Many Students' Favorite Professors Shun Distance Education

Jahvonne Y. Hernandez, a Syracuse University freshman, was flying back from a track meet in March when she saw her biology professor on the plane. Delighted, she nudged her

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teammates and exclaimed, "It's Dr. Druger! Let's get his autograph!"

Adoration isn't new to Marvin Druger, a professor of biology and science education. He has taught introductory biology for 40 years and, as one of the university's Meredith Professors for Teaching Excellence, has earned Syracuse's highest honor for teaching. At one point, the university bookstore sold "Marvin Druger Fan Club" T-shirts.

There is a market for those shirts -- Mr. Druger estimates that since coming to Syracuse in 1962, he has taught more than 40,000 students.

Most of them he met in the classroom, but for more than 30 years he has instructed a sizable number through the university's distance-education program. In his distance courses, he relies on lab kits as well as the audiocassettes that students in his classrooms also use. The tapes are packed with information and with his quirky humor. He sees them as vital learning tools, and his students agree.

The professor's love of distance education, though, doesn't extend to online courses. He doesn't teach on the Web and doesn't intend to. "I don't think that having more technology would improve my way of reaching students and helping them learn," he says.

Mr. Druger says every professor has a right to choose what teaching tools to use, but he fears that students who work solely from books, cassettes, or on a computer will miss out on the sensory experience of the classroom and experimentation. His distance-education students spend four or five days on campus at the start of each course to get acquainted with him and each other, and to learn firsthand the basics of the lab work they will do on their own. In the science kits they take home, they perform experiments equivalent to those they would do on campus. They even get a fetal pig to dissect, just like his classroom students.

"I want them to twang the vagus nerve, feel the liver, squish the lungs," Mr. Druger says. "I want them to handle it. That's life. You can't learn about it from pictures."

Opinions like Mr. Druger's raise some questions: Are the professors who are the most beloved and respected for their teaching the ones who are participating in distance-education programs, especially online? What do their opinions mean for the future of distance education? And can technology convey the qualities that make a professor the heart and soul of a campus?

Interviews with some of these professors by The Chronicle show that many are comfortable using classroom-based technology and e-mail, but that few teach via distance education, and even fewer teach online. Whatever their opinions of distance education, they generally see it -- and technology of all types -- as a way to help students feel more personally and intellectually connected to both the professor and the course material. Most of these professors view distance education positively and believe that online courses can provide just as much opportunity for personal interaction as traditional ones.

Connecting With Students

Many institutions have professors like Mr. Druger -- men and women who, over decades, have endeared themselves to students and colleagues alike through their passion for teaching. These are the professors whom alumni reminisce about. They can be famous personalities or the low-profile cement that holds their departments together.

Creativity and a personal touch are two common traits of favorite professors. "I'll use any method I can to make a student learn," says Gilbert Casterlow Jr., a professor of mathematics at North Carolina A&T State University since 1972. Gordon M. Patterson, a professor of history in the humanities and communications department at the Florida Institute of Technology for the past 21 years, says: "You need to care about the students. Caring is the connection." Both men say they support using technology that helps students learn, although neither currently teaches an online course. Mr. Casterlow taught telecourses from 1995 to 2000.

In his biology classes at Syracuse, Mr. Druger tells jokes and personal stories to drive home the science. He goes out to lunch with students and calls those who miss a class. After exams, he drops answer sheets from the window of a second-story storeroom to crowds of students who facetiously yell, "Jump! Jump!"

Among professors in general, technological tools are becoming increasingly popular way to connect with students. These tools vary from equipment used in the classroom to course-management software for putting course material, or entire courses, online.

Carl Smith, a professor of American studies, English, and history who has taught for 30 years at Northwestern University, says professors must keep their eye on pedagogical, not technological, advancement. He avidly adopts new technologies that he feels improve his teaching: "My goal is to do what I've always done, but do it better." But he doesn't teach any online courses, because, he says, Northwestern hasn't encouraged its professors to create them.

Professors want to use technology that's easy and quick to learn because they don't want to take time away from teaching, Mr. Druger says. The same goes for putting courses online.

He sees no point in following every fad, and he doesn't want to worry about whether a new technology will work. If he wants to update his course audiocassettes, he says, he can sit in his attic and record new tapes.

Not an Obsession

Mr. Druger uses a mix of technology in his teaching. He sends and receives dozens of e-mails a day. He maintains a course Web site but got tired of keeping up with an electronic mailing list he was on. When he lectures in Syracuse's technologically well-equipped Gifford Auditorium, he ignores the gadgets; he simply puts transparencies on a creaky overhead projector and shines a laser pointer on important items shown on the wall behind him.

"I'm not obsessively into technology," he says. "Mainly, I just scream for my wife." Pat Druger, to whom he has been married for 44 years, has a master's degree in mathematics and is his lifeline in dealing with electronic equipment.

