Faculty Academy 2008

I was in an interesting exchange today across multiple levels of the web on which I would like to reflect further.

It started when my friend Eduardo Peirano tweeted a link to me and two others about an article in the May 29th edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “I’ll Never Do It Again,” Elayne Clift laid out her reasons for never teaching online again. Her five reasons included:

1. “Virtual community” is the ultimate oxymoron.
2. The lack of immediacy in communication is maddening.
3. The quality of education is compromised in online learning.
4. Show the money (more work for the same pay)
5. Online teaching can be very punishing (requires more time)

She wrapped up her comments with:

“Weary and obsessed, I began to feel that, despite my best efforts, I was not up to the task, not in control, not meeting my own standards. On top of that, I suspected my students didn’t like me very much. That hurt. I began to break out in rashes and suffer sleepless nights.

That’s when I knew that I would not do it again and would chalk it up to experience — even if that decision meant hanging up my chalk altogether. Try to talk me down. Tell me I didn’t give it enough time. Call me old-fashioned and out-of-date. Just don’t call me to teach online.

I’ll leave that to (younger?) teachers who like living in a virtual world of virtual students with virtual goals, capacities, and ideas. Me? I’ll stick to the virtues of live human interaction — in the classroom and elsewhere — in a world rapidly becoming, as some of my students might say, “totally unreal!””

Eduardo knew that this 59-year-old (younger?) faculty would rise to the bait! He had started a discussion forum around this article in his Ning site for Higher Education - College 2.0. In his post, he noted:

“Aren’t online teachers complicating themselves. At the face to face classes there is nothing similar to forum discussions. So 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…) or presentation.”

I posted a reply on the College 2.0 forum, but I was fairly certain that Elayne Clift or folks that agreed with her would never see it there. So I posted the same comments in a Chronicle Forum for article discussion (as well as linking this comment out on Twitter). Jon Becker was more eloquent in 140 characters but summed up my feelings pretty well:

My more lengthy comment was:

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.

That was near 1pm today. Another person had started a similar forum called “Teaching Online.” By dinner time, these two comments had been read over three hundred and two-fifty times respectively, and a lengthy exchange was developing in the forum. What I found fascinating was that our comments evoked such strong reaction from two faculty who had never taught online. I respect more the comments from those who had taught online. My Twitter network is biased towards technology but was much more aligned with my own comments.

In several Chronicle comments, there was a note of fear that the “good old days” were gone and that because of online learning, higher education was going to hell in a handbasket. “Beatitude” noted “I hope to God this isn’t the future for all of higher education…”

“Beatitude” raised a number of interesting points. He or she noted that online courses were fine in the summer as long as they did not take resources away from [real] courses in the academic year. (My interpretation). There was a bit of fear about potential loss of jobs due to outsourcing. And a note that many students currently taking online courses live on campus and take these courses from their dorms.

All true.

Yet, there is no real discussion about “learning” or academic success. My simplistic view is that online is simply a mode of delivery, as are large lectures, small classrooms, and even tele-delivery to remote satellite settings. We do not burn down large lecture halls because significant numbers of students fail those classes. We instead look at best means of delivery given the context of large lecture halls. Online should be no different. Castigating online as something to fear for the future seems narrow-sighted.

Recent polls suggest almost 100% of entering students already own a laptop. Given wireless connectivity, there really is no course anymore in which some online learning does not occur. Our students are using Google and Wikipedia, either in class or outside it (not to mention Facebook!). The question is not whether students are online or not but rather whether we faculty are guiding their online lives towards learning that matters.

Lisa Lane had a more positive note in her posting in College 2.0 on this matter:

“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.”

I agree with Lisa (and I think our White Paper was an attempt to do just the type of sharing she suggests).

Eduardo hit my hot button today (or more correctly, Elayne did). What are your thoughts? Have we not reached the point where the debate over the efficacy of online learning is past and where we should instead be focusing on the new practices needed to make online learning the success many of us have already seen it to be? As always, I would be interested in your comments and reaction.

