Tuesday, August 1, 2000

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt Instructors May Struggle in Online Courses Inherited From Others By DAN CARNEVALE Rena M. Palloff is a faculty member at the Fielding Institute, where she helps teach an online master's-degree program in organizational management. Keith Pratt is senior project manager for Datatel, a software company, where he works with community colleges on the West Coast. Both teach part-time at multiple institutions, and both have experienced the growth of online education firsthand. Together they have written a book called Lessons From the Cyberspace Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching (Jossey-Bass), which is due out in January. Among other things, it takes a look at how professors are increasingly having to teach online courses that they did not create. Q: How do professors end up teaching courses they didn't create? Mr. Pratt: A lot of times the person who designed the content or designed the course just doesn't feel comfortable or can't teach effectively online. We run into situations where a lot of professors just can't do it, just don't feel comfortable with it. Q: For what reasons? Ms. Palloff: There are a number of professors who are really great in the classroom, in that they're entertaining -- they can deliver material in a way that engages students. It's much more difficult to figure out how to do that online, and to establish a connection and a presence with your students when what you've got is text on a screen. Q: When an instructor is brought in to teach a course created by someone else, does the new instructor face any special challenges? Mr. Pratt: To me it's kind of like going into a classroom and teaching a class using a textbook that you don't like or haven't used before. It's more how do you make it effective for you, and how do you make it fit your style of engaging the students in the process? It's a tough thing to do when you've got a textbook that you don't particularly care for, or maybe you do like but you've never used before. How do you build your own personality into how that class is going to be taught? That's one of the biggest steps for them to get over. Q: What experience or training should the new instructor have with the course before teaching? Mr. Pratt: When we do faculty development, we have the faculty do the course as an instructor and do the course as a student. Most courseware, when you look at it, there's a professor screen and a student screen. And if you haven't experienced what students are going to go through, then you can't help them deal with those issues when it comes time to do that. Q: What sort of issues typically arise when someone else teaches the course? Ms. Palloff: There are a couple. We've heard instructors say that they felt like the course didn't go far enough or didn't emphasize certain parts of the content to the degree that they would have wanted. So they needed to create some additional assignments, for example, that help students to get to that particular learning objective. We encountered an instructor who was just given a course that had absolutely no bulletin board in it, no way to develop interactivity at all. We told her to make as much use of e-mail as possible. So she was able to engage her students in discussion by creating an e-mail list. It wasn't the best, but it worked. The obstacles you face are problems building interactivity and community as well as incorporating all the content and the assignments that a faculty member thinks should be there. Q: How do students typically react when someone other than the course's creator is teaching it? Ms. Palloff: I inherited [a course] from an instructor who left, and I was asked to teach the course exactly as it was created. I did it with some trepidation, because I felt like the design of the course was a little confusing. Now the students knew that the instructor had left the institution and that I was taking over the course. But they didn't know I took it over as is. I did let them know once we got into it and the students were posting messages on the bulletin board saying, "This is confusing." So I opened up a discussion with the students and asked them to help me re-create the course in a way that would be less confusing for them. We all kind of co-created the way that we were going to work together for the rest of the term. And it worked great. Q: How do administrators feel about switching instructors? Ms. Palloff: From an administrative standpoint, when they have invested some money in the development of a course, and that course is resident on that university's server, it makes more sense to them fiscally and in a lot of other ways to simply say to another instructor, "We want you to teach this course as is," rather to say, "We need this course redeveloped," because then you're talking about investing more money to change the way that it looks and feels. So it makes some sense to develop a good set of courses that a number of faculty can teach. If it's customizable, then any instructor can walk in and make it theirs. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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