting all their course content online. At the time, Jack Wilson, chief executive officer of UmassOnline.net was asked innumerable variations of the question "If MIT is giving away access to their courses for free, why would anyone pay for courses from UmassOnline?" He explained that content was the ONLY thing open for general access, not their campus, not their courses, not their faculty, not their credentials. "Of the entire value chain of higher education, content is the least valuable part . . . Teaching is not about content" he said (Wilson, Jack M. (2002). More than digital content: Long live your course. Syllabus 15(10) pp. 12-14. http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6331

"What is there left for me to do?"

As I said, I work with all online faculty to help them with course conversion and the acquisition of new teaching skills. Some time later I introduced a senior full-professor to the web site marvels of a new text-book he had chosen. This was the first time he was teaching this particular undergraduate course online and I, in my innocence, assumed he would be delighted at NOT having to create a lot of content for the new course and build the structure for himself. This was an undergraduate course and his typical online style was to lay out a schedule of readings from the text book, give students the text of his lectures, and have his students take examinations at regular intervals. These students, he said, didn't know enough to "discuss," they had to be "told."

Dr. D and I enthusiastically pointed and clicked our way around the publisher's web site. I sent him off with a copy of my model online course syllabus, created just to make sure faculty didn't leave out anything important that the students needed to know. My instructions to him were go through all the stuff on the web site and to incorporate the materials into his assignments. Several days later he returned to my office with a very unhappy look on his face. He sat down. I asked him how he was doing with his syllabus and how he liked all the new resources he had at his finger-tips. He raised his eyes to mine and said "It's all so amazing! But what is there left for me to do?"

My incredulous reaction - fortunately I caught myself before I blurted it out - was, "If you don't know that after 30 or more years of teaching, then I don't think I can tell you!!"

It took me a few seconds to realize he was perfectly serious. The students had access - at the very beginning of the course - to all the readings, lecture transcriptions, powerpoint presentations, chapter summaries - quizzes etc. - and more - than he would ordinarily cover with them in the course of a term. The course information was all there, and the quizzes to check their "learning." Now what?

This experience re-opened my eyes. This senior faculty member was equating his role as a teacher to a presenter of information and monitor of student's individual interaction with course content - he communicated with each of them via email and conducted what was in effect, 20 or more tutorials. His job, as he saw it, was to assemble and present the resources that the students would need to make it their own. If the students could buy that package, already assembled with their text book. Dr. D just couldn't figure out what role in the educational process was left for him!

` Dr. D was losing sight of the fact that "Teaching is not presenting. Watching is not learning." (Wilson, 2002, p. 13). Students are willing to pay the necessary tuition for "the holistic education experience, which includes 'live-on-line' or live interactions with a faculty member, stimulating interactions with other bright and experienced students, team-generated case studies, academic credit from a well-respected university, and the experience of being part of an academic community." (Wilson, 2002, p. 14). It is the "added value" that an instructor brings to a course of study that is the priceless difference between sitting home and reading a text books, and "going to college."

So what did we do with Dr. D? We have been taking baby steps. Students were complaining bitterly that he wasn’t paying attention to their discussion conferences - they would ask questions but never see a response from him. And yet here was Dr. D telling me proudly that he was answering every one of his students' questions, not back to the conferences but individually, to their own email addresses (and then complaining about how much time it took). It has taken us three terms to get Dr. D comfortable with discussion conferences and the notion that students benefited from having examples of what he considered A projects available to them. I had spent 15 minutes with him trying to determine exactly what it was that he wanted and I still couldn't understand might as well have been ancient Greek he was speaking for all the sense I was getting out of it!. But we have an ongoing relationship and for Dr. D, it is one small step at a time to change a lifetime of attitudes about what constitutes real teaching and learning. I count it a good term when Dr. D becomes comfortable enough to try one new thing.

Faculty in Transition

As a online faculty development specialist working with both experienced and novice online faculty, I meet instructors 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. But many instructors find that the step from a traditional classroom to online course delivery strains their ability to adapt their teaching style and activities - the change is just too much for them.

