Articles by Christopher Hill

07:27:2010

Ten Factors that Determine Online Student Success at Community Colleges

Community colleges are especially prone to problems with student completion of courses and retention of the students to graduation. To assist these institutions in addressing problems of persistence among online students, Robert Knipe, dean of learning technologies at Genesee Community College, undertook a study with area colleagues to learn what factors are most critical in predicting success, with an eye to understanding which factors are in the college’s control and which may predict a student at risk for failing to persist.

Persistence is a key issue for community colleges because they tend to be driven by FTEs. These institutions are typically open admission, and maintaining a certain level of FTE determines the school’s funding for the next year.

To better understand online course persistence, Knipe contacted colleagues at area community colleges. “All [were] seeing about a 70 percent on-time completion rate, down from 80 percent,” he says. However, most research done at that point on online student persistence focused on programs at the baccalaureate level. So, Knipe constructed a “Top Ten” list based on his research that helps community colleges understand when students are most at risk for not completing an online course.

Knipe’s Top Ten Persistence Factors
#10: Learning Style: For a student to be most successful in an online course, he or she must have a learning style that is compatible with the demands of the course. This requires a certain ability to study independently; it also requires a match between the visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learning qualities of the course and the style of the student. There are several online assessments available which students can use to understand their own learning styles.

#9: Previous Success with College Work: As any academic advisor will attest, there is a degree of uncertainty with a new student (or a student new to the institution). Students who have demonstrated that they can handle college-level work are more likely to be successful studying online.

#8: First Time Distance Learning Student: Likewise, a student who has never studied online has no track record demonstrating their ability to handle these classes. The first time distance learning student is something of an unknown.

#7: Technical Factors: Technical factors can also be risk factors for some students, including those who have substandard skills, those who have problems with access, and those whose hardware and/or software are incompatible with the university.

#6: Gender: Being male can be a risk factor for failure to persist, but only up to a certain age. “Young males don’t do as well; older guys do,” Knipe says. Male grade performance trails that of females up until the age of about 25-30, after which men outperform women.

#5: Developmental Needs: These needs include reading, writing, math, and study skills. In a presentation on the subject, Knipe identified the following data point: “For a 50/50 chance of earning a C or better in any online course, basic academic skills should be at college English level.”

#4: Engagement: “Student engagement correlates highly with on-time completion,” Knipe comments. Lack of engagement can come in several forms, including lack of engagement with the course, instructor, other students, or material; lack of feedback; lack of community; or poor instructional design, to name a few areas of potential pitfall.

#3: Age: Academic performance correlates with age. As mentioned in #6 above, gender is a predictive factor in persistence; likewise, both men’s and women’s mean grades rise as they age, although the men make more dramatic strides while the women remain relatively consistent until the age of 25-30, after which they begin to academically improve as they age.

#2: Poor or Nonexistent Advising: Students who receive no advising or who self-advise are subject to a number of potential risks, such as approaching a class with an unrealistic expectation of the time or workload commitment, an assumption that online learning will be passive, or beginning the class with poor time management skills.

#1: Time of Registration: The most dramatic indicator of risk of non-persistence is time of registration. Those who registered 70 or more days from the beginning of the class posted the highest mean grade average, while those who registered after the class had started were very likely to fail.

Strategies for Addressing Online Persistence
So what does an institution do with this sort of information? Knipe explains that there are three ways to improve persistence: better instructional design, gatekeeping, and systemic improvement.

Better instructional design: By improving instructional design, the institution can impact many of the factors within its own control. The institution can do this by training faculty adequately, insuring that course design includes ample opportunities for interaction and feedback, and that faculty can learn from one another through best practices and mentoring.

Gatekeeping: This is the process of allowing the students best-suited for online study to register for the course, while consulting with those at risk before allowing them to proceed. For example, institutions can suggest or require that students take learning style assessments and technical assessment to insure both they and their technology (computers, internet access) are suited for the demands of the course. Knipe also suggest a block be automatically put on a student registration for an online course if the student exhibits one or multiple risk factors; for example, a student attempting to register for a course after the start date may be asked to see both an advisor and the course instructor for counseling about suitability for the course.

