On-line Teaching Experiences in Higher Education
As the title of this book “Finding your online voice” already suggests, this chapter will bring forward a personal voice, and will largely build on personal online teaching and learning experiences. The focus of this chapter will thus be on teaching/learning methods that I have found to work and that have made online teaching a pleasant (learning) experience for me, the instructor and that have contributed to effective learning among for students. My claim to validity is there for a modest one, I am not trying to prove anything, but will limit myself to discussing my own experiences, backing them up by referring to what I have learned from my students and my colleagues and from research in the field.,
Distance education has grown considerably the last two decades. Currently 60% of graduate schools offering face-to-face programs, also offer online graduate programs. This means that a sizable proportion of those who teach in these institutions does so online and that many others will soon follows. Sharing experiences, discussing opportunities and challenges, and consulting the existing research will contribute to making it easier for us, instructors, to be successful, efficient and effective online facilitators, whence my personal approach in this chapter.
What motivates faculty to teach online courses?
In just one year, from 2003 to 2004, in the USA online enrollment increased from 1.98 million to 2.35 million. (http://www.sloan-c.org/resources/survey.asp.) This means that more online instructors will continue to be needed and increasing numbers of those who used to teach face-to-face will gradually have to familiarize themselves with online teaching. Some will gladly accept the challenge, others may do so reluctantly. Management theorist Peter Drucker, predicted some ten years ago that higher education institutions in their current form will be relics in a matter of a few short years. His message was clear: change or die (Lenzer, 1997). Regardless of whether faculty consider online education a positive or negative development, they may have to go with the flow. Institutes that provide on-line courses have the important role to ensure that faculty are well trained so that the change from face-to-face teaching to online teaching is a smooth one. Emphasizing that content is more important than technology, may encourage faculty to face online delivery as part of their teaching obligations and enrich their experience.
To do something well one must be motivated. Motivation may be extrinsic, such as getting extra pay, or getting release time, or it may be intrinsic, such as self-satisfaction or intellectual stimulation. Research showed that self-satisfaction, flexible scheduling and a wider audience, making it possible to teach one’s preferred classes often, are intrinsic motivators for online faculty, while stipends, decreased workload, release time and new technology are extrinsic motivators (Parker, 2000).
What motivates me to teach online?
As I am supposed to tell you something about my experiences as an online teacher it would be helpful, I think, to share with you what my motivation is to teach. The answer is a simple one, I teach first and foremost because I love people – I like to interact, learn from people and share my experience of the world, the things that I consider to be important in becoming better human beings, more effective professionals, more efficient and effective communicators, in short conscientious humans who function well in a complex and ever changing world. My principle intrinsic motivation is self-fulfillment-doing something that I like to do and working hard to do it better than before. A second motivator is that I would like to get a better understanding of how people learn, what causes people to do certain things and not to do other things. Is it possible to influence people, to help them to complete courses successfully and/or, if necessary to help them to increase their motivation? I want to learn more about effective approaches to learning, affective communication skills and motivational “tactics” to enrich the online experience.
Lastly, the particular attributes of online teaching appeal to me as I have worked for more than twenty years in countries where students are under-served and where the geographical and social distribution makes it difficult to participate in traditional tertiary education, distance education offers important opportunities to make education more accessible and to increase equity.
It seems that my intrinsic motivation is closely related to the five intrinsic motives Wolcott and Betts (1999) mention:
· personal or socially derived satisfaction
· personal/professional growth
· personal challenge,
· humane concerns
· career enhancing motives.
There are some other things that are important to me and that I should mention. Having grown up in a school environment where asking questions was not encouraged, where having doubts (a form of critical thinking) was seen as negative, was not always a positive experience, but later on, while getting the opportunity to teach, these experiences challenged me to try to do better, to encourage questioning and critical thoughts, to foster curiosity and to challenge opinions.
Online instructors, online learners, and online experiences
Many online instructors do, unfortunately, not have the experience of having been an online learner. They may look at online learning as an outsider, not as someone having been involved in the process and having learned through and from it. That is different in traditional education. We have all spent years sitting in a classroom and have been exposed to the “sage on the stage”. Those of us who have become instructors may look back at these days and incorporate their positive learning experiences in their teaching and carefully avoid what they have experienced as negative. It may thus sometimes be difficult for online instructors to imagine how online students feel if they have to wait for feedback for weeks, for an answer to a simple question for days, or receive a reply that is ambiguous. In a face-to-face context the instructor will mostly be present during lecturing hours (class instruction). Quite a few students experience an almost total absence of the instructor in their online courses, as the online instructor may choose not to get involved and this may not have any real consequences. “I have had online instructors who have constantly been absent, they only once or twice got in touch with us during the 16-week course”, remarked one of my students recently.
