What can online course components teach about improving instruction and learning?

Journal of Instructional Psychology, Sept, 2002 by Roy Schwartzman, Heath V. Tuttle

One response to meet such economic challenges has been uncritical endorsement of online courses or course components (Lane and Shelton, 2001). Conventional economic theory suggests that rapid production increases can reduce the quality of the product as producers cut comers to meet production goals. This condition seems to hold in electronic education. Amid the hype surrounding online learning, a U.S. News and World Report special feature on e-learning cautions: "Some providers, including universities, bypassed educational quality in their rush toward Internet gold" (Shea and Boser, 2001, p. 50). The frenzied rush to "electronify," however, often neglects central questions about which kinds of educational experiences best suit electronic delivery methods. For example, we are very reticent to broadcast public speeches via web cameras and other devices. Speaker anxiety stems from fear of addressing a live audience, and the ultimate test of conquering that fear is successfully addressing an audience face-to-face.

Some critics have observed that hasty adoption of online technologies has generated high costs and faculty resistance (Shedletsky and Aitken, 2001). Faculty learning curves may be steep, resulting in long lead times for course development and inefficient course administration. Instructors may become swamped with replying to e-mail and correcting technological glitches. These problems, especially the cost issue, may stem more from the method of course design than from the electronic components per se. For example, an instructor can direct all technical questions to an online discussion board monitored by support staff or by other students who often have far more computer savvy than the instructor.

The time expenditure required to initiate and maintain technological components requires further attention. Activity-based costing tends to equate time with money. The more time an activity takes, the more labor it costs. Most fixed costs of courses stem from the labor expended in teaching. These labor costs in academic contexts may appear constant. If that is the case, then the only way to reduce labor costs would be to reduce the number of instructors, much as corporations quickly eliminate jobs as a response to shrinking profits. Another approach offers potential cost savings: maximizing the efficiency of tasks by making time-consuming activities less labor intensive, or allocating such tasks to the least expensive labor pool. Several approaches emerge from these methods of economizing.

One way to reduce costs is to practice economies of scale. The most common tactic has been to increase section size, or to use faculty-taught mass lectures with smaller breakout groups taught by graduate students or other inexpensive labor. The results have become familiar and lamentable. Maximal student-instructor interaction will tend to occur with the least trained instructors as higher-paid faculty teach more students more impersonally. At least one university places graduate students as teaching assistants, but uses theater students to leach communication courses. The theater graduates have minimal course background in communication, generally hope to become actors and directors instead of teachers, and most have not even taken the course they are expected to teach. These teaching assistants also happen to earn among the lowest pay of any graduate instructors at the institution.