Teaching multiple online classes

Summary:

What are the pros and cons to having the majority of your teaching load online?

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Teaching multiple online classes

anony (guest) 23 Apr 2015 16:24

I anticipate an offer with an exploding deadline soon and am still very conflicted about the position. One of the non-negotiable components will likely be that I have to teach online classes. I have plenty of experience teaching the courses I would be responsible for, but I have never taught any course online. My hunch is that the offer would dictate that the majority, if not all, of the courses would be taught online (4:4 load).

Any advice from those of you who have taught online courses? I'm not as concerned about the prospect of teaching online … more so the thought of teaching 3-4 courses online (including Research Methods) each semester. Thoughts? Cautionary tales?

Re: Teaching multiple online classes

DocJ 24 Apr 2015 12:33

Foremost, absolutely do not treat an online course the same way as an in-person course. That is, never use a "lecture" like format for an online class. In my experiences, an online class that operates as a guided independent study for students tends to work best. There is debate about whether to allow students to complete the course at their own pace or force them to remain in unison. I personally like a hybrid design where a whole set of modules/topics is available with attendant assignments leading up to an exam that's set for a fixed date range (usually 72 hours). This way, motivated students or those who have busy schedules can knock out a lot of material quickly while still keeping the class more or less on the same overall topic.

You need to learn more about your potential department and their perspective toward students. In online classes, it's very easy for the unmotivated students to flame out and fail horribly. If your department or institution would hold you more responsible for this, be very wary! You want the institution to be supportive of faculty and back them if a lousy student tries to whine to administration. Trust me, in an online class with say 25 students, expect as many as 4 or 5 to have issues and complaints with at least 1 or 2 completely flaking out and blaming you about their not remembering to check the class assignments or having endless technology problems.

Finally, how many separate preps would this entail? The nice thing about online classes is that once you develop the materials, you can more or less let the course go autopilot and then focus on grading and interacting with the students. The tough part is the prep. Online classes take a long time to prep unless you'll used "canned" material from a publisher. If it were me and I were just starting out, I'd focus on developing at most 2 new online courses per semester and would toss canned material on the others. This said, don't reinvent the wheel. There's a ton of great videos, demonstrations, and other materials on line (e.g. recorded talks from prominent psychologists at conferences). Tap into these to make your life easier - and - reach the more motivated students.

Apeneck Sweeney (guest) 24 Apr 2015 18:18

Second that. No one in our department likes online classes - students included. There is huge dropout rates since the slackers aren't forced to attend class. Eval numbers are usually horrible, so don't expect the students to like you.

Our school is pushing for online everything. At the same time, they are pushing for retention. The two don't fit well together.

So how do we make them fit? Easy - make the testing (not just the classes) online. What happens is easy to predict. When classes are online and testing on-site, the grades are horrible and the students drop out in mass numbers. When everything is online, the class GPA is A.

Everyone knows that this is because they are cheating. Would we expect otherwise?

Part of the reason faculty hate online classes is because it is so transparently crass - the students want the easy grade/credential, and the administration wants high retention and student tuition. Everyone profits.

Re: Teaching multiple online classes

DocJ 25 Apr 2015 13:52

@Apeneck - online classes succeed or fail depending on the students and the faculty teaching them. Faculty who understand how to utilize technology and integrate this with learning experiences will tend to make an enriching class style that will reach even lackluster students. If my institution had more online classes, I'd integrate the courses with social media technology, for example, and would have students use social media in a way that could be graded. Today's students are tech savvy with consumer/pop technology - let them shine with this.

Online testing is always an issue, but there are ways to reduce cheating. One colleague of mine went so far as to have oral exams done through Skype. While time-consuming and not at all applicable for classes with perhaps more than 10 or 20 students (depending on the number of courses taught), my colleague reports that students loved the format and felt a strong connection despite the distance learning. In my own online classes, I simply create tests that resist cheating and involve many open-ended questions that have no clear answers. Then, my institution has a strong honor code that's upheld by a student run court system. I've yet to see intentional academic dishonesty at my institution. Of course, this sort of thing varies from one institution to the next.

