Friday, June 29, 2001

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Robert P. Ouellette A Researcher Says That Professors Should Be Attentive to Students' Approaches to Learning By DAN CARNEVALE Robert P. Ouellette, director of technology-management programs at the University of Maryland University College, has conducted studies about student experiences in online-education courses. He has found that professors who recognize the different learning styles of their students and the differences between distance and face-to-face programs have more-successful online courses. Q. Are students with specific learning styles drawn to either online or face-to-face courses? A. I haven't been able to find a difference between the students. The students in both types of classes seem to be the same. What's happening is that in the face-to-face environment -- which is a very traditional environment, where you get a lot of warm and fuzzy feeling, a lot of body English, a lot of intimate rapport in real time on a weekly basis -- you create an environment of trust, because it's the traditional way of communicating with people. The people online are a little more distant. They tend to be a little more abrupt in their communication. It's easier to tell somebody to go where online. It's very difficult to do that face to face. Ethics and behavior are a little different. And I think it also takes a longer period of time to establish trust. You have the question of a time zone and the lack of almost touching each other. So this is a bit of the process somewhat. But the other side of the coin is that online you can have so much richer environment in terms of databases, modeling, access, and so on. And you have much more freedom as to when you do the activity, which is the thing the students like the most. In terms of demographic differences, I could not find any. But they clearly behave somewhat differently when they are in the face-to-face class versus when they are online. Q. So students' behavior is different because of the environment, not because of the types of students they are? A. Exactly. We have a long tradition of meeting people and learning early in life of dealing with our playmates and eventually our co-workers. And I think we have to learn that technique in the virtual environment, and it really hasn't arrived yet. Q. Does that put either face-to-face or online courses at an inherent advantage over the other? A. Not really, because learning styles are really dramatically shaped at a very early age. If you have somebody take a learning-style test, and I use a variety of those in all my online courses, you find out that the style is very consistent over time. Learning styles appear to be fixed very early in your evolution. Probably by your early teens it's pretty much fixed and doesn't change much after that. This is why it's so important to study the learning styles of the students, because they cannot change their learning styles. But the teachers can change their teaching styles in order to react to different students. Some are audio-visual versus audio-verbal and so on. Q. What are some of these different learning styles, and which work better in a distance-education environment? A. There are several tests that I use. One of the things that is very clear to me is that the distance-education students tend to be very visual. The phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" is very true. They prefer pictures much more than verbal communication. They understand graphics and pictures better than text. So when you're online, which is so very largely a textual format where people just put notes and words, it's very important to have a lot of graphics. I also found that about half the students are kind of global thinkers and about half are sequential. The global thinkers, they say, "Give me the big picture. I don't want to see the details." The sequential learners, they say, "Give me the recipe. How do I go from A to B to C to D?" What this means is that the teacher has to put the information often in more than one format. For instance, I use a system diagram or a conceptual mapping to show a relationship between ideas. About half the students captured that immediately. But about half of them said, "Hmm, what is that? I'd like to know a step-by-step procedure of how to get there." So you need to do both. So online if you want to capture a larger percentage of your students, and it probably applies to face-to-face as well, you have to repeat your material in a number of formats. Otherwise you leave some of them in the dust. Q. Did anything surprise you about your studies? A. In all of my studies, I worked with the students as individuals and as a group. I found that teamwork is important ... and we need to hone those skills in the students. The students in the face-to-face environment worked well in groups. The students online found it very difficult. The time-zone differences, the difficulty of communicating, the complexity of having to type very carefully the message was a real problem. I also found that the face-to-face students like sound better as the method of teaching while the online students like graphics better. So these are some of the most obvious things that came out. Q. How should professors use this information? A. They need to know their students better. Asking students to submit their résumés is not enough. You need to understand what they know, what they need to know, and how do they know. It takes a lot of tender loving care. Teaching online takes much more time than teaching face to face -- that's very clear to me. All our studies show that up to 40 percent more time is required to teach online than face to face. You have to put in more care and attention. You're almost there 24 hours a day. But I think you need to involve the student much more in the process. You need to have more active techniques that allow you to get the student motivated and participating in the process. If you do that, it can be a marvelous experience all around. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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