As a distance education student I have shared that experience. Feedback on assignments often took long, sometimes six weeks. That meant that I was sometimes halfway through a course before I got suggestions on how to improve my work. I have experienced the challenges of studying “alone”, of feeling isolated, the frustration if the tutor or instructor was not very understandable and the joy of belonging to a group of classmates. It may be useful if we follow the example of a division of the Open University UK, where instructors themselves have to enroll in at least one online course so that they get the feeling what it is to be a student (again).
I will end this section by giving two examples of instructor interventions that have made a real difference to me, a distance education student. Almost thirty years ago, I was living and working in Botswana and doing a BA in English in a real traditional correspondence program. In the translation courses contact with the instructor was very poor, especially in the second year. Fortunately, one time the second year instructor was ill and was substituted by the first year instructor. She sent me my corrected paper back with some very basic suggestions as was then the custom: check on page 18 of… and then came the name of the grammar book. But she added one sentence that I will never forget: “Still going strong I see”. Even now almost thirty years later, I recall these five words and feeling they gave me, something like “here is someone who cares”.
In the beginning of the 1990’s I decided to enroll in a Masters in Education program with the External Department of the University of London. It consisted of four basic courses/modules of 250 hours each, three electives, also 250 hours each, and a research project. Student support was still very basic. Courses “in a box”, supported by audio-cassettes and the occasional video. Assignments had to be sent in and at the end of each module there was a written exam that had to be done at the British Embassy. Feedback was, however, generally very good, although there was no contact whatsoever with the other students and/or the tutor. Although I finished the program successfully and in time, it had been very hard. Here again one instructor made a difference. Discussing some research I had done for one of my courses, he said: “You could use these data when you are doing your doctoral work”. It helped me enormously. First of all, I concluded that he was not only sure that I would successfully finish my Masters degree, but also that he thought that I could go on for a doctoral degree. This experience led to my dissertation research in motivational communication.
What do students expect their online instructor to do for them?
The expectations online students have about the interaction they will have with their instructor may differ considerably. Cultural context may play a role as is seen in an exploratory study involving online students from a university in the United Kingdom and a university in Hong Kong. Online students in Hong Kong expected the instructor to give explicit guidance, to tell them what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and to indicate where they could find the answers to problems they encountered. There was little room for initiative, creativity and critical thinking. Their preference was to enroll in a course “in a box”, with clearly defined chunks of “teaching” and “applying”, so that the students would be do the required readings contained in the study materials and the assigned exercises and pass the course. Students in the UK, on the other hand, expected the instructor to give a high quality lecture on line, and/or printed notes, and to encourage them to engage in finding resources and using their own creativity to find solutions to set problems. Their dependence on the instructor only showed in their wish to get quick, efficient and effective feedback. On the other hand students from Venezuela, enrolled in an online Masters’ program, formed study groups right from the beginning and expected the instructor to set group-work and then to give feedback to individual groups and only occasionally involve the whole class. Although the examples given above relate to an international audience, I have seen the same differences in classes in the USA.
Not knowing the expectations of the students, or not defining well what the students may expect from the instructor can lead to confusion and to problems. The following example illustrates this. Luc had sent in a draft of an assignment. The instructor made a number of observations and suggestions so that Luc could improve the assignment. A week later, Luc submitted the final version of his assignment. It was sent back to Luc with a grade. The latter complained immediately stating that the instructor had failed to indicate in the draft paper every small item that had to be dealt with. Referring to suggestions from the instructor in his final assignment Luc wrote: “Why was this feedback not included in my draft? I added and made all changed [sic] you mentioned in my draft document, however, the comments you made in my final were not all made in my draft paper.. If they were I would have addressed those concerns to better show my comprehension of the concepts.”. Marlies, another student, had another opinion. After she received feedback on her draft assignment she wrote: Thanks for putting me in the right direction-it was helpful.”
The role of communication in online teaching and learning
Motivation plays an important role in course completion. This was recognized by Briggs (1980) who stated that our theories or models of design do not sufficiently take motivation into account, by Bohlin who considered motivation the backbone of instruction (1987) and by Keller (1998) who sees motivation as one of the main influences on performance. Motivation refers to the choices people make, to what goals they want to realize and to the effort they want to put into reaching these goals. As instructors we can help learners to set and maintain their motivational levels. A way to do this is through making sure that we have information about them, through staying in touch with them and through communicating with them in a caring and affective way. This may be easier in a face-to-face instructional context than in online instruction. Body posture, facial expressions and the speaker’s voice are not easily transmitted in an online context. Up to now we do not have ways to substitute social cues such as a pat on the shoulder, a wink, or an encouraging smile we can use in a face-to-face situation. The availability of social cues, and opportunities for small talk that exist in face-to-face classes and contributes to getting to know each other better, are absent. We thus have to use written words to substitute these affective contacts. That is not always easy, especially if one is new to online communication. With the increase of the use of computer mediated communication, it is likely that people get more experience in interacting in such ways that social communication patterns are gradually revealed (Wienicki, 2003).