Teaching the teacher: distance ed instructors aren't born, they're made. Then they're quality controlled. Is this any way to run a university? - Training/Online Education

University Business, Sept, 2002 by Margaret Littman

At Indiana University Kelly School of Business in Bloomington, faculty are expected to respond to 300 or more e-mail messages in 24 hours or less, a demand that has led prospective faculty to come to terms with the fact that an Internet course is not any less demanding than an in-person lecture, says Timothy T. Baldwin, professor of management.

Adds Greg Brandes, Associate Dean of Faculty at Concord, "It's a challenge to teach people to be that supportive. For a professor who has taught for many years in a fixed facility, responding to student questions within 24 hours is something new." Such responsiveness also comes in the form of detailed feedback on class papers and constant communication between the student, faculty, and school, should any problems arise. Faculty who adhere to the office-hours-only model of student interaction typically do not fare well with the daily demands on their time that online teaching necessitates.

Paula Szulc Dominguez, Director of Research and Evaluation for Hezel Associates, a Syracuse, NY distance learning consulting firm, says that applying the standards of on-campus student/teacher interaction to an online course is one of the most problematic areas in adapting instructors to e-learning.

"Any faculty member will say that `meaningful professional relationships with my students' is what they like most about teaching. But the traditional classroom model they use is, unfortunately, not ideal online," she believes. What's more, "Expectations of students and administrators are very different from school to school. In some cases, you may need to give faculty grad students to help answer e-mail. In others, you may need to teach faculty how to access students' personal Web sites and use what they see there to encourage a cross-pollination of ideas inside and outside of the online course. That interaction is very different from what takes place in a face-to-face setting. But if you leave the model of face-to-face and get rid of the notion that face-to-face is the only way to interact, then it gets interesting."

Dominguez has been most impressed by the viral effect online education efforts can have. Once bricks-and-mortar faculty leave the confines of the computer lab or cyber cafe and return to the department offices, they see how online instructors are changing their syllabi, developing more team projects, and increasing the kinds of detailed feedback they give. This categorizes training into pedagogical terms for them, she says; they suddenly stop seeing online teaching as simply all about advanced tech support.

According to Gary Miller, Associate VP for Distance Education, and Executive Director of the World Campus at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, "We're trying to get faculty to think about how to use technology as a pedagogical tool--not just as a way to reach students." Yes, says Miller, the technological basics are covered in the World Campus program (an asynchronous training curriculum called Faculty Development 101), as are the expectations on instructors, in terms of time commitment and response time to student queries. But Faculty Development 101, which takes instructors an estimated one hour per day for one week to complete, also looks at broader concerns, such as how to author a distance course.