Systemic Improvements: Even the best-designed online courses will be problematic if the student support and business processes do not work to the students’ advantage. Knipe reminds campuses that all business process, including admissions, registration, financial aid, and bookstore, must be virtual and distance-learning-friendly, as should student support services like the library, bookstore, tutoring, and the like.

Ultimately, many of the findings of Knipe’s research are somewhat intuitive, while others may raise an eyebrow or two. However, understanding the factors that may put a student at risk for failure to persist in an online class can lead to better advising, better course design, better systems, and a better institution.

Reprinted from How Ten Critical Factors Determine Persistence in Community College Online Programs, November 15, 2009, Distance Education Report.

06:11:2010

Case Study: Building New Online Programs from Your Existing Courses

So often, universities hoping to expand their online course offerings think in terms of developing entire online programs from scratch, writing new courses, translating existing ones into the new delivery methods, and generally making a program that is separate from its campus analog. But for Northern Michigan University, expanding online offerings was a function of examining their existing course offerings and finding the opportunities to complete programs with courses already online.

Northern Michigan University is a private university serving about 9,000 students located in the center of Michigan’s upper peninsula near Lake Superior. Located in one of the snowiest areas of the U.S., NMU is quite rural and is always seeking ways to make education more accessible for its students, many of whom work and have family obligations, and all of whom are dealing with the winter travel conditions that can make getting to school difficult.

Judith Puncochar, associate professor in the school of education at Northern Michigan University, explains the process by which the university found new opportunities for online education by looking at their existing offerings.

Driven by goals
In 2007, the university set two goals that affected this process: first, to find an additional 1,000 students who would enroll in online classes over the next three to five years, and second, to document the current state of online teaching and learning at the university.

This fit well with the goals set by AQIP, the Academic Quality Improvement Program for accreditation sponsored by the Higher Learning Commission. AQIP set four goals for the university:

to improve the quality and consistency of the online learning experience for students and faculty
to identify stakeholders in need of support and/or training, which may be inhibiting them from participating
to document the current state of online learning at NMU and create a baseline to measure growth
to identify new opportunities and increase the number of online offerings.

Finding the baseline“The first step was to create a baseline document from which to measure growth,” says Puncochar. This process turned out to be quite labor-intensive, requiring the help of some of Puncochar’s student research assistants.

In short, the baseline document creation process required a manual tally of information gleaned from program web pages, online course offerings, websites, and graduate and undergraduate bulletins. The researchers tallied the number of credits and the number of required courses within each program for each major, minor, associate’s degree, certificate, bachelor’s degree, and master’s degree. The research also looked at course type such as traditional, online, and hybrids.

Identifying new opportunities
Once this raw data had been gathered, Puncochar and her colleagues could begin to find opportunities for expansion of online programs. They did this by analyzing the programs that had courses online and identifying those that were close to having an online certificate or degree available.

For example, the bachelor’s degree in sociology of liberal arts required 124 total credit hours with eight required courses, seven of which were currently offered online. Likewise, the bachelor’s degree in criminal justice also required 124 credit hours but had 11 required courses, nine of which were online. Each of these programs was offering more than 80 percent of its required courses online, meaning that it could likely easily become a program available online with the addition of one or two courses.

Puncochar then began working the phones, asking these departments what it would take to put those last couple of courses online and what barriers the departments were encountering. With some departments, these conversations brought expressions of resistance, as the chairs and faculty members reminded Puncochar that they have academic freedom and can teach the courses they like in the methods they see as most effective.

This is true, Puncochar allows. “Faculty don’t have to teach online,” she says. “How do you sell this?” Sometimes, the conversation addressed the kind of experience a faculty member could expect; for example, Puncochar finds that her online students are more engaged than her traditional classroom sections, where students can sometimes hide in the crowd.

