Distance education is rapidly
growing in higher education as well as in the private sector. In 2003 the
So, as Jennifer Hendricks says, the “little red cyber schoolhouse” is replacing traditional classroom learning — or at least supplementing it. But it is important to note that, just as students learn in distance education courses, faculty must also learn about distance education.
While educators are well-versed in their area of expertise, they typically have no on-the-job experience when it comes to e-Learning. Instead, they most often develop their e-Learning expertise through trial and error.
In this article we offer hints to help you learn from our experiences in the trenches. Our tips include ways to foster good communication with your learners and how to conserve time. We’ll include specific discussions about managing emails, announcements, course items, the drop box, and the grade book. We’ll also explain how to access and use the course statistics available from online educational programs such as Blackboard and WebCT.
Communication between faculty and students
Communication is an essential component of the seven principles of good practice in teaching presented by Arthur Chickering and Zelda Gamson who suggest that good practice:
- Encourages contacts between students and faculty
- Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students
- Uses active learning strategies
- Gives prompt feedback
- Emphasizes time on task
- Communicates high expectations
- Respects diverse talents and ways of learning Communication is fundamentally important in building the online learning community within the course and fostering interactive and dynamic learning, as the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications pointed out in 1997. More recently, The Sloan Consortium, made up of institutions and organizations committed to quality online education, validated the importance of faculty-student communication in student satisfaction. Without regular in-person classroom encounters, communication within online courses must occur in other ways.
There are a variety of ways to communicate within online courses but some of these ways take more time than others. For example, individual emails between you and the students can be especially time-consuming. Using online course discussion board forums and announcements to answer questions and share information can reduce the email volume while still fostering good communication with the learners.
Email management
Anyone who has taught a distance education course can tell you that an unforeseen time consumer is reading and responding to learner emails. Large classes can drown you. A colleague offered a simple solution with powerful results when she suggested simply creating a discussion board forum for course questions and answers. Learners often have the same questions so using the discussion board enables you to answer the question once, and avoid multiple incoming and outgoing emails on the subject.
You can devise multiple discussion board forums for different topics such as questions about a course project, presentation, competency exam, or paper. Organizing topics via the discussion board helps learners share information on a topic, and organizes questions and answers by topic area. You can also organize your email by using the Rules Wizard in Microsoft Outlook. This tool helps you establish “rules” so that Outlook puts all related email items into folders as they arrive by, for example, using keywords in the email subject line. Then when you are ready to read email you can review all related emails together, rather than jumping from course topics to unrelated topics. Microsoft Outlook’s Help menu provides detailed instructions for devising rules. If you use the course number as an organizing term, be sure to ask learners to always include the course number in the subject line so Outlook can drop the item into the course folder.
You can organize your replies to emails as well. Often an individual will send you multiple emails on the same day. You could reply to each of these messages as it arrives, but waiting to respond until after reading all of them saves you time. Also ask learners to jot down their thoughts as they work or read, and to then address all those notes in a single email. Newer versions of Microsoft Outlook include an option that notifies you when a new email arrives and that shows the initial line of the email. This notification can be a distraction instead of a help. Turning off the notification function, including any accompanying mail delivery sound alert, is an option that can reduce interruptions and maximize productivity.
Interestingly, we have noticed that there is often an informality to emails that is not characteristic of formal letters. When learners write to you and then you quickly send a response, some learners may perceive the communication to be terse. One way to build relationships with learners is to use a conversational greeting, keep a friendly notes format, and avoid responses that are so brief they may seem curt. We also find that interacting on a first name basis fosters better relationships with our learners.
A last note about emails is the frustration of undelivered emails. A great challenge, as yet unsolved, is keeping learners in the loop who have chronically full mailboxes that result in returned emails. It would be simple to suggest the responsibility is the learners’, but often those are the very individuals who are most out of the loop and most in need of help to get on track with information and learning within the course.
The sender often assumes the burden to try again to contact the learner when an email is returned. There are several solutions that may reduce this burden. For example, if the learner uses a university email address you can be sure that the email will be delivered unless the mailbox is full. So a first step is to ask learners to keep the university email address rather than change it to their home or work email provider. Many learners don’t like this option however, because they must log onto the university site to access their email in addition to accessing their usual source of email.
Course announcements
Another solution is to post an announcement, rather than sending an email to all learners.
Course announcements can facilitate communication with learners about upcoming guest speakers, tests, and deadlines. Blackboard provides an announcement feature that collects and posts all announcements so learners logging onto Blackboard can see all announcements for all courses. Using announcements is better than using email because announcements are available any time a learner accesses the course, even to individuals whose email boxes are full.
In addition to the problems already identified, antispam programs may filter out multiple emails when these come from a single source. When more than one email comes from the university on a single day, learners more and more often report that their mail program or their Internet Service Provider (ISP) blocked the second and subsequent messages because these fit the criteria for spam. Announcements bypass those email delivery issues.
Most e-Learning programs include a feature that posts announcements when tests are available. This convenient feature provides a standard notification and a link to the test, and the learner can begin taking the test immediately.