Most teachers have learned to teach in the classroom by observation and imitation. To teach in a college classroom you must have the requisite discipline knowledge and skills. When someone is interviewed for a position on a college campus they are expected to have done some teaching, too, but no-one asks "And how many courses in how to teach and how adults learn have you taken, Dr. Nuclear Physicist and candidate for the Newtonian Chair in Astrometrics?" Teachers in Higher Education aren't required to take "teaching lessons" to teach in a cllege classroom. So, the thinking goes at many institutions, why should they need "teaching lessons" for teaching online courses? In too many schools they are supplied with some hardware and software training and left to make it by themselves - and then we wonder why there are on-going questions about the parity and rigor of online courses.

One of my more unpopular opinions is about higher education's general failure in our ethical responsibility to see that students have the best learning experience possible for the inordinate amount of dollars that degrees cost. Higher education in the United States - outside of Colleges of Education - does not require its teachers to be certified in any way - as teachers. The assumption is, and always has been, that a professor is a subject matter expert and a researcher that adds to the knowledge bank, and, by the way, can teach, too. This action, in my mind, is as reprehensible - for the power they wield and the damage they can do - as showing a child how to flip off the safety on an AK47 and sending them forth, largely unsupervised, to do good works. And this is doubly true in an online classroom where it is the teacher's ability to create a postivie interface between themselves and the students that will be the difference between a strongly positive learning experience and an electronic correspondence course. Most of these new online teachers - who have not themselves learned online - have nothing in their own experience of teaching and learning to guide them.

[In the audience of 200 or so teachers and educational technologists from many of the Ontario Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology there was only one hand raised when I asked "Who here is from a college that has an faculty development person to help faculty make the transition to online teaching?"]

Faculty Development

Those of us who assist faculty to make the transition from classroom to cyberspace have many different titles but our job is essentially the same - to provide this assistance, encouragement, training and useful suggestions as instructors strive to attain competence embarking on an unfamiliar and scary new adventure.

When you add technology to teaching and learning - in classrooms or at a distance, it can open up productive conversations - sometimes for the very first time - about how you actually prepare for and deliver 'teaching' - what the teacher's responsibility is and what is the students'. Some tried and true instructional methods that are successful in the classroom work brilliantly online and others just don't seem to work so well when they are mediated by instructional technology.

Faculty have expressed to me the fear that they will have to learn to teach all over again, from the ground up. Habitual teaching behaviors come under close scrutiny when you apply new delivery technologies. Faculty have the opportunity to preserve what matters most and what works best for the students and to transform what needs to change. But someone - who has been a little further along the path - has to help them make the decisions about what stays, what changes, and what has to go.

From Classroom to the Television Classroom

Some transitions from classroom to mediated teaching at a distance are easier than others. for instance, 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 powerpoint presentations a little larger. It is close to 'business as usual' - in their familiar place at the front of the room. Wearing a microphone and staying within camera range doesn't seem to pose too many problems.

Learning to teach effectively online is a cat of a different color. Most teachers now making the transition from classroom to online course delivery are part of that body of 'mainstream' faculty I mentioned earlier - the settlers. 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 alphabet soup acronyms (WWW, DVD, JPG, HDTV . . ) These faculty are not prepared to take on a pioneer's lonely trek.

The faculty we are working with now are akin to the "settlers" who follow the trails blazed by the technology-in-teaching pioneers, like Murray Goldburg. Settlers arriving in their Conestoga wagons 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 create intricate flash animations and delight in building course simulations, the faculty 'settler' benefits from the comforting structure of templates and HTML editors or whole course management systems, either licensed by the institution or homegrown. They also need 'guides' who can lead them gently by the hand, out into these new and sometimes frightening vistas.

