VOLUME 14, NUMBER 3, 2000
Editorial
Is Distance Learning More Work or Less?
Michael G. Moore
Articles (for abstracts,
click here)
Is Distance Education More Work or Less Work?
David DiBiase
Faculty Work in Developing and Teaching Web-Based
Distance Courses: A Case Study of Time and Effort
James A. Visser
Capabilities-Based Educational Equivalency Units:
Beginning a Professional Dialogue
Ryan Watkins and Charles Schlosser
A New Tool for Managing Students' Questions in Web-Based
Distance Education Courses
Rafael H. Scapin and Euclydes Marega, Jr.
Student Perceptions of Satisfaction and Opportunities
for Critical Thinking in Distance Education by Interactive Video
Cheryl Hilgenberg and William Tolone
Interview
Speaking Personally with Janet K. Poley
Bill Anderson
Book Review
Dancing with the Devil: Information Technology and the New Competition
in Higher Education
by Richard N. Katz and Associates
Charlotte Farr
EDITORIAL
Is Distance Teaching More Work or Less?
Michael G. Moore
The workload of teachers in a dual-mode institution teaching online is the subject of two articles in this issue of the AJDE. Both David DiBiase (p. 6) and James Visser (p. 21) adopted the same common sense (some would say "ethnographic," "action research"!) approach in researching the question-i.e., they kept detailed notes and records of their experiences as they went about teaching students online and in a classroom. Beginning with a similar question, however, these authors end with contradictory conclusions. According to Visser, faculty need more time-nearly twice as much-to teach the distance learners compared to teaching the traditional course. DiBiase thinks they need less time-in his case, an average of 2.7 hours for each distance student compared to 3.2 for the conventional. Before trying to interpret these studies any further, let me hasten to add that the two cases are very different. They are different in what was taught, the level of students' previous education, the nature and extent of institutional support, and even the mixture of technologies; so that if comparisons are made, it should be very carefully. What we might do, though, by examining what went on inside each of the cases, is to specify more precisely what are the more important variables that determine the dynamics of such online forms of distance education. This would take us a step closer to more systematic and controlled comparison-and eventually, perhaps, even to experimental manipulation.
There should be no underestimating the importance of the issues being exposed here. They are not only important pedagogical issues, but they are also policy issues, rising rather urgently to the top of the distance education agenda as a steadily increasing proportion of faculty in higher education and in training are being called on to try their hands at teaching people they usually cannot see, have never met, and are unlikely to meet.
Just to clarify the above statement, I do not mean to say the question of how much work is involved in delivering a course of distance learning is a new one. As with virtually every problem in distance education online, there are many pointers to good practice from research and experience when other delivery mechanisms were in vogue, a point I will return to.
However, the way the question is being raised today, and the intensity of interest in it, is different. Previously, in the single-mode institutions that dominated the field, the question of workload would have been articulated as a simple, human-resource-allocation problem. With a complement of full-time content and design specialists working a fixed number of hours each week, the question was-and for such institutions still is-one of choosing among different alternative ways of employing those people. For most dual-mode (i.e., American) institutions, the question was usually one of either recruiting adjunct faculty, or of paying by the hour or day, the minority of full-time faculty who wanted to teach at a distance on an "overload" basis. Now, however, it is the bulk of faculty, not the adjuncts or the innovators at the margins, who are being called on to take up distance teaching, and usually "on-load". Thus the question "Is it more work or less?" with all the implications in higher education for impact on research, publication, promotion, and tenure is fast becoming one that a large number of people are personally very concerned about. Given the way American universities are run today, i.e., as business rather than as collegium, it has already become, in some institutions, a labor-relations problem. One particularly vexatious area of potential confrontation concerns the contractual terms under which faculty design, and then teach, distance learners online. Thus, for faculty and administrators alike, the answer to the question "How much work is involved?" is far from being of academic interest only.
A Quality Issue
Going further, and in the long run most importantly for both teachers
and "management," just below the surface of Visser's question
about "time and effort," and DiBiase's "more work or less?",
is a "quality" issue.