Mr. Druger's students don't seem to care he's not using the highest level of technology, or teaching them online. "He's old-school," Ms. Hernandez says. "That's why he's so cool." Sarah E. Bernard, a sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering, thinks he would be just as good an instructor online. "I think he'd have a lot of fun doing it," she adds.

It's not surprising that many popular professors aren't doing distance education, says Frank Newman, a visiting professor in public policy and sociology at Brown University and director of the Futures Project: Policy for Higher Education in a Changing World, a research effort. He is also a past president of the the University of Rhode Island and of the Education Commission of the States.

What makes such professors special, Mr. Newman says, is their ability to connect emotionally with students. Because they are used to making that connection face-to-face rather than via distance education, "they'd almost be the last people to be interested in it." The cutting-edge innovators among them are a small subset, he says.

Location, Location

Whether or not professors engage in online learning or other forms of distance education in large part depends on where they teach, says A. Frank Mayadas, director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Asynchronous Learning Networks. Among the institutions that have embraced distance education are some large state universities, which have integrated it at all levels of academic life, he says. Many community colleges offer a good deal of distance education. And some institutions, public and private, offer distance education through extension schools.

Favorite professors frequently are role models for other professors at their institutions -- Mr. Druger, for instance, helped create the training program for teaching assistants at Syracuse. Like their most respected colleagues, most faculty members don't feel obligated to think about using technology, says Emory Elliott, a professor of English at the University of California at Riverside. He is a University Professor, an honor bestowed on only 13 faculty members currently teaching in the California system.

Mr. Elliott doesn't teach online but enjoys using technology in his teaching and has taught via public television. He thinks that because favorite professors would rather concentrate on research and teaching, institutions might have to develop incentives for them to use technology in teaching.

Some professors think distance education is good only for technical subjects, professional-development courses, and other situations in which personal interaction isn't crucial for learning.

"I would never waste my time trying to use it for anything on which the teacher's human and creative skills are at a premium," says John Janovy Jr., a biology professor who has taught for 35 years at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. "I do not believe for one minute that such education comes anywhere close to the mentoring ideal that should be a part of university teaching," he says in an e-mail message. Not surprisingly, he has never taught a distance-education course.

Mr. Janovy loves some technology, though -- he uses PowerPoint in his lectures and gushes about a document camera, a Jetsons-style hybrid of computer and overhead projector. And he posts class grades and assignments through Blackboard, a course-management system for online education.

Other professors, though, have embraced technology and online education. Bill Pelz is a professor of psychology at Herkimer County Community College, in New York. This is his 34th year at the 35-year-old college. He led its entry into online education in 1997; the college now offers 75 such courses a semester. "Online teaching is very popular," he says. "A lot of faculty want to do it all online." So far, he's the only professor to teach all of his own courses online, but more than two-thirds of his colleagues teach at least one online course.

The personal interaction and cultivation that he can provide in the classroom aren't much different from what happens in a good online course, Mr. Pelz says. "What makes a heart-and-soul professor is the passion they bring to the job. That passion extends online or in the classroom."

A New Era in Teaching

The debates about the value of distance education will continue, but the professors interviewed by The Chronicle agree that more technology and distance-education techniques will become integrated into standard teaching practice. To stay competitive, institutions that offer online education will have to replicate the quality of teaching that traditional courses have, says Mr. Mayadas, of the Sloan foundation.

Online education will continue to proliferate at all levels of academe, says Brown's Mr. Newman. He expects that in the next 10 years, 50 percent of all courses will be hybrids, which will include both online and classroom elements. This will improve education as a whole, he predicts, because it will require a focus on pedagogy that traditional teaching doesn't often have.

"As distance education gets better, as the technology to engage students gets better, all classes will get better," he says, "because the pressure will be there." The standard experience in a course will become much more like the experience in the class of a favorite professor today, he says.

Getting Comfortable

Close emotional and intellectual relationships are harder to create in a purely online environment, although they can develop in hybrid courses that include classroom and online elements, Mr. Newman adds. But technology is advancing enough that more old-style professors will feel comfortable with the personal interactions it will allow, especially through asynchronous online education, he says.

"I don't think we'll ever reach a point where 18- to 21-year-olds aren't going into classrooms," says Donald R. Wagner, a professor of political science at the State University of West Georgia.

Students in high school and entering college today communicate differently than many of their professors do, Mr. Newman says.

They see interpersonal contact as the exchange of information; for them, face-to-face contact isn't as important as the speed and availability of that information, he says. In years to come, some of those students will move into academe and replace the current generation of professors.

Younger students will expect even less face-to-face interaction, says Mr. Wagner. "Thirty years from now, a heart-and-soul professor may be someone you've never laid eyes on," he says.

In fact, Herkimer students have nominated faculty members who are teaching online courses for teaching awards -- and some of those professors have won, says Mr. Pelz. Some of the students have never met their professors in person. One of his students has nominated him for a national teaching award, he says.

In the meantime, at Syracuse, Mr. Druger is enjoying the relationships -- in class and at a distance -- that he has formed with his students.

"I like affecting people," he says. "I don't know how much technology I need to do that."