Monday, February 21, 2000

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Rob Kling Indiana U. Scholar Says Distance Education Requires New Approach to Teaching By DAN CARNEVALE Rob Kling is a professor of information systems and information science at Indiana University at Bloomington's School of Library and Information Science. Since the 1970's, he has studied the social aspect of computerization. In the early 1990's, as he began using online tools in his teaching, he noticed how students were reacting to the new technology. He has published a case study of the problems that came up with another professor's distance-education course. Mr. Kling has been vocal in warning that distance education should be used with care, because everyone is still in the experimental phase, and universities have a lot to learn. Q. What problems do you see with current distance-education courses? A. The way in which these courses are to be done well often requires new pedagogies. You can't just take an existing teaching method from a face-to-face classroom and map it online. They take a lot of time on the part of instructors and students. Part of it's because instead of speaking, people are writing. Writing is slower. The comments are sort of micro-essays. They're much longer than most student comments in face-to-face class. They're better thought through. They also spell-check them. So when they post things, they're in effect writing a memo. Do they learn more from it? I hope so, but it's more labor-intensive than simply sitting in the classroom and commenting. In a face-to-face class, if I pass out a handout and I begin to discuss it with the students, they can nod if they're understanding. If I send out an assignment or I send out a handout electronically, then they wonder, should they say that they understand it -- the electronic nod? Or should they feel that if they all respond with an electronic nod that they're going to be flooding my mailbox with e-mail? So they wonder, when do I want to hear from them? Q. So why are many students taking distance-education courses? A. Many students are satisfied with them for a very simple reason: The largest fraction of students who are taking distance-ed courses could be viewed as constrained learners. And I say that because they're usually taking them under conditions when they don't have a face-to-face alternative. If you're starving and you're in the desert and there's a McDonald's, that is terrific food. McDonald's in the desert, when there's nothing else around except sand for hundreds of miles and rocks, this is haute cuisine. Q. What sort of problems have you found with students in distance education? A. In a face-to-face class, if students are confused, it's usually pretty clear. In a distance-ed course, if students are confused, there's no clue unless they choose to communicate about their confusion. Q. What do universities need to be doing from an administrative point of view? A. They need to be evaluating the courses in ways that are meaningful for online courses. They need to help instructors prepare for what it takes. What one finds today is a kind of set of administrators who are eager to have new students because they mean new revenues. So they try to make it easy for students and easy for instructors to teach. So there's a bias in many cases on the part of administrators to tell instructors, "Look, you can do it as an overload," or, "It's cheap and easy." And there are a lot of students -- many of them are what I call constrained students -- who are happier to have few barriers, to make it easy for them to enroll and matriculate in such courses. What I think is troublesome about that is that when instructors meet students in a practical way, instructors are often facing relatively higher workloads on the one hand, and they're having to often work on their own to try to figure out how to have a more satisfactory course. Q. How should universities evaluate something that's as new as online education? A. Evaluation is perhaps not the right word, but it's to get feedback to instructors about what students are experiencing in the classes and to help think through ways to improve the quality of such teaching. We don't do those kinds of assessments in a serious way. And when they're done, they're usually treated as instructor evaluations ... sort of teaching ratings for the instructor, rather than providing the kind of information to help us improve our teaching. The standard course assessments tend to be numerical surveys. They tend not to elicit vivid accounts of where problems arise and what might be done about them. It's a survey of what students say, but it's like "Was the instructor accessible?" from "Not at all" to "When I needed," rather than a narrative account that says, "When I was stuck on a weekend trying to work through an exercise, I really needed help, and I couldn't figure out whether I should call you at home," which is a different issue. Does the instructor want to be called at home if students are stuck? Well, that will vary, but knowing that students wonder gets the instructor thinking, "Hmm, maybe I should make my willingness to be called at home or when I'm willing to be called at home known in advance." Getting some number on a five-point scale doesn't tell us what that actually means in terms of a student's experience. Q. So aren't some of the traditional concerns of online education -- such as isolation, lack of interactions, and not enough institutional support -- the same as in traditional courses? A. That's correct. So here's what's worth saying: Isolation is not a problem of the same kind as in traditional courses. But what happens in online settings is that issues in face-to-face courses are amplified. Online interactions today -- we're speaking primarily about text -- require that people be extremely articulate in a written form. And people vary. ... But what online communication requires today in most of these courses is a strong ability to be extremely articulate in written forms. And students ask questions that are rather vague, and an instructor responds in a way that she thinks is helpful, and the student doesn't feel responded to, and we found that they're often likely to give up rather than ask again. In a face-to-face setting, the student may still be frowning or have a puzzled expression on his face, and as a consequence, the instructor knows she may not have resolved the issue, in which case she can try to say more or drop it. But because there's unspoken visual feedback, in many cases you can know whether people are getting excited, interested, confused, bored, and so on much more readily than if every bit of communication requires taking an initiative to communicate it. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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