Technology Training is Necessary, but not Sufficient

Software training - 'Building Web Pages 101' or "Getting the most out of <fill in the product name> testing and grade book' are, at many schools, easy to come by. What a shame that it always seems that upper administrators who make the decisions about how much support (in money and staff) will be provided for faculty development have never taught nor learned online. These administrators - many teachers who have grown up out of the classroom - appear to assume that software training alone is sufficient to effortlessly move a professor from classroom teaching to online course delivery - notwithstanding the fact that many of them have never had any formal training in classroom teaching.

Administrators do seem to be willing to fund technology - all those bright and shiny new gadgets and sexy wireless networks. Most higher education institutions have do 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 convert documents and other digital resources to web pages -or paste them into learning management system (e.g. Blackboard or WebCT) templates. There may be instructional developers who can do graphic design work beyond the competency of individual instructor. These activities often result in what has been derisively called 'shovel-ware' - course materials translated as is, with little knowledge or consideration of necessary design and process changes to accommodate them to new delivery technologies.

Is this kind of '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, it's not hard to learn a piece of software, what the icons are, and how to click them in the right sequences. All it takes a good set of handouts and about 30 minutes when done one-on-one (and liberal sprinklings of "Good Job!" and "You got it!") and an hour or so in a group lab setting. Most instructors quickly become comfortable and confident in their use of course management and delivery software. It doesn't usually take long for them 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 into place. Learning the mechanics is the easy part.

Taking Faculty Gently by the Hand

Faculty development professionals can take instructors 'gently by the hand' and show them how to deal with their fears and concerns, adjust their personal teaching styles and turn their considerable intellectual resources to building online learning environments for their students.

There are deeper issues new online faculty face that technical training just does not address. It is fortunate that some faculty choose to teach online and are excited about it. Then there are the others. They have deep seated fears that show up as a deep sense of discomfort and dis-ease, often without them being able to articulate its source or determine its remedy. Their discomfort may stem from fear that they cannot cope with the technical requirements, and they have heard how much longer teaching online can take - they don't know how they can possibly cram any more work into their days. They express grave concerns for the quality of online courses. Embedded in these concerns is a fear that they cannot maintain what they believe to be adequate quality of instruction - and maintain their high ratings on the student evaluations. And worst of all, that they may appear incompetent or inept in front of their students.

It's hard for most faculty to express these fears. At the Universities where I have worked, the faculty body has been mostly male and 50 percent of them now are eligible for retirement in the next 5-10 years. These are senior faculty, some of whom have been teaching for a long time. Their fears are dumped into legitimate "fear buckets." You've all heard them: "How do I know that the person taking the exams is the person signed up for the course?" "How do I stop them from cheating?" "Where will I find the time to do all this?"

I learned a lot about these fears from Dr. G. He had retired from one of our local industry partners where he had been senior chemist with several patents to his name. He had been asked to convert for online delivery his classroom course in what I call "Chemistry in everyday life" - a general chemistry course for undergraduate non-chemistry majors. He came to me a whole YEAR ahead of his teaching his 11 week long online course - all in a flutter. He'd been talking to some of the other part-time instructors who had had a very difficult time with teaching online, and had grave doubts about his own ability to change.

So I went ahead and started off, as I always do, by asking him how he teaches in the classroom - what he did and what his students did. Hmmm! He lectured for 3 hours and his students listened and took notes. His first big question was "How am I going to deliver my lectures to my online students?" So I took him on a short excursion through our demonstration courses - we use the FirstClass conferencing system. It slowly dawned on him "There's no place for me to lecture, is there?" I knew we were in trouble and had a long road ahead of us. When he left my office he went over and made the first of three attempts to break the contract he had signed to teach the course.

He had been confronted with the necessity to learn a whole new way of teaching and interacting with students. To teach by using his fingertips on a keyboard was awkward and different. It is 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 a "performance artist" Dr. G, like most faculty, had been used to keeping a close eye on his audience and making instant adjustments in his information delivery pace and style in response to visual and aural feedback. Suddenly he was confronted with teaching through a computer screen that doesn't have eyes to watch or 'body language' to interpret.