Overall, some programs were easier to complete than others. At the baseline measurement, the percent of required courses offered online ranged from nearly 50 percent for master’s degree required courses to nearly 15 percent for bachelor’s degree courses to a low of about 7.5 percent for certificate program requirements. Just one year later, these numbers had jumped to nearly 78 percent for master’s degree programs, 18 percent for bachelor’s degree programs, and 22 percent for certificate programs.

Additionally, there are some programs that will likely never be offered entirely online. For example, Puncochar says the university has a goal of having programs in all six liberal studies divisions available online, since the school is a liberal arts school. However, some science departments, notably chemistry, are uncertain about having lab courses offered online, since this implies that students would be conducting potentially-dangerous experiments in their kitchens. However, geology and astronomy were both able to find lab course options that were safe to deliver online, so students can indeed fulfill their lab science requirement online.

Excerpted from Building New Programs with Existing Courses, April 15, 2009, Distance Education Report.

03:30:2010

External Pressures Bring Changes to Higher Education

Higher education faces a number of pressures today that online learning may be able to help address. The economy is increasingly driven by knowledge and technology continues to evolve. At the same time, people are becoming more mobile while demanding lifelong learning to meet their educational needs. All of these pressures are coming to bear on academe, and universities are deciding whether and how to respond.

For most institutions, change is inevitable. “External forces are putting on more pressure to change than internal pressures to stay the same,” says Kelly Edmonds, doctoral candidate in higher education research at the University of Calgary. She has identified a “second order change” beginning in higher education that will likely force a number of paradigm shifts in response to three main types of forces affecting the university. This second order change, while a painful process that brings about dramatic shifts in the way an organization operates, may herald the next generation of higher education practice as the academy shifts to serve a new kind of student, a new kind of economy, and new demands on those who have dedicated their lives to education.

Tension #1: Economic Forces
Everyone who works in higher education is aware that the academy is not insulated from economic pressures. Governmental support for higher education is dwindling, with the situation more dramatic in the U.S. than Canada, says Edmonds. This loss of traditional sources of income means that universities are exploring different models of balancing the budget. One potential response is a move to the “business model,” an idea that is gaining traction among an academic population that a few years ago would have recoiled at the idea that the provision of education has any similarities with the marketing of other goods and services. “The term [business model] is actually being used at the University of Calgary,” says Edmonds.

In addition, no discussion of economic forces would be complete without mentioning competition, and higher education is certainly seeing its share. Privately-owned, for-profit institutions have become very successful bringing traditional business practices, like an emphasis on customer service, to the table. Traditional universities are feeling the pressure to compete with these for-profits or lose a certain segment of their potential student population.

As a result, Edmond notes, universities are being asked to adapt to an entrepreneurial culture with a focus on market share, branding, and consumerism of students. “Universities are moving to commodify education; education is being sold as a product,” she says. While this may be a reasonable response to these pressures, some members of the university, particularly the faculty, are “feeling a loss,” Edmonds says. This sense of loss leads to another set of pressures that she characterizes as philosophical resistance.

Tension #2: Philosophical Resistance
Many of the objections that faculty might have to the growth of online learning are well known. Edmonds identifies several factors in play, such as questions of quality arising from the commodification of education and poor application of technology. Concerns about quality can also stem from a sense of loss of connection to students and the changes to the traditional role of faculty member as expert and lecturer, a model that nearly all of the current generations of faculty members would have experienced in their own career as students.

Many faculty prefer to use conventional pedagogical methods in their classroom. They have a vested interest in these methods, Edmonds finds, and there is a strong Western tradition of the transmission of knowledge from the experts to the learners that is altered in the more egalitarian online environment.

Finally, faculty may have concerns about job security. Many of the current generations of faculty may feel they are giving up some control of the curriculum to instructional designers, especially if these faculty members do not possess the skills to design an online course themselves. Along with this insecurity come concerns about the erosion of academic freedom, as the development of a course comes to require more of a team approach and less of the time-honored tradition of a professor alone in his or her office, consulting reference materials and creating a new course independently.