At the most simple level, the answer to the question whether teaching online is "more work or less" could depend on how well the providing institution is organized to support the design and delivery of such courses. The same course delivered in a well-managed organizational system might require less work on the part of the instructor than in a less-well-organized delivery system-and still be delivered with quality. Similarly, how much time and effort is needed could be dependent on the degree of interaction between instructor and students that the institution and the individual instructor will settle for. A course that provides a greater degree of individual interaction, while providing a higher quality experience for the student, would most likely be more demanding of the instructor than the same course with less interaction. (I should add here that, in my own online teaching, I have been reminded yet again, as I have discovered over a lifetime of involvement in distance education, that the distant learner, adult and highly competent in life though he/she may be, does have a much greater need for the instructor's emotional support-i.e., for reassurance that everything is "going okay"-than most educators in the classroom will find believable. It is a phenomenon not to be underestimated as one attends to the need to balance the cost of "time and effort" with the desire to provide a quality experience.)
Obviously, an administration that has valid information about these "time-and-effort" variables needed to produce good quality, and uses that information to make good decisions in making contracts, managing and rewarding faculty (or, on the other hand, the administration that makes bad decisions in that regard), will determine, one way or another, the quality of both the student's and the instructor's experience. That, in turn, will determine the long-run success or failure of the program and, perhaps, the institution itself.
Some indicators of the time/effort-versus-quality variables can be noted in the two articles being introduced here. DiBiase, for example, spent much longer (32% of his time) on "authoring" the distance learning course compared with "authoring" his traditional class (7%), but he spent about the same time (46% and 51%, respectively) in "student contact." In his traditional class, the student contact time was spent mostly on lectures, an activity which, in the distance class, had already been "authored." That freed him to give a significant amount of the student contact time in the distance class to "monitor course site for messages, initiate and respond to threaded discussion, e-mail, telephone." In other words, the distant learner had considerably more personal, individual attention from the instructor, once the investment in putting the "lectures" online had been completed. In the Visser case, a considerably larger proportion of time was given to design, and much less time given to interaction, than in DiBiase's case. This was because the course featured synchronous group lectures delivered by videoconferencing, with much time taken by these group meetings and a great deal less in interaction with individuals. That in itself is not a judgment on the quality of the experience from the learner's point of view, though. We can only speculate on the difference in satisfaction of the students who were able to see and interact with the distant instructor and among themselves in real time as compared with that of the totally asynchronous, text-based medium.
(There is, in fact, little evidence to support the conventional wisdom-propagated, I dare suggest, by the vendors of online services-that the group-conferencing method is generally, universally, and invariably inferior to the online method!)
Time to Design
In spite of the many differences between these cases, one thing that struck
me as common-and quite remarkable-was not how much, but in fact how little,
"time and effort" went into design of the courses.
For his 80-hour course, DiBiase spent no more than 100 hours on design, and Visser spent about 330 hours on his 36-credit-hour course (which I interpret to mean some 100 hours of student time). If these are, in any way, representative of what is happening generally in the development of Web-based courses, they are astoundingly contrary to all previous experience of "best practice" in distance education. Let me illustrate by referring to an editorial in the AJDE in 1992 (vol. 6, no. 2), in which I urged everyone involved in distance education to "Take time to design." In that editorial, I cited the US Office of Personnel Management, the US Army, and the McDonnell Douglas Company in support of the assertion that design time to "contact time" might range from 300:1 to 50:1. Over the years since then, particularly when consulting on design and development of programs, I have had no reason to give up the 50:1 minimum "ballpark" ratio. In fact, this often turns out to be less, and rarely more, than is needed. So I have to ask myself "What is going on with these online courses? Have the tools for design become dramatically more efficient?" To some extent, probably they have. However, there are many other contributing explanations of the decline in the time invested in design. They include acceptance by a generation of students of frequently mediocre quality as the price of the liberation offered by institutions prepared to teach online as contrasted to previous years, when their attitude was one of "Take it or leave it. Come to campus or go without!" And, of course, many students have no better distance learning experiences with which to compare what they have today.
There are many other explanations-too many to explore here-and I am happy to do no more than simply throw open the question. I do want, though, to point out one other thing, and that is the general absence of audio-and-video presentation in the online courses. This alone makes an enormous difference in the time and effort needed for design-and, I would say, in the quality of the course. Absence of audio and video online is not universally true, but, for reasons some of which are highly defensible and others more dubious (which again we cannot go into here), the fact is that the typical course offered today, including the two reported in this issue of the AJDE, do not provide audio or video online. The production values of those that do fall abysmally short of what are provided to distant learners by organizations delivering "telecourses" in cassette or broadcast formats. Also, with regard to textual design, general observation of online courses suggests that not nearly as much time is being invested in decisions about layout, graphics, illustrations, etc. as would be the case with the study guides of the better-quality traditional distance education courses.