Time-saving tips
Blackboard and other e-Enterprise applications offer a number of features to save time for online instructors. We suggest that the most valuable of these are the ones that allow you to save announcements, to manage visibility of course items, to set up drop boxes, and to manage the grade book. Here are our tips for using these features.
Saving announcements
In Blackboard, when you create an announcement you have an option to either make it permanent or available for a limited period of time. Using the latter function posts announcements for a designated period and then saves them. This “save” feature reduces the time you might spend in subsequent semesters creating announcements because you can simply click on one, modify and make minor changes, and re-post the announcement. It is much faster to make changes in this way than it is to recreate an entire announcement.
Managing visibility of course items
An advantage of online teaching is the ability to upload course materials and assignments ahead of time. There are two choices available: making an item available immediately upon clicking “Submit,” or controlling the dates and times of availability so the item will remain invisible to learners until the designated time.
Problems can sometimes occur when you upload items ahead of time but do not make them immediately available. When you access the control panel in Blackboard, you can see all course items regardless of whether they are or are not currently available to students, so you may not realize the learners cannot see them all. Items unavailable to learners appear in light gray rather than full color. Forgetting to make the items visible to the learners can result in confusion and numerous emails asking where the materials are within the course. Double checking availability by viewing the course from the learner screen before accessing the control panel helps keep track of what is and is not visible to the learners. To change the folder’s availability simply access the control panel and the particular course location of the materials, and then click on the modify icon to the right of the item.
Once you understand this availability option, you can devise course materials and simply make them invisible to learners until a designated date. This can be an excellent time management tool enabling you to use slow times within or before a semester to upload course items, thereby saving time later when things get busier. This feature is especially helpful in freeing up course time late in the semester when learner papers and projects absorb a lot of your time. Conceivably you could create and upload lectures, tests, discussion board forums and numerous other course items before the semester even begins. If you set the availability of items to correspond with the course schedule, items will simply appear regularly as if you had just posted them.
Drop box management
Drop boxes provide learners with a mechanism for uploading documents such as course papers. Once uploaded, the learner verifies what was uploaded and the time of upload is visible to both the learner and you. Using the drop box is much better than email attachments which can fill up your mailbox.
The drop box also allows course assistants to save you time by printing and managing course papers. Instructors with course access can easily add users such as secretaries or graduate work study students and give them “assistant” status within the online course. After these individuals have course access, they are able to log into the course drop box, via the control panel, and download and print the course items.
It’s best to manage the drop box by saving items to a disk or CD, printing them, and then removing them from the drop box. Removing items from the drop box enables it to download faster. Full drop boxes can take a long time to download, and during this download time you cannot see the contents. Saving and printing items to read later consumes still more time. Instead, the teaching assistant can print the screen showing the drop box items and their posting date. This printed list is useful for later reference.
Managing the grade book
Like Chickering and Gamson who included the importance of prompt feedback as one of their seven principles of good teaching practice, Egan, Sebastian, and Welch long ago noted the importance of timely feedback to distance learners. Distance education via Blackboard provides learners with timely formative and summative feedback.
Formative feedback occurs during the course each time you post the grades for any graded class activity. Summative feedback occurs at the end of the course when you post the final grade. Learners can see their grades as soon as you post them — they simply click on the Tools tab within the course site.
Figure 1 shows what the learners see when they choose the “Check My Grades” button on the Tools tab. This online grade access feature is especially nice for them at the end of the semester because they no longer have to wait to get their grades in the mail.
Figure 1 Learners can easily check their grades in Blackboard.
Initially, you may perceive managing the grade book to be a daunting task, but once mastered it can really save you time since it calculates the final grades for you.
To manage the grade book, access the course control panel, click on the grade book, and then click on the spreadsheet view. (See Figure 2.)
Figure 2 Use the spreadsheet view to manage the grade book in Blackboard.
One word of advice, loading the spreadsheet can take several minutes, especially if you have a large class. You can multitask by reducing the open window
and working on another project while it is loading. Choose the “Add Item” button to add all the items that will constitute the learners’ final grades. If you are using tests or quizzes generated by the course, they will automatically appear in the grade book. One important point when utilizing the grade book to help learners track their course grades is to be sure all items that constitute their final grade are loaded into the grade book. Otherwise students will only get the average of the online tests and quizzes and not a true reflection of their academic standing in the course.
Once all the items are loaded, click on the “Weight Grades” link in the spreadsheet view. Another screen (Figure 3) will appear and all you have to do is add the weights. The final letter grade is 0% until you assign items a weight.
Figure 3 Add item weights after adding all items that constitute the final grade.
Another feature of the grade book is the ability to export grades into a computer file. You accomplish this by clicking on “Export Grade Book” in the spreadsheet view and following the directions. This enables you to keep copies of grades and access them even if the Internet is unavailable. You can save this file in a Microsoft Excel-compatible format. Most universities back up all courses daily in the event of major system failures. So if a disastrous system failure wiped out all of the course items, the back up files could restore the system.
