Opening a Door: Trying Out Distance Education


My reactions to my first week of an online class in preparation for teaching online.

I am winding down to the end of my first week of a 5-week online training class, learning how to teach online with the University of Maryland University College. I am starting to get very excited about the possibilities. So much has changed since the early days of online education, which essentially followed the old top-down, one-way communication model of traditional education, where you try to stuff your own knowledge somehow into students' heads. I remember when R.I.T. was starting out their program, they wanted people to do lectures on video, which would be purchased by class members and snail-mailed to them. I have never taught a writing class by lecturing -- I figure, that's kind of like giving a lecture on how to ride a bike!

I have rebelled against that model since the very first day I taught, way back in September of 1975, and I paid a heavy price for my resistance. I had to fight tooth and nail to practice my own pedagogical principles. Now I see that, at least with UMUC (and probably with many other institutions as well), the movement is toward student-centered, process-oriented collaborative learning models, and the online technologies are helping to make that more possible. While it is true that there are some subjects that don't make an easy transition from the classroom to the online environment (and some that will never make it period -- e.g., it's hard to imagine a painting class taking place online), there are many options opened up for sharing knowledge and working through problems together.

I am really enjoying the discussions being carried out in the online "Conferences," and it's fascinating how quickly we all became comfortable with one another and settled into an easy give-and-take conversational style. We also know a lot more about each other right away than would occur in a traditional classroom, by writing bios of ourselves. Some of us (including me) have posted photos. The "classroom" extends from Japan across the U.S. and into Germany -- and interestingly, two classmates actually share the same computer lab in Japan, even though they never met before. Consider this -- two people writing in the same room and not knowing they were writing to each other at first.

I am learning a lot from everyone, but I am also enjoying passing on my own expertise, drawing on what are now a couple of decades of experience with classroom teaching in a variety of courses, as well as my technological expertise. Never thought I'd be a tech expert -- and in many ways, I am still not -- but my facility across different kinds of software is clearly coming in handy. All the work I have been doing on my own teaching myself software, html, etc., is really going to pay off here. And my imagination is setting to work on resolving transition issues.

I resisted online teaching mightily for a very long time, convinced I would never be happy in a teaching situation where there was no physical presence. How inhumane! How alienating! But it's not, really. The comfort level, the sense of an intimate presence and connection that I would expect to come in maybe by the fourth week of class (at best), seems to be achieved much more readily and easily online. Perhaps because the technology in many ways removes barriers that would be there in person. It has been noted that people tend to be much more themselves in e-mail than in other kinds of correspondence. And in a regular classroom there would be time constraints that aren't present online simply because people end up rushing off to do the next thing, rather than hanging out and chatting. When you can do the chat on your own schedule, you may end up taking say, ten or 15 minutes, and then reading others' responses here and there at other times, rather than being confined to, say an hour where you have to sit and listen all together, when you know you really need to run an errand, or return a phone call.

I am scheduled to teach a course in Writing for the Mass Media beginning May 22 (assuming I pass the training course, which isn't really in question), and I am looking forward to figuring out creative ways to translate my f2f (face-to-face) beginning journalism class into the online environment. The technology is going to make it a lot easier for me to do a lot of what I really want to do, which is to create what I call "learning teams" where people work together on learning the material, editing each other, working through problems together. No more endless hours spent photocopying and having to plan far enough in advance to physically get the papers to team members and the whole class in time for them to have time to read and respond to each others' work! It will all be there online.

Hmmmm. What a great way to teach creative writing, too. Why, you could have creative writers scattered across the entire planet coming together for a workshop. In fact, that is actually being done, and for free, at the Zoetrope Virtual Studio. I have signed up for that but haven't gotten into it yet, and won't have time to do that for a while. But I definitely want to give it a try.

One really major advantage with teaching online with the UMUC is that I have access to the University's massive online library and databases, including, for example, Lexis-Nexis, which allows me to easily research news stories that may or may not be on the web. And of course there are many other resources I now have at my fingertips. It has been a very long time since I have had such easy access to the resources of a major University library, going all the way back to when I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the 1980s. Nothing in Western New York compares with that -- not even the University of Rochester -- but the UMUC library is top notch. Ohhh, I am a happy camper indeed!


Posted: Thu - April 8, 2004 at 09:24 AM          

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