Dr. G was just teaching as he had been taught, and had comfortably developed a classroom teaching style that mirrored what he had seen demonstrated and had used with some success himself. Dr. G was being asked to move way out of his comfort zone to use a delivery technology other than the 'chalk-and-talk' he had been used to. And Dr. G had just begun to suspect just how far out of his comfort zone I was going to nudge him.

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 like Dr. G realize they can't teach a student anything - students must do the learning! There is sometimes no correlation at all between their "teaching behaviors" and what the students actually 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? It was the answer to this question that Dr. G and I were to pursue.

With Dr. G his discovery process took over a year to accomplish and it began with changes in his classroom. We starting with the novel notion that something else could happen besides his lecturing and students asking the occasional question. We helped him to realized there was another reason why he was lecturing - because his students were smart! They quickly figured out that they didn't need to do any assigned reading,nor come prepared for class because Dr. G would rehearse for them what was in the assigned readings, and if a question was not answered within 2 or 3 seconds he would go ahead and answer it himself. He started holding small group discussions in class that required preparation ahead of time. This was the beginning of his holding students accountable for their own learning - and students hate to look stupid in front of their classmates!!

My taking Dr. G. gently by the hand - and his bringing me a muffin once a week - meant that we developed a consistent but simple structure for each unit of his online course - Dr G got panic attacks when faced with too many decisions. The students would have an individual reading assignment and a short quiz to take over the reading - this fulfilled Dr. G's need to be certain the students had at least become acquainted with the chemistry part of the unit. Then there would be one or two group assignments that used the text book as a resource, but also required the students do outside research in the library or on the web, because the topic would be some environmental issue that had been - or was - in the news (to guarantee relevancy to the here-and-now).

The unit on "The water we drink," for instance, had two topics he designed so the students could apply the chemistry information in the assigned reading, showing its immediate application to areas of interest to the students. One topic was the sale of Great Lakes Water. One team researched and presented the pros, the other team presented the cons and the third group represented the regulatory groups that would make the decision on granting or denying the license, based on the evidence presented. Another group's tasks revolved around the problem of how to take drinking water out of the Genessee River and raise it to the standards of bottled water. Do you remember that name? That is the river that caught fire in the bad old days before environmental cleanups.

As we were working together on designing the online course, Dr. G began to experiment with his classroom course, trying out some of the new teaching methods we were discussing. When the same person is teaching online and in the classroom, a reciprocal effect often seems to develop. The critical discovery is that effective teaching methods, besides lecturing, works in both formats. Course materials designed for the online course are valuable resources for classroom students and both classroom and online students benefit from the ease of document distribution.

Taking teachers by the hand involves listening very carefully to them. When I begin to work with a new teacher I spend a lot of time asking how they work in the classroom. I note what they are 'doing right' then reassuring them that many of the teaching methods and techniques they are already using successfully in the classroom readily can be translated into their online courses.

It helps to be an online student before becoming an online teacher

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 part-time faculty who have very recently been online students themselves, they quickly accept suggestions to diminish the size of the readings package and expand the time spent in discussion and problem-solving. Ms P and I sorted this one out together - the course she had inherited was one she had just taken. She had just graduated with her Masters degree and her instructor, coincidentally, had died suddenly. The topic of the course was financial planning for health organizations and had required a 1200 page reader - mostly legal documents.

In this case, taking faculty 'gently by the hand' involved our stripping the course down to the final project and re-building the course around it. Students came out at the end with a finished financial plan - for the business unit in which these distance students were working. The process of building the plan was broken down into stages - each with deliverables to ensure good pacing. Students worked individually to apply the process to their own data. They used the course conferences to share their segments as they were developed, providing critique and helpful advice to each other. All the important legal, financial, and process information in the original course was covered, but in the context of its immediate application to the plan under construction. This worked with Ms. P's personal style, and provided her students with a working document totally relevant to their own needs as financial managers and planners for their respective health organizations. Because they were working on a plan for their own organization, students quickly realized they were not competing for grades and that collaboration could improve their own work.