Tension #3: Political Challenges for Leaders
Edmonds likens changing a university to turning around a ship – a slow process that requires much careful maneuvering. Each of the tensions mentioned above can cause a political challenge for higher education leadership: global competition, competition from for-profits, competing budgets, academic structure and governance, lack of e-learning policies, academic freedom, and resistance by the faculty.

To address all of these concerns, universities will have to embrace this “second order change” that Edmonds identifies. This is a period of change during which the status quo is destabilized, beliefs are questioned, and the next move is unknown until the institution passes through the change and can “refreeze” in a new form.

Navigating this change is critical for higher education as a whole to move from incorporating online learning solely as a one-off program and into using its delivery and pedagogical methods across the academy. The institutions who can embrace the challenges of change may be pleased at the new paradigms open to them in the future.

Excerpted from Are You Giving Up Control of the Ship? Three Pressures You May Not be able to Resist, Distance Education Report, July 1, 2008.

03:05:2010

Does Teaching Online Really Take More Time?

There are certain widely held ideas about how time is used in distance education. One is that distance education “takes more time” than face-to-face teaching. This is one of those axioms that people accept and repeat, but don’t think about. Because as soon as you start to think about it, questions arise: Exactly what takes more time? Course development, or teaching? How much more time does it take? Does it take less time to teach the second time you teach it? What about the third? What takes longer to master—the technology, or online pedagogy?

Lee Freeman, who administers the online MBA program at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, decided it was time to answer those questions and maybe challenge a few misapprehensions about time in online teaching. He surveyed instructors in all different schools and colleges of his institution. He came up with some useful facts and busted some myths.

The big findings
What Freeman calls his “big finding” is that, relative to face-to-face development, online course development really isn’t as terribly time-consuming as people say. The extra time spent developing an online course as opposed to a face-to-face course is proportionately similar to the extra time spent teaching the online course compared to classroom teaching.

And guess what? “Teaching [online courses] isn’t all that bad either,” as Freeman says. “Basically,” Freeman says, “after the second or third time the instructors are comfortable with it and that learning curve has been reached.”

This curve is reached relatively soon for online pedagogy and even faster for the technology itself. “After the first or second time people were comfortable with the technology and beyond that they figured out how to teach it,” Freeman says. In Freeman’s research, it appears that it takes an instructor a little longer to figure out what they want to do with the course pedagogically than to become comfortable with the technology.

“That’s one of the biggest things, that the technological learning curve is shorter than the pedagogical learning curve,” Freeman says. “The technology’s not the problem. It’s not what’s making people take longer when they teach.”

Second (and third) time’s the charm
Freeman was able to demonstrate that, once past the first online course, there is a significant reduction of instructor time. This leads him to believe that much of the complaint of excessive time consumption probably comes from the first-time experience. One implication of this is that, if instructors can be conscientiously coached through their first online experience, they are likely to find things much better on successive tries.

Freeman’s data doesn’t challenge the assumption that it takes longer to develop an online course than a face-to-face course. What he has established is that the teaching, as well as the development, become less time consuming, and that that change can come as early as the second or third time out.

Four lessons for distance ed administrators:
What are the lessons for distance education administrators in Freeman’s investigation? The research suggests four ideas:

Make sure faculty understand that they’re starting something new. You have to make sure faculty understand that, while they may be teaching the same content, there is going to be a bump that they have to climb over. It’s going to take some time and some effort but it will get better.
Teach your faculty to think about their course in a different way, to be ready to do things differently. Let them know that teaching online gives them an opportunity that they may overlook in the classroom because they are habituated to the way they have always done things. In teaching online, the nature of the technology allows and sometimes requires teachers to change things. Whatever kind of change that may be, the directors and instructional designers, while not pushing any particular technique, should always be showing what’s available and reinforcing new ways of doing things.
Use your instructional designers. As the faculty member is developing the course with the instructional designer, the designer should be on the lookout for time consuming approaches. If they see that the teacher setting up a time consuming situation for themselves, the instructional designer should alert them and where possible suggest ways to get the same results by doing things differently.
The more an administrator knows about the process of course development, the better he/she can manage. Program managers and administrators should be sure that they understand what online instruction takes and that they communicate it well. If they do, they will face fewer instructors coming back saying they’re never going to teach online again. As Freeman says, “Let them know that what happened the first time is not going to be the constant truth of what’s going to happen every time.”

