How to Balance Online Learner Needs and Instructor Workload

The world of distance education is changing teaching and learning. But for instructors, it may not feel like it’s changing for the better. Instructors are becoming more and more frustrated with the increased workload and the expectation from students to be accessible 24×7.

Distance education has a tremendous upside, but increasingly, students and instructors are experiencing its downside too:

• Instructors’ workloads are increasing. The need to respond individually to students can be all-consuming and exhausting, and instructors are finding their workloads are becoming difficult to maintain.
• Students miss a sense of community. A classroom fosters a community, and some students feel isolated without this connection, which may negatively impact student learning.

The solution is to create a learner-centered online classroom experience, one that compels students to assume more responsibility for their education while lessening the workload on instructors.

You’ll learn how to make this happen in your distance education course with a copy of the audio online seminar How to Balance Online Learner Needs and Instructor Workload. Presented by two experienced online educators, the online audio seminar will help you:

• Identify and implement strategies for establishing an instructor presence while decreasing your workload.
• Discover why combining a learner-centered, interactive instructional activity with targeted instructor feedback enhances student achievement and retention.
• Develop assignments and grading strategies to increase student interaction.
• Create an inclusive, online community where students connect with other members of their class, thereby reducing their reliance on you.

Order this Seminar

Who Should Attend
Any online educator from a two- or four-year college or university will benefit from the seminar. The seminar is especially suited for the following positions:

• Faculty (full and part-time)
• Department Chairs
• Instructional Designers

If you’re interested in getting your students to take more responsibility for their learning while ensuring a more manageable workload for you, this seminar will provide tangible, working solutions that you can implement right away.

New for 2011! A Discussion Guide for Facilitators.

Participating in a Magna Online Seminar as a team can help leverage unique insights, foster collaboration, and build momentum for change. Each seminar now includes a Discussion Guide for Facilitators which provides step-by-step instructions for generating productive discussions and thoughtful reflection. You’ll also get guidelines for continuing the conversation after the event, implementing the strategies discussed, and creating a feedback loop for sharing best practices and challenges.

Order this Seminar

Barriers to implementation
The literature that Mitchell reviewed is replete with studies and stories pointing out individual barriers to acceptance of distance education, and attempts to figure out what is the best way to deal with some of these barriers.

Up until now, the studies that have looked at barriers to distance education implementation have tended to view them from the technical or the administrative side. What Mitchell wanted to identify was more the “interest and values” sources of the problem. In looking at the literature from this perspective, there were four areas of difficulty that popped out:

• intellectual reluctance
• support
• cost-benefit
• change.

Intellectual reluctance is a lack of belief that online learning was a benefit to the teaching and learning process.

Support has to do with the perception that the institution values online learning enough to put in place assistance and resources to support faculty in their efforts. If that perception is not there, this is a major barrier to acceptance.

Cost-benefit refers to whether the faculty believes that distance education is worth the resources expended on it. Where do faculty place distance education in the priorities of institutional budgeting? “There are a lot of things that an institution could do,” Mitchell says. With faculty the cost-benefit factor is more a matter of values than money. Again that has to do with attitude and perception.

The study revealed two different levels of change — changes in individual faculty roles and institutional change. In Mitchell’s interviews with faculty, she found that they felt relatively secure in their tenure rights and other job security-related issues. They felt that they could use online learning on their own terms. But there was a higher level of insecurity associated with fears of institutional change. The faculty members felt less confident about how the institution would change, about how their environment might change with the advent of distance education. Mitchell and Geva-May found higher levels of conflict in direct relation to the degree that faculty felt they had no control over developments.

“We had many faculty who said, ‘No-one can force me to do this. I’m tenured.’ Nonetheless when these professors experience change beginning in their own departments they are concerned. They feel that the changes may not be beneficial for them and would ultimately add to their work load significantly.

Mitchell found that many times faculty felt that the decision-making process is not especially inclusive—they wanted to be more a part of the discussion. Mitchell points out that it may be simply that the faculty members had decided not to be included. Nonetheless, there was an impression on the part of faculty that change was being made, and they were not as much a part of it as they would like.

Practical applications for distance education administrators
How can Mitchell’s study help a distance education administrator? “The most important thing about working with change is to be aware that even though as an administrator you may feel you are being inclusive, it may not be perceived that way. And that you really look at how you are going to deal with that issue, so that faculty feel involved, not just informed.”

The key factor that Mitchell found that affected the level of conflict was the actual experience of online learning. There was a direct correlation between experience of online learning and acceptance of it. Mitchell explains that there are basically two schools of thought about faculty and distance education. “One is that you do get faculty involved, another is that if you do get them involved they’ll say that it’s too much time and effort, and they will fall by the wayside. What this research is saying is no, if you get them involved then your chances of actually implementing this are better.”

Excerpted from Is Conflict Inherent to Distance Education?, Aug. 1, 2007, Distance Education Report.