|
Online Instruction
Ed Meyen talks about the benefits of online instruction. By Melissa Burgos Brown SCR*TEC I think it's a great way to look at what we're all about in teaching and that is: "what you teach." Unfortunately, many people get hung up on, "how you teach." You can teach bad content and be very effective at it. You can be entertaining, you can use all of the principles and you teach them all of the wrong things. This way you can really examine the content and that creates a level playing field. That's not to suggest that online instruction will replace traditional instruction, but I think there's a real place for it and for many people it will become the instruction of choice, not for all that they learn, but for a substantial portion of what they learn. --Dr. Ed Meyen |
 dward L.
Meyen is a Professor of Special Education. Dr. Meyen's research has focused on
the academic performance of children and youth with handicapping conditions,
community planning, and applications of instructional technologies. He is
currently involved in the development, teaching, and research on online
instruction. His Curriculum
Development course has also recently been awarded an Honorable Mention from
the prestigious Paul Allen Virtual Education Foundation for the Outstanding
Online Course Award. One hundred eighty-two entries were received from 148 institutions
in the U.S. and abroad. Only seven were awarded Honorable Mention. Here he discusses the design, interactive teaching process,
and teacher and student response to online instruction.
|
 Dr. Ed Meyen of the University of Kansas. |
First, I would like to
talk about your initial idea to develop a course taught completely online.
The first course that you taught was one that you had taught in a traditional
classroom setting, can you talk about your first steps in creating this
course online, was there much discussion or was it just a matter of
finding the technical support to design and put together the pieces? Actually I didn't want to do an online course. I had just returned to the faculty full time and Paul Tangen was working in the department of design looking for a masters project. He came to the door, introduced himself and he wanted to know if I'd be interested in working with him on an online course because he wanted to study the interface in terms of online instruction and design features. I told him I wasn't interested in a text-based course. It happened in the same week that RealAudio was announced as a functional tool and so we sat down and in about 10 minutes I realized that it offered many advantages if you could use RealAudio and graphics in terms of the course. So, that's kind of how we got into it. So the course was developed and all of the courses have been developed with the help of students, rather than university resources. We kind of developed a team of myself and students and that's how we developed the courses. |
| Did you encounter any
problems with the university in terms of receiving equal credit for
this course being taught completely online? No, what we did was to begin with a course that I teach regularly. A course on curriculum development that I teach in the Department of Special Education and it's also offered to students in the Department of Teaching and Leadership. I'd just taught the course on television so I'd done a lot of preparation for that course. The lectures were all in detail and all of the activities were in detail, as well as any resource material. We basically, in the very first course, replicated that course in terms of all the content and all of the lectures. So it was an equivalent course in every respect. It was offered as a graduate-level course online and about half way into the development of that course we decided 'Well why not design a course on how to do what we're doing?' So the second course was a course on developing online instruction. We developed a course that taught students how to design a course just like the one that they were engaged in, and both courses have been very popular. |
| In your articles you talk
about audiostreaming technology as a technique used in online instruction,
can you talk about the development of that? Yes, first of all, I wrote scripts for every lecture. There's a tendency for professors when they write, to write like they're writing an article. What I wanted to do was to write lectures like I lecture. I use a lot of transparencies and such in my lectures in the traditional course. So I wrote the scripts for the lectures in an informal type of language like I was giving a lecture. Then for all of the content I created graphic illustrations. The advantage of going from a script is, first of all, you can control the content and get it down to the basic content, without all of the extraneous information you sometimes put into it, but then, it also gives you two versions. You have a script which you then record in audio form, but if a student, for example, was hearing impaired and couldn't listen to the audio lectures, I'd give them the scripts and the graphics and they had the very same content. Writing the scripts took a lot of discipline so I have every lecture in script format exactly as the students listen to it. So the student brings up the lecture, but again, there's the Advance Organizer which is also in audio format and tells them what they learned last and what they're going to learn in this lecture, then it goes into the lecture and they're never looking at a blank screen because they're all illustrated. So it's not boring for students to look at. Well, they say it isn't. Also, we did some research and found that they wanted to see an image of the instructor. Initially, we just had a little icon picture of me, but they wanted to see more images. Besides the graphic illustrations and the content, we have images of me lecturing. And the way we captured those was, we just went to the tapes when I talked on television and captured little images of me with my arms flaring and talking about this and that. They appear on all of the lectures. |
| You also talk about asynchronous
learning, which is interactive learning without the interaction between
student and instructor occurring at the same time, in you inital semester
teaching the course online, did you feel that the lack of face-to-face
interaction was successfully supplemented with the video and audio technology
used for the lectures? The typical reaction from the professor and student, for example, who's never really thought very much about online instruction and is certainly not experienced in it is that "My goodness, it's going to be very impersonal." It turns out to be just the opposite. It is extraordinarily personal the way I designed the course, because there's lots of interaction. And you become aquainted with your students. You're communicating with them almost daily. You're accessible to them. Particularly in graduate courses where the courses are offered at night, and the courses that I teach, the teachers are already employed. They are professionals. By the time they get to the course they're tired and by the time the course is over, they've got to go home and do some other work. You rarely have the opportunity to sit down and talk with students about their personal interests. In online instruction, every question that they ask and every activity that they submit is theirs and you're responding only to them and they begin to realize and sense that. I think that one of the real strengths of online instruction is the personal nature of it. That is just what people don't think about when they think about "My goodness I'm going to sit here looking at the monitor and hit a few keys and be expected to learn." |
|
"It is extraordinarily personal the way I designed the course, because
there's lots of interaction. And you become aquainted with your students.