Excerpted from Time Requirements for Teaching Online: Beyond the Myths, Feb. 1, 2008, Distance Education Report.

01:08:2010

How One Online Program Won the Sloan-C Award

Ever wonder what an online education program needs to do to win a Sloan-C award? The associate of science degree program in veterinary technology at St. Petersburg College, Florida, won the Sloan-C Most Outstanding Online Teaching & Learning Program award in 2007. What follows is an excerpt from an interview Distance Education Report conducted with Dr. Richard Flora, dean of the School of Veterinary Technology.

Q: Was the online AS in veterinary technology an online program from the beginning, or did it develop out of a face-to-face program?

Flora: The online program grew out of the face-to-face program. The distance program was accredited by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) in 1995, but the conversion process started in 1991. We were kind of online pioneers. Our online program was the first online vet tech program fully accredited by the AVMA.

Q: Was it hard to enlist the participation and support of faculty?

Flora: At first there was a little bit of uncertainty. It wasn’t really “I’m not going to do this,” but they were just wondering how it was going to work. But the faculty here really has and does embrace the online environment. The same faculty that teaches on campus teaches online; the courses are exactly the same, just delivered differently. And so the faculty has really embraced this and really has developed it to the point where it is now.

Q: Were there struggles getting the program accepted by the market?

Flora: Back then online instruction was just something that wasn’t being done. So the reputation of an online college wasn’t that great. People looked at it pretty skeptically. When the accreditation process went through at the AVMA they really took a pretty hard look at it, and that helped the acceptance.

I think the biggest milestone in acceptance was the performance of the online students on the national licensing test. The online students consistently score a good standard deviation above the on-campus students. The first students would have taken the test in ’94/’95. That’s when you could start comparing performance on a standardized test. We’ve used the fact that our online students perform so well to market the course to prospective students. We still make sure students are aware of that right from the start.

Q: Do you regularly revise the curriculum?

Flora: Yes, we’re continually looking at the curriculum because veterinary medicine is changing so rapidly. Part of what we have to do is make sure we maintain the requirements to be accredited by the American Veterinary Medical Association. They put out the things that an accredited program has to cover. Our faculty’s really good about staying current, altering courses every semester for the new information that’s out there. It changes from semester to semester; nothing’s static at all.

Q: What were some of the aspects of the program cited by Sloan-C in presenting the award?

Flora: Student performance was a big one. And then they went in to look at the courses and look at the technology that was being used. That was the other big thing that they liked about it. We do a lot of audio chats instead of texting. And with reusable learning objects, our instructors have gone in and created video presentations especially for the lab classes. They might be talking about analyzing blood samples where they can narrate over slides of what they’re instructing about, and they are able to highlight different areas of the slides.

Or they can do video over their PowerPoint so that as they instruct on an abnormality in one of the white blood cell lines, the students can come into the class, open up that video presentation, listen to the instructor talk about the cells, and at the same time they’re talking about it, the technology gives them the capability of taking a cell off the slide, enlarging it, and highlighting the different areas of the cell that they’re talking about as they instruct the students.

Q: How do you train your instructors to teach online?

Flora: The College has what’s called the Web and Instructional Technology Services [WITS] Department, and they’ve created some great instructor training modules that instructors can go through at their own pace online, where it talks about the online environment, the college in general, and then goes through the capabilities of our course management system, in particular.

We have a very stable faculty. We may bring one or two adjuncts a year, but other than that we’ve had the same faculty teaching for several years now. We’re very fortunate there. We have eight full-time professors in the AS program and we have twelve adjuncts.

