Everywhere Carol Maxson looked, colleges were delivering courses online. Everywhere, it seemed, except at Trevecca Nazarene University, where Ms. Maxson is associate provost and dean of academic affairs.
Trevecca’s faculty members were not eager to teach online, and many doubted that such courses could create the same sort of community found in classes on the Nashville campus. Ms. Maxson knew she had to do something. “The train had passed us by, and I was hoping that we could grab on to the caboose,” she says.
So last fall, Ms. Maxson signed up for “Introduction to Online Teaching,” a six-week virtual course offered by Nazarene Bible College, in Colorado Springs. Since then, about 30 Trevecca faculty members have taken the course, galvanizing a grass-roots movement at Trevecca toward online education. In October, Trevecca offered its first online course, for its first online-degree program—a master’s in organizational leadership.
While some for-profit institutions, like the University of Phoenix, have a finely honed process for training professors to teach online, at nonprofit institutions skeptical faculty members drive much of the academic decision making, and the process isn’t nearly so neat.
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A 2009 survey of 182 nonprofit and for-profit institutions by WCET, a technology cooperative in higher education, found that just over half had mandatory training programs for professors who teach online. Other institutions offer voluntary clinics and training programs, work one-on-one with professors to prepare them to teach online, or provide no training at all.
Then there’s the radical approach used by Trevecca, which ramped up an online program quickly by sending its professors to another institution to acquire online-teaching skills.
But colleges can face an uphill battle. A 2007 survey of more than 10,000 faculty members at 69 public colleges and universities found that more than two-thirds of professors thought online learning was inferior or somewhat inferior to face-to-face instruction. The survey was conducted by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities’ Sloan National Commission on Online Learning.
Traditional colleges must often dangle carrots to get faculty members to put in the time to develop online courses and learn how to teach them effectively. The University of Colorado at Denver tries to coax wary professors to teach online by offering weeklong “Web camps” during the summer and winter breaks. CU Online, the university’s online division, offers a small stipend, hip T-shirts, and an “upbeat, fun” learning environment to professors who attend the camps, says David Thomas, manager of academic technology services at CU Online.
“Online is like a haunted house,” he says. “It might be an enjoyable thing, but it’s a dark door to go through. We try to lower the barrier to entry.”
The Web camps cover the basics—such as how to handle discussions and tests—and the professors spend much of the week on computers, designing their new courses.
While CU Online offers face-to-face training, others, like Washington State University, which is developing a program to train faculty members, say it makes more sense to offer the course online. “We’ll be in a position to walk the walk and demonstrate good online instruction to faculty,” says David Cillay, associate dean of the university’s Center for Distance and Professional Education.
The length and intensity of such training programs vary. Some of the most rigorous are offered by colleges that rely heavily on adjunct instructors, such as Nazarene Bible. The college, which began offering online courses in 1998, now provides 80 percent of its classes over the Internet. The vast majority are taught by ministers, social workers, and other adjunct instructors, says David M. Phillips, the college’s vice president of online academic services and institutional technology.
The instructors start by taking a two-week online orientation alongside students. Then they take the same six-week course in online teaching that Trevecca’s Ms. Maxson completed. Those who seem comfortable with online instruction are then invited to teach for Nazarene Bible, but first they must observe a seasoned teacher in another six-week online course.
When the instructor is finally allowed to lead an online class—some four months after the process started—a mentor observes the new instructor’s methods and provides feedback. Within a year, the new instructor is expected to take a second course, on advanced techniques in online education.
Mr. Phillips says the lengthy process “gives us more committed instructors in the end.” “I definitely don’t have a shortage of people who would like to teach for us,” he says.
Mr. Cillay of Washington State says that the professors he works with are generally at extremes—they’re either scared to death about teaching an online course, or they think it will be as simple as posting some lecture notes.
“The ones who come in expecting that it will require little work have their eyes opened pretty quickly,” he says. “We help them understand that it’s a classroom, not a Web site.”
Joan R. Davenport, a professor of soil science at Washington State, spent five months last year building an online course on soils for undergraduates. The effort took 10 to 20 hours per week, including weekly conversations with a “course coordinator” from Mr. Cillay’s office. Ms. Davenport had plenty of personal incentive—she lives 90 minutes from Washington State’s Tri-Cities campus, in Richland, Wash., and was tired of the commute.
Ms. Davenport had already created an online graduate-level class in soil science, but she says the undergraduate class took much longer because she wanted to make it fun. “I’m never going to see my students live, so I had to get creative and figure out how to make my students get their hands dirty,” she says.
Ms. Davenport is now working with technology experts at the university’s distance-education center to develop a video game for undergraduates that will illustrate cation exchange, a complicated process that determines the soil’s ability to transfer nutrients to plant-root systems.
Many professors say they don’t teach online because they don’t have the time needed to develop such courses. Regis University, in Denver, and the University of Colorado at Denver try to get around that problem by regularly offering catered lunches featuring presentations on how to create courses or use various technologies in online instruction. Such sessions are often led by faculty members who have experience with online teaching, rather than technology experts.
“Sometimes it’s nicer to hear this type of message from someone you know, someone who is in the trenches with you,” says Joanna C. Dunlap, an associate professor at UC-Denver who teaches instructional design and development. She learned how to use Adobe Connect, a tool that allows videoconferencing, while interacting with other professors on the Internet in a session organized by CU Online. The experience gave her enough confidence to use Adobe Connect in her online classes. “It’s a practice field that allows us to get our skills down, so that we can then take them to the game,” Ms. Dunlap says.
The Sloan study found that veteran professors—those who have taught for more than 20 years—are teaching online at rates equivalent to less-experienced faculty members. That may seem surprising, given that younger professors are typically more comfortable with technology.
But Ms. Dunlap says senior professors who serve as mentors to junior faculty members often recommend that they get control over their research agenda and face-to-face teaching load before trying to teach online. The older colleagues believe that’s the best strategy for acquiring tenure, she says.
The Sloan study found that about 55 percent of probationary, tenure-track faculty members felt they were unlikely to receive adequate recognition for their online work at tenure and promotion time.
“The rewards system at most institutions has not been changed to reward the behavior that we want to have happen,” says Russell Poulin, deputy director of research and analysis at WCET, the technology cooperative.
As colleges experiment with training professors to deliver online instruction, some wonder if they should be focusing on collaboration instead. Have Okimoto, director of academic technology services at the University of Hawaii, thinks weak budgets at many public institutions will foster more partnerships like the one between Nazarene Bible and Trevecca. At a November meeting of the Northwest Academic Computing Consortium, a network of more than 30 colleges and universities, Ms. Okimoto will lead a discussion on the topic. The sharing could be as simple as exchanging worksheets that explain to professors how to use certain types of software online, she says. Or it could go much deeper, to the point where one campus agrees, say, to provide instruction about how to teach online courses designed for all nursing educators in the consortium.
“The pedagogical issues, whether you’re at the University of Hawaii or the University of Oregon, are going to be the same,” Ms. Okimoto says.