Friday, August 25, 2000

LOGGING IN WITH . . . James R. Mingle Measuring Students' Learning Is a Major Challenge for Distance Education By DAN CARNEVALE James R. Mingle, former executive director of the State Higher Education Executive Officers, is now a senior policy adviser for the Southern Regional Education Board's Distance Learning Policy Laboratory. Among other responsibilities, he will head a subcommittee on faculty issues that evolve with the growth of online education. Q. What faculty issues do you expect to be looking at? A. There are three strands to this. We're going to look at teaching effectiveness -- and obviously, that involves faculty development. Secondly, changing roles in the expectations of faculty, and intellectual-property issues. Q. How do you judge teaching effectiveness online when it's still difficult to measure in a traditional classroom setting? A. The challenges of measuring and identifying student learning and attributing that outcome to particular practices are as difficult in a distance-learning environment as in a traditional classroom. So you fall back on consensus over pedagogical strategies and whether they're applicable. I think there is clearly a consensus that technology has inspired faculty to rethink their instructional delivery. And I suppose because it is now more visible to people outside the classroom, it's hard to keep it a secret behind closed doors. ... The research often comes up with this "no-significant-difference finding" between a distance-learning or electronic mode and a traditional-delivery mode. I don't think that's good enough. To justify the investments, we're going to have to show some real learning gains. On the teaching-effectiveness issue, there is a prior question in terms of state policy and institutional policy. Generally, states and institutions have spent far more on infrastructure, on the equipment side, on the technology itself, than they have on the development of the ability of faculty and students to use the technology, and in terms of developing content. Part of this project would be to educate legislators and public officials that those human investments are more important, in a way, than the capacity issues. Q. In judging quality, do you see a move toward competency-based assessments? A. Yes. I think that is independent of technology, however. There are lots of forces that are pushing higher education and faculty to be more concrete as to the competencies expected at different levels. I don't know that that's technology-driven. Students are not only attending multiple institutions to get a degree, they are often taking courses from multiple institutions at the same time. And to have a system that recognizes a variety of credentials earned at various places, you'll have to have some sort of agreement on what the learning represents. I think that pushes you toward some standardization of competencies, especially in the professional and technical and vocational areas. Q. The second issue you mentioned is the changing role of faculty members. How exactly is that role changing? A. At this point there really isn't a consensus on, for example, fundamental things like workload, expectations, and class size in an electronic environment. There was an initial view, especially among policymakers and legislators, that we could significantly increase class size in an electronic environment and therefore increase productivity. There are indications that the workload and the level of the interaction between faculty and student often go up in an electronic environment, and therefore class size may not change. But there may be some productivity gains from the use of other material and content developed by others. ... The British Open University model has a category of faculty member or instructor that we really don't have, and it's a tutorial function for a distant learner. That's a whole new category of faculty. And deciding who those people should be, and how they should be compensated, and where their use is appropriate is all part of this changing role. And then there's the fact that electronic-content materials are often developed in a team environment, with an instructional designer and other faculty. That changes the role of the faculty member, especially in regard to his or her teaching functions, which were pretty much an isolated, individual activity. Q. Will the Learning Policy Laboratory make a recommendation as to the best policy covering ownership of online courses? A. I would doubt that. ... I think this is being worked out institution by institution. Describing the different approaches is going to be Step 1. [In university systems,] there may well be some discussions of whether or not these policies ought to vary from institution to institution, or whether they should be systemwide. There are two fundamental questions here. The first relates to what intellectual-property policies will, in fact, reward faculty for their contributions and stimulate their interest in developing content and sharing it. And the second one is how the institution protects its collective investment in course and content development. Working that balance out, I think we can be of some help. I doubt that we would reach a consensus over this. But I think we can help in terms of communicating at this point that a lot of -- how do I want to put that? -- people are avoiding the subject. [Laughs.] So bringing it out and describing the policies and getting a faculty perspective on it and an institutional perspective will greatly help. A lot of the discussion around intellectual property assumes that there's a lot of money to be made from content development. I think there's another issue here, that's probably more powerful, and that is, How do faculty members gain recognition of all kinds, not just financial, but for their contributions in this area? Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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