The same training program is effective for adjuncts, but we also always pair them with experienced instructors so they always have that experienced instructor in the background to monitor what goes on in the course or to answer questions or help when needed. So it’s kind of a mentor relationship for the first couple of semesters.

10:22:2009

More Principles for Improving Online Transparency, Quality

In Tuesday’s post, we introduced Transparency by Design, an initiative from a consortium of adult-serving educational institutions with significant commitments to distance education. Today we conclude the organization’s list of eight basic principles for supporting transparency:

#4 Faculty competence: First, and most basic, the faculty that are going to be teaching online must have the content background. But beyond that they have to get the appropriate training to teach online. They have to understand online pedagogy and they have to understand the technology they’re using. You need to be able to certify that the faculty have the appropriate skills. Then you need to constantly update the faculty on those skills. Finally you need to have a faculty evaluation system and use that information to feed back into the courses.

#5 Institutional integrity: Again, starting with basics, the institution must be accredited. Regional accrediting agencies are your allies in ensuring institutional integrity. They will help you look at what you say you’re going to deliver and what you’re actually delivering and help you make sure they match. Institutions must be rigorous in establishing outcomes for programs and courses and measuring their effectiveness—are you achieving those outcomes?

“You say you’re going to do something and you show that you’re actually doing it,” says Merle Harris, president of Charter Oaks State College. Here, too, a key point is to make this information easily accessible to students. “You have to be upfront about it and make sure that people know that you are going to be upfront about it,” Harris says.

#6 Excellence in student services: The guiding principle is that you have to recreate online all the services that are offered on the ground. You have to be sure that students can get online advice and counseling. You have to make sure they can get complete information about their courses in advance. The online registration process has to be efficient. Students must have access to library services online. Online tutoring services should be available. You have to be able to accomplish financial aid transactions at a distance. Since the students are using technology they have to have a help desk. Not only must you recreate the services that students could walk to on campus—in most cases you actually have to do a better job because often enough students have a difficult time connecting with services on-campus.

#7 Integrity in marketing: Make sure you’re giving a clear and accurate message about what you actually can and do deliver, so that you’re not making promises that can’t be fulfilled. As with other aspects of transparency, integrity in marketing has to do with providing relevant information on your website—what the graduation rate is, what the alumni say about the program, etc.

#8 Curricular quality: “We have to make sure that there is quality in the content,” Harris says. For example at my institution courses are reviewed by other faculty members both before the course is offered, and the first time it’s offered, and then it comes up for review again within at the most five years—it could be earlier.” This periodical review is necessary to be sure that outcomes are clearly stated and that the students are achieving those outcomes.

“The keys are disclosure, transparency, the ability to interact with students easily and the quality of the curriculum. So that we know what we’re trying to achieve and we regularly measure it.”

Excerpted from Transparency is Good Practice for Online Administration, Distance Education Report, April 1, 2008.

10:20:2009

Principles for Improving Online Transparency, Quality

Transparency by Design, an initiative from a consortium of adult-serving educational institutions with significant commitments to distance education, is based on the premise that a well-informed student—or prospective student—benefits everyone. A key focus of the plan is providing program-specific outcomes data that allows students to make informed decisions about their education investment.

Michael Offerman, president of Capella University, who led the working group that shaped the initiative, said that “To meet the education needs of adult students, we must provide them with trustworthy and transparent ways to choose among many available options and to gauge the potential of each one to further their careers.” The goal of the program is “to lead universities and colleges toward greater accountability and transparency.”

Transparency by Design institutions began issuing annual reports that include comprehensive data for each course of study, including student demographics, completion rates, costs, student engagement, and knowledge and skills learned. Most important, Transparency by Design reports include outcomes at the program specialization level, allowing prospective students to assess how well a program will prepare them for their professional pursuits.

One of the requirements for implementing Transparency by Design is the development of a new set of best practices for participating institutions. “You want to make sure things are in place at the institutional level,” says Merle Harris, president of Charter Oaks State College, who has been instrumental in developing just such standards. “Collectively we went back and we looked at best practices that have been put out by other organizations for online learning and then we developed our set based on those,” she says.