In the case of my online classes, the grade distributions work out exactly the same as my in-person classes, and my retention is perfectly fine.

Attitude is everything. The unmotivated students who do so poorly tend to have a lousy attitude where they're focused on some grade rather than learning. Maybe our education system is partially to blame. Maybe if these students felt faculty actually gave a damn about them, took a more personal interest in who they are, and reached out individually they'd have a better outcome? But, I'm biased. Having worked at a SLAC and large public universities, I hope I'm fortunate enough to always be at a SLAC. The difference in student enthusiasm and career/grad school outcomes even with students who don't break a 3.0 GPA is astounding. Frankly, our public system is a mess. But, that's another topic.

qwerty (guest) 25 Apr 2015 14:19

The two worlds of the nice SLAC schools and the larger public universities are quite different. It may be that good SLAC students can succeed in online education, but these students are the minority. The majority of college students aren't particularly motivated and lack basic academic skills. In online formats, these students suffer.

Please, let's not fall into the 'blame the teacher' routine. Our state legislatures are doing enough of that, thank you.

It is a common misconception that students are 'tech-savvy'. That has not been my experience. My students are social-media savvy. They are pop-culture savvy. They are 'always-be-in-contact-with-friends savvy'. But they are not particularly smart with Excel, PPT, SPSS, or even Word. It continues to amaze me how ignorant they are of how some basic technology works.

Again, this is from the perspective of a prof at a medium-sized, state university. It may indeed be different in the lofty world of the SLACs. But I work with the majority of our college population, and for them, online education is truly a gamble. As Apeneck said, dropout rates and grades overall are terrible for online platforms. To succeed in such classes, the student needs to be self-motivated, organized, and be capable of devoting the time to the class. My students? Easily a quarter of them have children of their own (different world, right?), nearly everyone has 1-2 jobs, and they are first-generation college students whose parents have NO IDEA what sort of environment fosters academic success. For these students, I recommend very strongly that the avoid online classes like the plague.

Re: Teaching multiple online classes

DocJ 25 Apr 2015 14:58

@Qwerty - I agree that students aren't savvy with technical computing or even basic office computing. This is why entry-level classes like those are offered. If institution leadership were smart, they'd require students take basic microcomputer application courses before starting online curricula.

That said, your phrasing about "worlds of the nice SLAC schools" and "lofty world of the SLACs" reflects my point about attitudes. I understand nearly all of us in faculty roles are exceedingly busy if not overwhelmed. Atop the teaching, we have administrative demands and all sorts of extra service duty that goes unpaid and largely unrecognized. Then, through it all, we need to try to keep our research going and deal with problem students. I get that all of this saps energy and motivation, that it can lead to cynicism and low or dismissive expectations. This happens with faculty at SLACs, too.

Outcomes are influenced by our expectations. As psychologists, we should be cognizant of this. If one has low expectations of students, even if it's been proven true from past experience, how can things get any better? That lousy expectancy will perpetuate the poor outcomes. I'd like to think that all of us working in academia at one time valued teaching and student interaction. Don't let stress and problem students ruin that enthusiasm.

qwerty (guest) 25 Apr 2015 16:25

No one works harder than those working with students from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. My cynicism is not directed towards my students. It is directed towards people like you, who believe that the standards of your higher-end students reflect the greater population. For you, online education can be wonderful, so long as the faculty are as brilliant as you are. But for those of us on the front-line of higher education, we know how disconnected you are from the real world.

I have students in my classes who are going through divorce. I have had students who have been in at various stages of the judicial system. Last year I had a student who explained that he had to withdraw from class because he and his mother had recently become homeless. He had been doing his schoolwork for the past week from their car. Are these kinds of cases common? Issues of divorce, spousal/partner abuse, finances, child-rearing are very common. I usually get one specific case per semester that drops my jaw. For students such as these, online education is a genuine trap - they sink their money into it (and our administrators gobble it up), but the chances that they can succeed are exceedingly thin. What these students need is the brick-and-morter of the classroom, where I can get to know them (and all their issues), and provide the help they need.