{Photo Remixed from Gill Wildman}

After a slight delay, the second video from Faculty Academy 2009 is up and it’s the terrific talk from James Boyle on “Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness”. Lots of good morsels to chew on here. I’ll be putting up more videos on the FA09 website on the webcasts page. It all went by so fast . . .

read more

Bud Deihl and I traveled north a few miles to attend the University of Mary Washington’s Faculty Academy 2009 in Fredericksburg, VA. It was a chance to reconnect face-to-face with some of my Twitter friends like Martha Burtis (see her reflections on this day here), George Brett and Laura Blankenship.

One of the highlights for me was the lunch debate between the Right Reverend Jim Groom and John St. Clair on “Is the CMS Dead?“ In a lively back and forth, the original Edupunk Jim suggested that the course management system was only good for management, not learning, and as such, SHOULD be dead … but appeared to be more undead (I knew zombies would appear at some point in his talk). John countered that he thought the talk was about CMS - conservative mid-sized sedans - and that he thought most people wanted a sensible automobile and not some do-it-yourself hovercraft!

Both gentlemen gave great passionate arguments to their side. I talked to Jim afterward and asked why the question had to be CMS “or” open systems? In the past two semesters, I have used the Blackboard CMS for the things it does well (document and link management, rosters, grade management), but also used blogging, Jing and wikis for collaborative work with my students. In other words, Blackboard served as a portal and launching point for my students into the open web. This seemed to me to be a case of “AND” rather than “or.”

I enjoyed the lunch debate, but in reality, the whole day was fantastic!

James Boyle gave an invigorating keynote on “Cultural Agoraphobia: What Universities Need to Know About Our Bias Against Openness.” Having just come off the Board of Directors for Creative Commons, he was uniquely qualified to discuss this issue. He started with a history of the internet and how openness was a bug meant to be fixed later, but the internet grew more rapidly than anticipated and openness spawned many wonderful opportunities and profitable enterprises. It definitely caused problems and concerns, but also amazing positives in the business world, entertainment, government, and education. Yet, Boyle stated that education has yet to deal with its concerns and instead simply is biased against openness. He noted that openness meant not only the ability to copy but also the ability to improve.

Thoroughly enjoyed the talk. Jeff Nugent has recently had us at the CTE discussing licensing our Center organizational web material with a Creative Commons license.

I attended a great panel discussion by UMW faculty on their use of blogging in their classes. It was a chance to see a very diverse mix of blogs associated with writing classes, art classes, science classes and math classes. One of the take-aways was that blogs allowed time for students to reflect on critical issues for which there just was not time in 50-minute classes.

Cole Camplese of Penn State University gave an excellent talk on emerging trends impacting teaching and learning. I loved his observation that we view what our students do as “technology,” but that it is only technology to those of us born before technology. To the students raised in a wired world, it is simply a means of communication and connection. I was blown away by the fact he listed that 40% of students at Penn State no longer bring a TV to campus. They get their “TV” and entertainment straight off the web. He noted that our universities are still designed as if our students are going to receive our wisdom and reflect it back to us, when in reality, through their own content and knowledge creation, our students act more as amplifiers than reflectors. At Penn State, they have cast blogs as a form of digital publishing and are exploring ways for students to keep their own digital content. If blogs are viewed as personal content management systems, then digital expression is seen as a form of scholarship that must be systematically supported.

I was also impressed that a third of PSU faculty reported using YouTube instructionally.

The last session of the day was a workshop run by Laura Blankenship on “Creating a Personal Learning Network for Yourself and Your Students.” We will be discussing the same topic at our upcoming Teaching and Learning with Technology Institute in June, so I was interested in seeing how Laura presented this concept. She did a great job by first focusing on problems that needed solving, and then brainstorming from the group web applications that could be used to solve these problems. In the course of the discussion, we discussed RSS feeds, Google Reader, delicious, Jott, and a host of other tools.

One last side thought - Twitter was very active among participants, and the hashtag #umwfa09 made note-taking unnecessary. However, Twitter had scheduled maintenance today which hit right at the end of Cole’s talk, and it was momentarily frustrating to lose it mid-conference (so much so that I complained about it in Facebook!!!)

Great day - looking forward to Day Two tomorrow!