Harris and her associates concluded that there were a few basic principles for institutions that really want to be transparent.

#1 Make distance education a central element of your mission: Distance learning really has to be central to what the institution is doing. If it is viewed as an add-on and not part of the central mission then very often it doesn’t get the resources that are needed to carry out a quality program.

#2 Accountability to stakeholders: Who are the primary stakeholders in a transparent institution? The prospective student and the enrolled student. “One of the reasons we feel it’s important to have accountability measures and to report on those regularly is because prospective students who are making a decision about where they want to go to school, where they want to take courses should have information,” Harris says.

Accountability to prospective students includes providing adequate information about the program, what it contains, and who’s teaching it. But it also includes measuring what happens to students who go through the program. Harris’ group looks at things like graduation rates, retention rates, what alumni say about the program, and measures of student engagement, with the aim of making this information readily available to prospective students.

#3 Responsiveness: In practice this means nothing more or less than good customer service, so that when there are issues and questions students can get quick answers. Responsiveness in the academic process means that faculty respond quickly to a student, so that a student who’s learning online can get an answer to a question or feedback on an assignment within 24 to 48 hours, depending on the institution’s policy. Administratively, responsiveness means that if there are questions about grades going out, about registration, about fees being paid the student will get very quick response either by email or by telephone.

Click here for Part II of this article.

Excerpted from Transparency is Good Practice for Online Administration, Distance Education Report, April 1, 2008.

08:14:2009

How to Train and Maintain Your Distant Faculty

When online instructors work off-campus, as many often do, it can pose unique challenges. The lack of contact with colleagues and the institution can lead to isolation, and drifting out of the main currents of technological and pedagogical innovation.

What’s more, distance faculty may not be aware of the degree of presence they need to have in a course, and may effectively just “sit them out,” rather than provide appropriate levels of input to the course. Isolated teachers can also find that they have missed opportunities for professional advancement, not being surrounded by colleagues and associates who can train them in the pedagogical application of new technologies. The missed professional development opportunities may eventually frustrate them, interfere with their career development, and cause them to leave the institution.

Technology also can create challenges. That’s why at Canada’s online Athabasca University, the faculty are shown that there is a pedagogical grounding for the use of the new technology, and it’s not just technology for technology’s sake. A survey of faculty there revealed that faculty weren’t very interested in new technology but if it increased their effectiveness as instructors they would make the effort to attend training sessions. The lesson seems to be that to keep faculty up to date you have to focus on the pedagogy, and why the technology supports more effective pedagogy.

According to the survey, faculty said some of the biggest obstacles to teaching online are:

Dealing with difficult students in an asynchronous environment.
Knowing how to use a variety of instructional methods online.
Motivating students to stay engaged with their learning.
Understanding how to use the learning management system.

To read this article in its entirety, download our free report: Best Practices for Training and Retaining Online Adjunct Faculty.

08:10:2009

Helping Your Online Faculty Succeed: Q&A with Kaye Shelton

While many online programs struggle with student retention issues, Dallas Baptist University has achieved an impressive 92% student course completion rate across its 34 fully online degree programs. Kaye Shelton, Dean of Online Education at Dallas Baptist University, shares some secrets for success.

Q: How can we turn teachers who were initially reluctant recruits to teaching online into regular consumers of the latest knowledge, research and best practices in the field?
Shelton: First of all, I believe that support specialists are critical factors in the success of online education. We are the distance education experts, not the faculty, and we have more time that we can devote to searching for resources. It is our job to provide as many tools and resources as possible to support excellence in teaching and help the teachers remain current as well as efficient. Actually, I believe that by providing the latest knowledge, research and best practices in the field and making them easily accessible often encourages those instructors who are reluctant because we are assuring them constant support and reminding them they are important to us and to the online classroom.