You're communicating with them almost daily." |
What about e-mail as a
form of communication between student and instructor, do you find that
more students seek help and feel comfortable communicating with you
as an instructor as compared with having office hours? Well, there are several things operating here. My courses, keep in mind, are not taken by traditional undergraduate students. They're taken by employed professionals for the most part and some traditional graduate students. They take the course and they complete the activities at the time that's best for them, when it's convenient for them, and when they're ready to do it and to learn. That's very different than going to class at 3:30 every Thursday afternoon, whether you feel like it or not, whether it's rainy or not, whether you're tired or excited or whatever. They do it when it's best for them, which means that I have activities coming in and communications coming in at all hours of the day. So they now go through an entirely different shift in terms of how they participate in instruction. They're not going to class on a schedule. They can get ahead or they can fall behind. The typical pattern is they get ahead. From my point of view as a prof, I no longer go to class at 4 o'clock and give a lecture. I no longer plan for Thursday afternoon or Wednesday night to teach. I teach everyday. I start my day working on my courses and responding to e-mail. That's the first thing I do when I arrive in the morning and it's the last thing I do in the daytime. |
| What is your schedule?
I imagine that there are some times during the semester where you're
busier than others in terms of mail and correspondence with students.
Right, I call that the funnel syndrome, where everyone is trying to get through. It took me a while to adjust. I do not adhere to a rigid schedule, but I do try to start each morning looking at my courses. I have three courses that are available so I have a separate e-mail account for each one of them. My courses are designed with lots of activities that students must complete and then they click submit when the forms are done and they come in. Probably 80 percent of the communication I have with students is based on those activities that they submit their responses to and they average about two activities a lesson. There are 16 lessons so a total of 32 activities per course plus projects and other kinds of assignments. So those come in and I respond. It's an e-mail message and they ask questions such as, "I'm not quite clear on this in the lecture, have you ever thought about this, or in my class I had this experience . . . " You get those kinds of communications. I typically do it the first thing in the morning and I'll periodically check it during the day, if I need a break to do something different when I'm working on some other activity, and I try to check at the end of the day as well. I teach 100 percent online, I teach no traditional courses right now. And so, I've just gone through a total transformation in terms of what I do as a faculty member. |
| Do you sense that students are more motivated because
the additional responsibility is placed on them? I think they're more motivated because of the fact that they get more feedback from the instructor and the course is planned. Now as a prof, we always plan our courses, but it's a very rare professor who goes into a course that's truly well designed and they adhere to the design of that course and they honor it 100 percent. You know, a prof gets reinforced by someone asking extraneous questions and allowing you to talk about something you enjoy, whether it has anything to do with what you planned to do today is beside the point. Students like that a little bit, you know they get sometimes, not bored, but there are days when they would rather not be focusing on the intensity of the content and hear something a little bit softer. Profs are the same way so, I really believe that in many traditional courses we really fall short in terms of the design aspect. In an online course, it has to be designed and it's very public. You would not want to subject a poorly designed online course to anyone, if you think about it because your professional reputation is also at stake. If the content's not good, if it's not organized, well structured, it's right there for review. You can review every aspect of online teaching and cannot deny it. You go into a traditional course, you can't review anything unless someone is going to sit there and take notes on every aspect of your lecture. You can check and find out, like today, how many activities came in, what time they came in, and exactly what second I responded. You can look at the quality of their response. You can look at the quality of my response. By definition, the technology records everything. That's excellent for evaluation purposes. I think it's a great way to look at what we're all about in teaching and that is: "what you teach." Unfortunately, many people get hung up on, "how you teach." You can teach bad content and be very effective at it. You can be entertaining, you can use all of the principles and you teach them all of the wrong things. This way you can really examine the content and that creates a level playing field. That's not to suggest that online instruction will replace traditional instruction, but I think there's a real place for it and for many people it will become the instruction of choice, not for all that they learn, but for a substantial portion of what they learn. |
| What kind of effect do
