Not ready

[James Kerr]

Recently asked by a professor how to “get ahead of the rush to offer online courses” at our university.  Professor Nameless is an excellent instructor, but ardently avoids teaching online and openly admits he doesn’t like technology.  At a faculty development workshop for our LMS he declared he would never teach online and never use our LMS.  Professor Nameless is also a nice guy, don’t take me the wrong way.

There seems to still be a general misconception that any good classroom f2f instructor will be a good online or TEL instructor, and that using technology or teaching online is a piece of cake.  Truth is, it takes more work for online courses than f2f courses to do it properly.  We’re working with Professor N.  Baby steps.

[SueFolley]

James – you are totally right. It takes a lot of work to prepare an online course, and it does not follow that a good f2f teacher will make a good online tutor. It is a different skill set they need, and does involve a change in perception of role. I have just completed my EdD thesis on tutors’ experience of teaching online, and the group of tutor I concentrated my study on were not the advocates or early adopters tutors but the early/late majority tutors. They mostly found teaching online very different and very difficult, and expressed a strong preference for teaching f2f.

[KarenStrickland]

Hi

I’ve looked at this from another angle slightly and it has highlighted some assumptions I had about my students. Yesterday I met with on of my PGCert students who is a  lecturer at my institution, lets call her Susie…

Our PGCert is blended with most content being online and some workshops. When Susie and I were discussing her progress she was asking me questions about content readily available in our VLE, Moodle. I gently suggested she might like to have a look again at the course materials when she told me she found it a little difficult at times as she DOESN’T HAVE THE INTERNET AT HOME! Well, I was a bit flabbergasted and before I could stop myself, my words were out… “how can you possibly manage without internet access at home?” I asked. We had a fairly light hearted discussion about my assumptions and she did have a smart phone which is fine but not great for doing all your learning on. But in pondering this encounter it made me think about the discussion activity.
 
This learner was happy to engage in online learning but did not have access at home (or very limited through phone), arguably her access issues suggest her “readiness” to learn was restricted.
 
Her expectations were that she would keep her learning at work which she then found challenging to incorporate and was using an previous version of the module in print format. Obviously limiting her to older material.
 
This experience really flabbergasted me as I had assumed my learners working in HE would all have the access to online learning at work and home. In my previous role as lecturer in nursing with under and post grad students I was fine with acknowledging access issues but somehow have slipped into assumptive mode as lecturer in HE.

How does this relate to James’ post? Well the assumptions we make about learning and teaching need to be unpicked regularly. Just as we cannot assume that good f2f teachers and good online teachers neither can we make assumptions about particular learner groups.

Karen

[James Kerr]

Sue-congratulations on finishing your EdD thesis! I will be taking candidacy exams this autumn, then on to PhD dissertation.

Different departments in our university approach online teaching differently; one department I’m thinking of specifically is requiring GA and GTA to complete an online teaching course/workshop before they start actually instructing, even f2f courses, because even traditional courses carry a technology load, whether it is providing course documents or even just communicating with students via e-mail.

What is interesting is that the same requirements are not made of faculty, even new hires.  Granted, with each subsequent generation of educators, the base technology skill set grows, but assumptions are still made.

[James Kerr]

Karen,

You bring up an excellent point.  I was teaching an introduction to computer science course once, and an adult returning student enrolled in the course; he was retraining for another career after losing his job.  Course prerequisites were sent out and listed with the course description.  It was required that students have a basic comfort level with computers and handle the basics, such as starting applications, opening and saving files, using e-mail, etc.  This student felt he met the prerequisites for the course, but was soon struggling with even the most basic computer tasks.  He later inquired about additional tutoring; he thought the course was going to teach him all the basic computer skills he needed, and not require a functional knowledge of computers already.

There are still folks around for whom things like “click”, “right-click”, “taskbar”, and other names and functions are still unknown concepts.  This illustrates why asking questions and having students assess themselves prior to enrolling in TEL and online courses is still necessary.

[MonikaMajor]

Jim,

Our students still have trouble viewing videos or listening to audio files in our LMS or are ready to submit a quiz and run into problems.  They email me, the instructor,  to solve their problems.  As you know I am not a computer expert so I wish we offered more support for students on campus.  Recently my students discovered  that our LMS does not work with Google Chrome for video and quizzes so sometimes they are educating me.  I am not surprised that many instructors don’t want to deal with such issues, avoid technology and focus on the subject they know rather than uncovering new grounds which takes their time away from their research.

Good luck with your exams!

[philtubman]

Hi, Thanks for this post James and the other contributors.

I work on the other side of the fence to MonikaMajor, as I work in the ISS dept and hear about problems 2nd hand from the staff when something is going on such as quizzes not working in certain browsers etc. It is an institutional problem that as e-learning is embedded in courses, the fear of not being able to solve working problems is a major problem for uptake amongst normal teaching staff. And nobody really knows who to fix these, unless you know somebody…

I would like to hear some positive stories of the luddite to enthusiast, and the methods used to introduce people into TEL. As has been discussed on this topic, the skills and attributes required are very different from f2f teaching. I have read about things like the 3E framework http://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/academicdevelopment/TechBenchmark/Pages/3E.aspx but it still remains a mystery as to how to move people through these stages.

My addition to this discussion is the point that fear of technology-reliance as a factor in adoption of TEL. The point goes very deep, as Karen points out, into the homes and personal lives of tutors, as the attributes required for digital literacies (for tutoring) disrupt your perceptions of yourself and profession. This is a harder nut to crack than even the insitutional support problem I started with.

Does anyone have any thoughts or stories on this…

[James Little]

Hi All,

Great posts and insights.  Picking up on Phil’s point about embedding resilience about tel going much deeper than just the professional context – i.e. into use of technology in all aspects of lives  and hence why this might be a bigger challenge than just work.

I think there are several approaches which can alleviate some of this anxiety.

But – these rely upon protected time and willingness to set aside some time for learning something new.  This commitment – even if it is very small – is the first psychological step that needs to be taken and enabled.

In terms of connecting up theory such as Edinburgh Napier’s 3E’s to real world examples of enabling and moving forward I agree sometimes it can seem there is gap between the two.  At my last place of work I collaboratively developed  a staff personal development course in order to bridge the gap in online teaching and learning pedagogy for staff at the university. The course aimed to equip academic staff with the knowledge and experience in the use of educational technologies and how to plan and develop an effective online course for their students.

In doing this we tried to underpin the rationale of the course into the 3Es framework – as enabling and enhancing activity (T1 – first 6 session), then leading onto new activity (T2 – online course development).

More thoughts about this here http://www.learningtechnologist.co.uk/2013/05/01/octel-week-2-activities/

However, it seems that whilst some aspects and problems seem universal perhaps some of the ways that they could be tackled are quite specific to both student and academic context (institution/subject).  As Karen Strickland mentioned some of her students don’t event have the internet at home.  A challenge is as much as the diversity of experience rather than just a lack of experience.

 

[Leonie]

Hi Sue. That sounds like a really interesting thesis topic. Do you have any of it ready in a shareable form?

[Author]

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