Leaving these thoughts for readers to take up if they so wish, two conclusions might be made, provoked by this preliminary analysis of the two studies reported here. First, whatever is eventually determined to be the "right" amount of time needed to teach online, the quality of the program will be dependent on the extent to which there is time to design. If the traditional design-to-contact ratios are anywhere near accurate, institutions new to the distance education field need to look closely at the effects on quality of trying to move too quickly from the design phase to the interactive. Taking more time to design is probably going to pay off handsomely in the quality of the learning experience, and ultimately the success of the program. Second, and as a consequence of taking time to design, the quality of the online experience will be enhanced and compare favorably with the classroom to the extent that the instructor is relieved of the mass delivery of content and is enabled to give more support to the individual learner. Ultimately, therefore, the answer to the question "Is distance teaching more work or less?" should be that it is neither, but is just different. It should not be a question of having less work or more work than in conventional classrooms, but getting better quality out of the same effort as a result of that effort being more effectively organized and applied.
Is Distance Teaching More Work or
Less Work?
David DiBiase
This article presents data collected
in a year-long study in which the author and his assistants kept detailed
records of their time spent teaching and maintaining two comparable university
courses. One course was offered online to adult professionals away from
campus, the other offered to traditional undergraduates in classrooms
on campus. The courses had similar learning objectives, similar student
activities, and equally favorable ratings by students. Both were mature
courses that required only routine maintenance and revision. The data
do not support the widely held belief that teaching an asynchronous online
course requires more effort than teaching a comparable synchronous classroom
course. Although the distance course required more frequent attention,
the total teaching and maintenance time spent per student was less than
that required to teach and maintain the classroom course. Categories of
teaching tasks are also compared.
Faculty Work in Developing and Teaching
Web-Based Distance Courses: A Case Study of Time and Effort
James A. Visser
Using an experiential case approach,
this study explores the conventional wisdom that distance education courses
require greater faculty work effort and time commitment than traditionally
taught courses. The study's basis for analysis is an instructor's time
and effort in developing and delivering a graduate-level course in public
administration, for both a distance course (a modality with which he had
no previous experience) and his traditional classroom courses. The study
finds support for the conventional wisdom. But it also suggests hypotheses
for future comparative analysis that development and delivery time and
effort may partially depend on the accumulation of instructor experience
and the level of institutional support. This article also identifies some
implications for future research and faculty participation in distance
education.
Capabilities-Based Educational Equivalency Units: Beginning a Professional
Dialogue
Ryan Watkins and Charles Schlosser
This article proposes a basic model for
the transformation of academic equivalency in distance education, shifting
from a unit of measurement that relies on time in the classroom (the Carnegie
unit) to one that focuses on learner achievement. The Capabilities-Based
Educational Equivalency (CBEE) model puts forward a framework of academic
equivalency that is founded on valid and useful instructional design objectives.
While allowing time to be variable (rather than constant) and holding
academic achievement relatively constant, the CBEE model permits the comparison
of student achievement in face-to-face and distance education, as well
as between programs delivering instruction via a wide variety of media.
A New Tool for Managing Students' Questions
in Web-Based Distance Education Courses
Rafael H. Scapin and Euclydes Marega, Jr.
This article describes a Web-based question-answering
system geared toward courses carried entirely via the World Wide Web.
The question-answering system is template based and uses the mSQL database's
W3-mSQL scripting language to generate HTML files dynamically, or "on
the fly." The entire system is managed through an mSQL database located
on a Web server, and data are stored and recovered on demand. The system
was developed to make interaction between students and teachers easier
in distance courses taught via the Web and will be implemented in courses
being carried out by the Centro de Divulgação Científica
e Cultural/Center for Scientific and Cultural Dissemination (CDCC) at
the University of São Paulo at São Carlos, Brazil.
Student Perceptions of Satisfaction and Opportunities for Critical Thinking
in Distance Education by Interactive Video
Cheryl Hilgenberg and William Tolone
Critical thinking is an important component of learning, yet it has received little attention in distance education literature. The purpose of this study was to investigate graduate students' satisfaction and perception of opportunities for critical thinking in distance education courses that utilized a two-way audio/video system.
