Wednesday, January 3, 2001

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Michael Kirschenheiter A Columbia U. Professor Praises the Interactivity of Teaching Online By SARAH CARR Michael Kirschenheiter, an associate professor of accounting at Columbia University's School of Business, was one of the first university professors to work with UNext to put one of his courses online. UNext, a company that aims to provide students with online courses from top-name institutions, has contracts with Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, and Stanford Universities, as well as the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Chicago, to create online courses in business subjects. Mr. Kirschenheiter (above) says he may work with UNext on other courses, and is waiting to see how well the company's first course offerings are received by students. He does not actually teach his accounting course -- which is among UNext's current offerings -- but worked with UNext instructors to develop the syllabus and exercises. Q. Why did you decide to work with UNext? A. There were a couple of reasons. First, it offered me the opportunity to re-create my course from the ground up. ... This was a good chance for me to structure the course a little bit differently. No. 2, this was a unique opportunity. The way that UNext works is that we were going to create a course that had the potential to reach out and touch a lot of people, so it gave me the opportunity to really leverage the way I presented the material to be able to affect the way very many people learn accounting. Q. Do you miss the personal contact with the students? A. Oh, yes. I don't want to say that this course replaces what I can do in a classroom. But it does present me with the opportunity to do certain things that I can't do in a classroom. That is, I can reach a lot of people who I wouldn't be able to reach otherwise. I can also find out more about online teaching and the way that people interact through the World Wide Web. It enhanced my human personal capital as far as teaching goes. Q. What role do you play in the course development and delivery? A. I provide the material. I gave UNext a series of Word documents that covers the material. I also work with UNext to explain how the courses should be structured, what the themes should be, and what I was trying to achieve with the structure of the course. And then, after talking with UNext, we were able to develop jointly certain animations that use the technology of the Web to drive home some of the points. Q. What were the greatest benefits and the greatest drawbacks of working with UNext? A. Drawbacks: I would say that the drawbacks are that you miss the personal contact. It is very important to have personal contact. There is something about face-to-face communication that is special. Also, you have a certain control over how you present the material, which extends to motivating the student. And in the classroom, I can feed the students the material in a specific order that I believe enhances the educational process. Both of these things are lost when you go online. So when you go online, you have to develop techniques that accomplish this without the face-to-face communication. Also, you have to recognize that students don't learn in a linear fashion. You lose the control over how they access the material. That's why it is called the Web, right? Benefits: Online, the instructor can offer enhanced kinds of visual and interactive arts, like animation. You can allow the student to actually click on things and learn about things in an interactive fashion online. This helps with motivation, because in many ways it makes the learning process more enjoyable. It also causes the professors to stop and think about how they teach their material and what the objectives of the material are, which is a good thing to do and something we may overlook when we teach for a number of years. Q. What are some of the key differences between teaching for a university and for a company? A. What I did with UNext was design the course. I did not carry through and actually teach the course. There are risks in this, because I don't actually get to teach the course, but there are also returns, because I get to reach many more people than I would otherwise. That is a big difference. One of the good things about working with UNext is that most of the people have academic backgrounds or Ph.D.'s. I worked with people who had graduate-level training in accounting, but also graduate-level training in education. I benefited from this because they understood my concerns about delivering a good product, a product that actually succeeds in teaching the students. So in that sense, the difference between teaching for a university and working with "consultants" wasn't so big. UNext is now selling the courses, trying to line students up for it. We had significant testing prior to the release of the project, and the students have been doing really well. But I am interested not only in seeing 10 or 20 or 100 students doing well, but a lot more. We'll have to wait and see. Q. Do you worry at all about losing control of your content? A. This is a worry. But I work for Columbia, and I understand, and I think Columbia understands, that this has its name on it. Columbia, just like all the other schools in the consortium, has an oversight role on the classes that bear its name. So I feel very comfortable that Columbia recognizes the importance of this and will continue to exercise the oversight and that the quality won't fall below what they want. Background article from The Chronicle: Closely Watched UNext Rolls Out Its First Courses (5/12/2000) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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