you think online instruction will have on traditional instruction? I think that online instruction will have a very significant positive effect on traditional instruction, because of the fact that it does focus on engaging students. It focuses on making good decisions about content, structuring content, and providing assessment that's really relevant to what you taught. It creates a situation where there is no disputing whether or not you have overlap between two online courses. So when students say, "Gee, I had the same content in X 101 as I had in X 102 by a different professor," but if it's true or there's a concern about it, just take a look at it. I just think that the instructional accountability that's placed on you in teaching online eventually will splash over to traditional instruction and will drive the quality of traditional instruction up. |
| Do you think that, like faculty members, students are
also divided on this issue some students would rather be in a traditional
classroom setting and be on a set schedule? I think there are some students who really prefer the person that performs in their teaching and keeps them engaged regardless of the subject matter. I remember in college having a prof that I thought droned, but was no doubt in my mind, a person who knew his subject matter. It was my responsibility in that case to gain from it. I also remember far more recently, listening to a prof that I'd heard a lot about, he wasn't teaching here at the time, and so I attended a lecture and there was no question, it was thrilling. When I sat down I said 'Now, I listened to this person for three hours and it's been really engaging, what'd I learn?' I really struggled, I didn't learn anything. But the person had a great way of presentation. So I think teaching is complex and if you have to have the immediate strokes to teach, [by teaching] live, then this is going to be of less interest to you. If you are a student and you need that face-to-face interaction, versus really being focused on the subject matter and assuming some responsibility yourself, then this isn't going to be for you. Most students claim that they put a lot more effort into it. It's a lot more work, but they don't realize it. That's because of having a number of activities that cause them to apply what they're learning, right now. But courses vary in their design. There are some online courses that aren't worth the juice it takes to bring them up. And others are really outstanding. |
| Have you altered anything
from the original design of your online courses since their inception?
Yes we have. When we began, the idea was that students access the lectures and then I would place activities, assessments, and other resources in the lectures when I thought they needed them. It turns out, after some research, that that's fine except they want to know what they [the activities] are in advance. When they go to the lecture they want to know "What's that activity like that I have to do or those activities are that I have to do?" They want to have them in mind. And so, we moved that up front so they could click and look at the activities in advance. The other thing was that, in my courses I take notes for them. As they're going along, a statement will come up and appear on the screen in color, even during a lecture, and that's a key point. What I've done is gone through the script and picked out the key points and those are notes for them. Then at the end they can print out all those notes. We've found that if you can give it to them in advance, they anticipate what those discussions are going to be. So we changed that and they can click on those in advance and print them out. |
| So do you think that students feel more comfortable giving
you feedback about the class through e-mail? In terms of critical feedback, I don't think that the willingness of students to offer good critical feedback changes very much unless you take advantage of how you can make it anonymous. And here's what I did, at the end of every lesson they had a little 10-item questionnaire about the quality of the lesson, did they learn anything, clarity of instruction, encounter any problems, and I don't see the student's name attached to the message. That goes to a separate source and I get aggregate data, in other words I get group information. I don't get individual input on that lesson. I have a little test, kind of a reactor, with every lesson, and I don't grade it. It's used for instructional purposes, but I do get feedback on the quality of those questions and whether they relate to the content. That's formative feedback. So, on both of those they're very willing to give that kind of feedback. What I do get is another type of discourse with students, which if you think about it, is really a constructive feedback. When they send an e-mail that says "I don't understand this" what they're really saying is, "That's a lousy statement, it's not clear." Or you send the response back and they say "Well that wasn't how I was looking at it." That's good constructive feedback, but yet it's in a different context. And so, because you give them more opportunities to do that and they are doing it privately, I think you do get more feedback that's useful. One of the real strengths of online instruction is that, from a student's point of view, it's always private. One of the first comments I get, any semester after about two weeks, all of the sudden someone will send me a little note saying "You know, I've been doing this for two weeks and all of the sudden it dawned on me that I would never talk in class. And now, I'm sending you all of these comments and I'm responding and such. What a difference that makes!" And I think that as an instructor, online, you have to kind of reinforce comments to get students to talk, and you can do that. I try once in a while to insert a little humor in response, but you have to be very careful, because some students take everything literal. |
