Online Teaching - "I'll Never Do It Again"

[Eduardo Peirano]

Thanks to Esperanza I was alerted to the article I'll Never Do It Again - Chronicle.com. Thanks to Gabriela Grosseck the link to that article was retwitted several times. In this article Elayne Clift, a lecturer at various colleges and universities complains about online teaching:

- too much work
- difficult to communicate with people for whom she has no face, no persona, no body language, no in-the-moment exchange.
- the lack of immediacy in communication
- couldn't keep up with all the posts, replies, planning, announcements, tracking, grading, and so on unless she visited the increasingly dreaded Blackboard almost every day.
- all the e-mail messages that she received from students

She wrote "couldn't keep up with all the posts, replies, planning, announcements, tracking, grading, and so on unless I visited the increasingly dreaded Blackboard almost every day"

Aren't online teachers complicating themselves. At the face to face classes there is nothing similar to forum discussions. So the the discussions between the students should be very important for their grade!! They should be allowed to help each other and the teacher's role is to point them to good resources and to support and facilitate the discussions and learning. If the homework is a collaborative paper each student should be responsible to contribute with some paragraphs (Michael Wesch: A Cultural Anthropologist Looks at Digital Technolog...) presentation.

The post Leading Horses: notes on helping, failing and peeking from Lisa M Lane is also related to this topic.

I would like to know what do you think and would appreciate your contribution to this thread. How can we make online teaching easier to manage?

[Britt Watwood]

First, thanks Eduardo for taking a leadership position on this! I posted the following in the Chronicle forum and would suggest others reply both here and in the Chronicle - http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,60723.0.html

Elayne Clift certainly had issues with teaching online, but it appeared to me that she attempted this course without changing any of her practices, and teaching online is fundamentally different than teaching face-to-face. I am as old-dog as Clift, but I also have been teaching online for 14 years at a variety of institutions, and see things a little different than she does.

A "virtual community" is only an oxymoron if the faculty does not instill a sense of community through her or his own social presence in the class. Using social media and collaborative activities, a community can not only form but be very strong. Social networking tools can lead to a rich communication not only within just the course but with discipline experts worldwide. We recently held a webconference with our class and guest speakers, and we also opened it up to the world through Twitter. Others in the field from around the country joined the webconference and began interacting with our students in the chat box. You could not duplicate that in a physical classroom.

As to lack of quality, that is more an indictment on the institution and the faculty than on online learning. In my most recent class that I co-taught with another, several students used the term "life-altering" to express their appreciation for the quality of learning they found in our class.

The comments about money and time suggest to me again that Clift attempted to be the single expert on the stage rather than co-opting her students into the learning process. I find the time distributed nature of online learning works well for me, but much of my focus is on helping students learn how to learn and teach each other.

I was lead author of a white paper published by our Center for Teaching Excellence on online teaching> http://bit.ly/11DBMx. It focuses on the practice of teaching online, and may offer an alternative view to the one espoused by Clift. Please add to the conversation - we would be interested in your thoughts.

[Eduardo Peirano]

Britt: you wrote:
"The comments about money and time suggest to me again that Clift attempted to be the single expert on the stage rather than co-opting her students into the learning process. I find the time distributed nature of online learning works well for me, but much of my focus is on helping students learn how to learn and teach each other."

I think that this is the way how online teachers should work.

[Wayne]

I completely agree with your analysis Britt.

The problems identified all have solutions, which have been explored by other practitioners. Like the traditional classroom, online teaching should be cyclical; design, delivery, evaluation, and redesign. I would suggest Elayne take the feedback from the students, look at the learning objectives she was trying to achieve, and then explore tools and techniques to teach them online. I think their was a disconnect between delivery, learning activities, and goals. The combination can lead to a very frustrating experience.

It was unfair of Elayne to generalize her experience regarding communication, community, and quality. To me these were all issues with her online design and delivery. I think you could make the same generalizations after teaching a poorly designed face-to-face course.

In the end, I don't think teaching online is for everyone (much like taking online courses). In order to be successful you need to be comfortable with the tools and be open to exploring different design and delivery methods.

[Lisa M Lane]

This sounds like a tale of a bad support environment.

Faculty who've been teaching online awhile have a responsibility to share their experiences, tips and tricks with those just starting out. Mechanisms need to be in place for them to do that, whether it's professional development programs, training seminars, or social interaction (online or in person). I could, and have, provided many, many solutions to the overload so many new online instructors experience trying to make their online class as much like their on-site classes as possible. There are indeed ways to design the experience to be easier and better for all.

[Eduardo Peirano]

As Britt Watwood posted "it was an interesting exchange across multiple levels of the web".

I also replied in the Chronicle Discussion Forum's Thread "Plane pilots learn with simulations. I agree that online teaching is not for everyone"

Several months later Stephen Downes posted about the same Chronicle Readers Discussion "How many of you would want a pilot who studied in a flight simulator?" Right, and the rest of you can contemplate how pilots can practice landing in the Hudson in real life."