Some of my best success stories are regarding instructors who we bring in ‘kicking and screaming’ but leave our office with a positive outlook and with much less trepidation. As faculty support specialists, we should also try to make it fun during the professional development opportunities. For example, during our annual online faculty workshop, in a drawing, we give away prizes such as flash drives, iPods, and Flip video cameras which are items that can help them as online instructors. For those faculty who cannot attend, we mail them the resources and archives of the workshop.

Q: What are some motivating factors we can offer our best instructional designers and support specialists in addition to salary to make them stay with the program?
Shelton: One of the best incentives would be to provide professional development opportunities which help them remain more confident in their support of faculty teaching online. Offering opportunities to work from home and offering flexible work hours can be good incentives as well. I also try to remind my staff of how important they are to the overall process. Sometimes, those behind the scenes are less noticed, but in reality, instructional support staff can be critical to online success.

Q: What are the most important things we can do to help the faculty’s first online experience be a positive one?
Shelton: Teaching online is different from teaching in the classroom. Prior to the first online teaching experience, it is important to help the faculty understand those differences. We provide ePedagogy training for every first time instructor which offers tips and tricks for teaching online such as methods for saving time and keeping their email inbox down to a minimum. Instructors need to understand student expectations as well as institutional expectations, such as how often they are expected to be online with the students.

Q: Do you have to train your technical support people in the interpersonal aspects of support, the “human factor”?
Shelton: I am fortunate to have an incredible team of online course developers and don’t really need to spend time training on the “human factor.” They greatly respect our faculty and are patient with their learning process. We always tell the faculty, “There are no silly questions, so ask away!” I do sometimes need to encourage them though because it can be frustrating when our timetable doesn’t always match the faculty’s timetable and expectations. But being flexible, understanding and focused on the ultimate goal–which is excellent faculty support–is the most important thing we can do, because we are partnering with them to deliver quality online education.

08:06:2009

Online Course Design Should Consider Learner Characteristics

In the early days of online learning, text was the primary medium of instruction. Now options abound, but finding the appropriate tools and using them effectively is another matter.

“The problem is that many instructors try to emulate what goes on in the face-to-face classroom without carefully considering learner characteristics or learning conditions,” says Steven Terrell, professor in the Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences at Nova Southeastern University. “Either they’re not aware of the multitude of new tools that are out there that can support different learning styles and course objectives, or they may be aware of them but don’t know how to use them or don’t have the time or money to be able to use them.”

Terrell recommends beginning with the learning objectives before deciding how to support the learners in reaching these objectives. These objectives may very well be identical to those in a comparable face-to-face course, but the way these objectives are addressed needs to suit the nature of the online environment and the learning preferences of a diverse group of students.

“Think of all the tools available first and as you’re developing the course objectives, and say to yourself, ‘Alright, if I’m going to have this objective, how can I present the material to the students so that it supports a given number of learning styles?” Terrell says.

Learner characteristics are influenced by several factors, including:

Locus of control: Is the individual student in control of the learning or are there external forces in charge of what the student learns?
Task orientation: Is the learner able to stay on task without going too far astray?
Level of motivation: Is the learner intrinsically motivated or extrinsically motivated?

Although he expected certain characteristics to have a dramatic effect on student success, Terrell found that there was no single preferred learning style that helped students to succeed in online courses. He speculates that high levels of motivation help dedicated students overcome some of their own shortcomings or those of the design of a course.

However, not all students have high motivation levels, and so the course needs to be designed to support all students and contribute to their developing intrinsic motivation. “The tools we choose should help a student become more task-oriented and more independent,” Terrell says.

Terrell provides several communication options for his students—email, telephone, chat, Skype and blogs.

“Wikis and blogs are very common these days. They’re really easy to set up and include in a class. They engage the students so they don’t feel divorced from the system. Some research shows that loneliness—the ‘it’s-me-against-the-world’ thing—drives away a lot of online students. Having communication tools readily available helps students,” Terrell says.

Terrell makes it a point to include a link to a digital library where students do further research. He also includes podcasts and learning objects that students can use and practice on as many times as they want.

Excerpted from Consider the Learn in Course Design, Online Classroom, January 2008.