Do any of your students have such issues? I doubt it. I know how pristine the SLACs can be. You want your students to have rockstar SAT scores, and to get those you need money and support.

Don't preach to me about 'expectations' when you are so cut off from the realities of such students.

anony (guest) 25 Apr 2015 17:57

@DocJ My plan had been to set it up like a hybrid with modules that are relatively self-paced with specific time windows for larger assessments. I hadn't even begun to think about the department/university expectations around online classes … particularly DFW rates … That question is definitely going on my list!

@Apeneck Sweeney Thanks for the cautionary tale regarding student evaluations! I've been much more focused on the up-front workload that will go into developing these classes and hadn't thought about getting that first batch of evals. *shudder. One of my colleagues had just that experience. She taught a course with an in-person section and an online section. Her in-person student evaluations were stellar (as usual), but her online evaluations were, let's say, noticeably lower. This is one reason why I would be concerned about online teaching. To this point my teaching record is pretty great, I would hate to see a huge swing in my course evals simply because I am switching to a new method of delivery. I'm not going to go as far to say that it would jeopardize my career …. but … when it comes to yearly evaluations numbers often speak louder than words.

Something we have also been talking about at my current university (large state school) is how online courses should be evaluated. It is easy to see how an in-person course is evaluated, one of your colleagues sits in on your class and writes a report. Online seems to be a different animal. We have discussed allowing the colleague to "sit in" on the course through the online management system, to observe discussion sessions (imagine someone sitting over your shoulder as you chat with students), and looking at the materials/activities that are available to the students. While these practices seem reasonable, I do not see how peer-assessment of the in-person course would be equivalent to assessment of the online course.

Anyone have insight into how to promote fair evaluations of those teaching online courses?

Apeneck Sweeney (guest) 25 Apr 2015 22:51

You have some good ideas, anony. I think it is smart to think of ways for your new faculty to see that you are doing a good job in the online format. Frankly, just asking senior faculty to do that can work magic, for it shows you care.

One thing to ask about is whether your new colleagues are also aware of the difficulties with online formats. In my department, everyone would immediately agree about what we have all discussed here (I think few would take the 'blame the professor' route). They likely have two different standards for evaluating faculty based on online vs. in-house. If so, you might be judged against your fellow online profs, rather than in-house. But it would be good to find out before you sign the dotted line.

Also, keep in mind that good departments care about more than just the eval numbers. They often look to see the qualitative comments, and to see if there is a pattern. My sense is that if you are very diligent in addressing the needs of the students, that will be clear in their comments (despite negative numbers, if there are any). I think a burden with online teaching (so I hear) is that the students want responses asap - moreso than in-house. So, at least in the first year, you might have to be stuck on the computer quite a bit.

Also, find out about the testing format - if online or in-house. Different departments have different standards.

I wish that I could offer more advice, but I have never taught these online classes. Good luck!

Re: Teaching multiple online classes

DocJ 26 Apr 2015 01:18

@qwerty - don't assume SLAC = privilege. Plenty of SLACs operate with abundant internal financial aid and have a strong focus on groups who fall on low SES. At my SLAC, I've worked with abundant first generation students who come from abject poverty and even had one student report to me midway through the semester that one reason for falling grades was that this student wound up homeless. Your assumptions suggest to me that you lack awareness of the broader academic world. You don't know my employment history. I've worked the range of institutions from big, non-elite public institutions down to community colleges situated in cities filled with poverty.

Yes, I agree that students who face a myriad of life struggles will have difficulty with online classes. But, you failed to consider that for a single parent an online class may be far more viable than having to find a sitter and possibly loss a job with varying hours to be able to attend a regular class. You failed to consider that some students you serve may lack adequate transportation, too. Maybe the issue here is less about the format and more the expectation that people who lack financial resources own a copy of MS Office or SPSS? So, please consider that there are a multitude of angles here.

My main point - again - is that the instructor sets the expectations. Students are very good at picking up on an instructor's attitude. If you go into a class with apathy and expecting failure, that's what you're going to get.

That said, I'm through with turning this into some lame debate

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