Teach More Effectively with Customizing Learning Experiences

Expectations are rising in higher ed. There’s a growing emphasis on outcomes and accountability, and a steady trend toward personalizing the educational experience to boost individual student achievement and competency. But if online courses were customized to meet the needs and interests of individual students, would instructors’ workloads become unmanageable?

Many fear, and understandably so, that introducing customized, student-specific learning to online courses will add a crushing amount of work for the online instructor. And indeed, that’s a fear that could easily be realized if the process was approached incorrectly.

But there’s a way to do it right–a way that can actually reduce faculty workloads while increasing personalization of online learning. You can learn about it in Teach More Effectively with Customizing Learning Experiences, a 75-minute audio presentation that will introduce you to a model for offering personalized content without creating overwhelming responsibilities for the instructor.

Order this seminar

You’ll learn:

• How to better understand the goals and mental models of individual learners.
• How to integrate the concepts of social, teaching and cognitive presence into course creation.
• How to “design in” choices and options for readings, assignments and projects.
• Where customization makes the most sense within a course.
• How to use rubrics to incorporate self- and peer-review processes.
• And much more.

The program presenter is Judith Boettcher, Ph.D., an author, consultant and leading voice on educational technology and online teaching. Dr. Boettcher has more than 20 years of experience at institutions such as Penn State and the University of Florida, and is co-author of the just-published Online Teaching Survival Guide: Simple and Practical Pedagogical Tips.

Who will benefit:

• Distance learning deans
• Distance learning directors and coordinators
• Instructional design professionals
• Faculty who teach online
• Program leaders
• Anyone interested in sound online pedagogy

It is possible to give students a rich, personalized educational experience online–without overloading the instructor. Find out how with a copy of this seminar!

Order this seminar

Dana Tesone, assistant professor in the Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida, and Peter Ricci of Barry Kaye College of Business at Florida Atlantic University, set out to learn more about the way that students perceive online education today. Their work shows the equality of student perceptions of online versus face-to-face courses, and it has implications for how we think about these two delivery approaches.

The study
Tesone and Ricci, both professors in the hospitality field, studied a series of 450 students enrolled in a senior-level hospitality management program. These were largely traditional-age students (mostly 20 or 21 years of age), skewing female and non-minority. Some 70 percent were employed in the hospitality industry.

Quantitative results showed that student perception of their courses was similar, regardless of whether courses were delivered face-to-face or online. The areas the survey measured include:

• feedback concerning student performance in the course,
• instructor’s interest in student learning, use of class time,
• instructor’s overall organization of the course,
• continuity from one class meeting to the next,
• pace of the course,
• instructor’s assessment of student progress in the course,
• text and supplemental learning materials,
• description of course objectives and assignments,
• communication of ideas and information,
• expression of expectations for performance,
• availability to assist students,
• respect and concern for students,
• stipulation of interest in the course,
• facilitation of learning, and
• overall assessment of the instructor.

Students were given the option of providing comments, and the comments were also interesting. Students in the asynchronous online course gave favorable comments about convenience regarding time and travel. Also intriguing was the fact that the face-to-face course employed what the authors called a “sage on the stage” learning method, while the online course employed learner-centered methods—but both types of pedagogy were rated equally highly by students.

The implications
The first implication of these findings is the importance of using the more appropriate learner-centered pedagogy in the online classroom. “We have people who just don’t get the change in pedagogy,” says Tesone. “Everyone should be trained in this; it’s a major mental shift. If you aspire to be a sage on the stage, then this is not for you,” he says.

If the online environment presents a challenge for faculty, it also presents a challenge for students, perhaps in part because of misperceptions about the rigor of the courses brought about by experiences with poorly-designed courses. “We teach students who have had other classes that were treated like correspondence courses; that’s what gives us a bad name,” he says.

But today’s students are not taking a correspondence course, locked into distance delivery because it is the only way to complete a course. “Today, students who live 200 yards away take the [online] course because they don’t want to come to the classroom. They took the course out of convenience, not realizing the interaction is more intense than sitting in class.”

Today, technology adds a dimension to education, and students ultimately value both the increased convenience and the experience. “It has allowed us to become closer to students because of the software, and they learn more as a result,” says Ricci.

Excerpted from How Your Students See Your Courses, February 1, 2009, Distance Education Report.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Faculty Development in Distance Education: Issues, Trends and Tips

Of the many lessons learned from the early years of distance education one of the most persistent to remain, and thankfully so, is the fact that you cannot simply pluck an instructor out of the classroom, plug him into an online course, and expect him to be effective in this new and challenging medium. Some learned this lesson the hard way, while others took a proactive approach to faculty training from the start.

Here’s your chance to learn from the mistakes and successes of those who blazed the distance education trail.

Faculty Development in Distance Education: Issues, Trends and Tips

Download your copy of this report today! It's FREE to Faculty Focus members.

Sign In Create an Account

Faculty development for distance educators is a critical component of all successful distance education programs. Well thought-out faculty development weaves together needed training, available resources, and ongoing support, and carries with it the same expectations for quality teaching that institutions of higher education have for their face-to-face classes.

This special report, Faculty Development in Distance Education: Issues, Trends and Tips, features 12 articles pulled from the pages of Distance Education Report, including:

• Faculty Development: Best Practices from World Campus
• Developing Faculty Competency in Online Pedagogy
• A Learner-Centered, Emotionally Engaging Approach to Online Learning
• How to Get the Best Out of Online Adjuncts
• Workload, Promotion, and Tenure Implications of Teaching Online
• Four Steps to Just-in-Time Faculty Training

This report is loaded with practical strategies that can help you build a comprehensive faculty development program, helping ensure that instructors stay current in both online pedagogy and practical technical know-how.

Faculty Development in Distance Education: Issues, Trends and Tips

Download your copy of this report today! It's FREE to Faculty Focus members.

Sign In Create an Account

Download the report for FREE when you join the Faculty Focus community!

Faculty Focus contains a wealth of valuable material on all of the key issues that matter to today’s top faculty and administrators. It’s packed with strategies, tips, and other information you can use on the topics that impact your students, your school, and your work, including:

• Instructional Design
• Faculty Development
• Teaching Strategies
• Distance Learning
• Classroom Management
• Educational Assessment
• Faculty Evaluation
• Learning Styles
• Curriculum Development
• Trends in Higher Education
• And much, much more.

Faculty Development in Distance Education: Issues, Trends and Tips

Download your copy of this report today! It's FREE to Faculty Focus members.

Sign In Create an Account