| What are the main benefits
and challenges of online instruction? You can create quality instruction for any setting, but you're forced to do a better job in online instruction. If you were to ask students what the advantages are, I think the first one they're going to say is flexibility. They can take the instruction any place, any time. And it's always the same content, always the same experience, in terms of the presentation. And my students typically work late at night or in the morning. Some work in the workplace some work in the day. Whatever's best for them. So students like the flexibility. They like access. They know, when they send their message that the probabilities are very high that they're going to hear from me pretty quick. They can call me if they wish, they can fax me if they wish. A lot of them stop by. From the instructor's point of view, everything's public, just about, because everything you do can be reviewed. Of course there are all kinds of designs. There are courses out there that, I call 'content free.' They run students around a bunch of resources on the Internet, all of which are relevant, but I don't know how they ever pull it together into something cohesive, but you can make it a first-class experience. |
|
"Develop a design that will fit and work well online and maintains the
integrity that the instruction has to offer and creates the level of
communication with students that you want. Don't compromise a bit on
content, you don't have to." |
Finally, I wanted to ask
what advice would you give to educators creating an online course as
far as good sources for guidelines and best practice examples? Generally, any teaching principle can be applied online. Like Advance Organizer, feedback is a basic principle, reflective questions, engagement. Those are all basic learning principles, you just transfer them over here and you develop them in a different way. I think the key is to sit down and think about what you're teaching and think about you're students and think about your willingness to make an investment of effort. Don't begin developing the course until you've worked out an instructional design and planning strategy. I think that is very important. Lay out your course and then go back and determine how you can best adjust it to online. Develop a design that will fit and work well online and maintains the integrity that the instruction has to offer and creates the level of communication with students that you want. Don't compromise a bit on content, you don't have to. Don't compromise a bit on quality of the student performance, you don't have to, you can get better performance. They control the quality of the work before they send it to you. Also, you have to think through the technology implications. No way, will I spend the time to be technically competent at the level necessary to do the technical side of it. I want to put my energies into the content, the instructional design, and the teaching part of it. We didn't have an office around here to go to for support so I ended up being paired with a student which I think was great. He was highly motivated. We worked out a team. I have a news seminar, I just taught an online seminar which is both asynchronous and synchronous and six students who had taken the courses worked with me and we designed it. And so, that was a different team, but we designed, I think a very sophisticated online seminar in terms of technology. They did the technology work and I was responsible for the content and worked with them on the instructional design. I think that there are tremendous opportunities here for student teams. Now, it would also be great if you had a technical support office and you'd go to this office and they'd assign you someone and a few months later you'd crank out the course. I think that at the present time, when you look at professional opportunities for students who are in college today, in any field, the student who gained some experience while they're in college, not only in taking instruction online, but designing instruction online, working with a prof or someone else to create it, no matter what field their going into, they're going to have a real edge and they're going to have a better future. It makes no difference what the field is, because industry is going in that direction. Industry invests more in training than universities. They're going to Web-based training. So there are a lot of career opportunities and you have a large number of students who are highly motivated to gain this experience. In every academic discipline the situation is there, it just needs to be created into a culture. Universities are all trying to create support offices, but it's going to be a challenge just to determine how it ought to function. Right now the courses are out there, the online courses that are fully online. I think that for the most part, it's all the entrepreneural spirit of individual faculty members. There are a few places where there is a systematic effort to produce courses. The School of Nursing at the University of Kansas Medical Center, for example, is working to develop an online masters degree. That's a systematic approach. But for the most part if you look around the country, the online courses that are fully online, at this stage, are still coming in as a consequence of fortuitous situations. Ed and Paul got together. We need to go beyond that, but we don't want to discourage that either. |
|