Teaching to their strengths

Thinking through problem scenarios or case studies to use in an online classroom takes time and careful thought, and, like real life, the best don't always have tidy solutions. All of our faculty at RIT have extensive industry experience and taking these faculty 'gently by the hand' means encouraging them to share their experiences and tell their "war stories." It means encouraging them to take advantage of the experience of their adult students who are collecting a credential truly earned with years of their own work experience.

Mr. W, a new computer language instructor, explained the difficulties he had experienced in his classroom course. Mr. W had many years of experience in managing departments of programmers, but not being a programmer. His students were largely from the College of Business and had complained about the emphasis on writing computer code in his course. He had tightly focussed the course on that aspect, working hard to learn the intricacies of the language, out of a fear that his students would find him inept. After some discussion, we decided that his students needed to know enough about the language that they could direct programmers. The more important aspect of the course was actually not writing code at all, but becoming adept in Mr. W's skills: recognizing situations in which a business problem could be solved or an application built most efficiently, using that particular language. The final note on the bottom of my whiteboard was "More Business, Less Code!" effectively giving him permission to teach to his strengths.

Hybrid courses:The Best Preparation for Teaching Online

When faculty are teaching the same course in the classroom as they are going to teach online taking them gently by the hand can begin by encouraging them to add communications technology to their classroom teaching and to reexamine and re-think what they are already doing in the classrom. 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 understood if it is shown or demonstrated adds only one more layer of technology to instructor's the tool kit. It generates recorded material that can later be edited down and stored as clips and streamed, or distributed on tape, CDRom or DVD.

Faculty scheduled to teach online can start out taking small steps like convertin all their existing 'digital instructional resources' (syllabi, schedules, documents and handouts that are already saved as computer files) 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" i.e. to 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 eventually translate effectively into synchronous chats and asynchronous threaded discussion groups.

The use of email, or a learning managment system, 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. Students need to work individually to acquire information from whatever course resources are provided, then that information needs to be used or applied in some fashion before it can become useful knowledge. Course content that needs to be read, watched, listened to, or thought about can be easily made available in electronic files. When the times comes that course concepts must be talked about or written about, this can be dealt with very effectively by using a mailing list or asynchronous online conferences that do 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 significantly minimize their in-class time from two or three periods a week to one, Classroom time is valuable and can be better used when instructors are no longer spending that time rehersing what the student could acquire by themselves (with some encouragement from the instructor). The step to a completely online course is then a small one.

Assessment of student learning

In both hybrid and online courses the question of assessment of student learning always comes up, especially from faculty who are used to traditional proctored, closed-book examinations. Taking faculty gently by the hand involves introducing them to alternative forms of assessment. Regular writing or homework 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 do get to know most of the students better online than they ever could in a classroom and can quickly detect radical changes from their usual style, ones that might indicate cheating or plagerism. When they discover the hassle of scheduling proctored examinations for online courses, faculty are often are willing to discuss alternate forms of assessment that, incidentally, can provide a broader view of student learning.

When a course is built around a final task, project, or portfolio with regular deliverables, a record of progress at each step is generated as the the student has to integrate a specified set of information, concepts, skills or activities. If each student is applying this a topic of their own choosing, or one that has been assigned by the instructor, cheating becomes a moot issue.

Online delivery technologies should be integrated 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 the classroom.

Conclusion

If a faculty person has been phasing technology into the classroom, the move to teaching online is a change in degree, but not in 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 master, 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 can receive their expert feedback. Students can learn, not only the what and the how, but to be members of their chosen professions.

For all the talk of "super teachers" and courses with ridiculously large enrollments to take advantage of economies of scale, the role of the individual instructor is more important now that it has ever been. All our information resources are growing at a prodigious rate - from our library collections to the billions of web pages now available in the 'shallow web' (the deep web is buried behind passwords and corporate firewalls).

Today, and for the foreseeable future, teachers will continue to 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 and support from faculty developers 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 hybrid courses 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 a lot of individual attention up front - sometimes 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.