Saving Time On-Line
by Evelyn Beck
Does teaching on-line take more time than teaching a face-to- face class?
“Yes, it certainly does,” says Thomas Nolan, who teaches on-line nursing courses and directs The Center for Teaching and Professional Development at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif. “It’s a heck of a lot more labor intensive.”
He cites an average of 300 hours to transform a class from a face-to-face to an on-line environment and then the tremendous volume of emails once class starts. “In a face-to-face class, if you know the material fairly well, you could go from one week to the next without opening the book,” he says. “But an on-line course percolates along all week long, including weekends.”
Greg Kearsley, who has developed and taught on-line courses for a number of colleges, agrees. “Teaching an on-line course takes more time than teaching a typical face-to-face course if you do a good job,” he says. “This is because you have a lot more interaction with the students, so that requires more time to read and respond. On the other hand, if you minimize the interaction and rarely respond to students, it can take less time than a traditional class–but it will be a terrible learning experience for the students.”
Does that mean that dedicated on-line instructors must give of themselves 24/7?
No, says Terry Anderson, a distance education professor at Athabasca University in Edmonton, Canada. “It is very easy to fall into a pattern of reading email and conferences three or four times a day, including weekends, and thinking that you, the teacher, has to respond to every student posting within a few hours. We are a long way from evolving to the state where students of on-line courses are satisfied with ‘office hours Tuesday and Thursday from 1:00-2:00 p.m.'”
What Anderson and other experienced on-line faculty advise is that instructors set limits on the time spent on the computer, encourage more student-to-student interaction, and make better use of time-saving technology.
Nolan, for example, blocks out times that he is available. “I’ve made it clear in my own mind that this work is not going to get in the way of other things I want to do,” he says.
In addition, students can be the ones who moderate discussions, and they can answer each other’s publicly posted questions so that the instructor is not always responding. In fact, an instructor who responds too quickly can inhibit student responses.
Students can also collaborate on group projects, which means not only interaction that doesn’t involve the instructor but also fewer papers to grade than if every student turned in an individual paper for that assignment.
“There is no reason why the instructor should always be the one who learns the most by doing everything!” says Anderson.
Other tips are to save and reuse postings from one semester to the next, to create a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page, and to use computer-graded quizzes. You can also assemble a body of Internet links related to your course, building on it each semester through your own searches and by assigning students to compile and annotate a list of relevant web sites.
When considering your course schedule, you might also want to have assignments due at mid-week rather than at the end of the week, especially if you want to stay away from the computer during the weekend. And make sure students have passed an orientation quiz or completed an on-line scavenger hunt at the start of the semester so that they know how to navigate the course; this will save on questions later.
Also, consider cutting the time it takes to open and save student submissions. Anita Philipp, a professor of computer science at Okahoma City Community College in Oklahoma, cites the many additional steps involved in accepting assignments on-line: “The work must be downloaded, the appropriate application opened to view it, the assignment graded, and the results saved. Then the critique must
be sent back to the student. This is definitely more time consuming than grading a set of papers that have been submitted in class.”
Philipp recommends simplifying this process by having students send work as .txt files if formatting is not an issue and as .rtf files when formatting is important.
Carl Berger, a professor of science and technology education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that smarter Web searching is also vital.
“What happens is that on-line instructors would like to use multimedia, but they’re overwhelmed by the vast number of sites that are not appropriate.”
He recommends using a free resource such as MERLOT www. merlot.org as “triage,” a way to find top quality sources more quickly. Berger also foresees vast improvements in technology on the horizon that will ultimately make putting together a Web course much easier.
“Right now we spend a lot of time because nothing fits,” he says.
But he suggests checking out the IMS Global Consortium www.imsproject.
org and the free LRN (Learning Resource iNterchange) tool kit offered by
Microsoft www.microsoft.com/mspress/business/feature/030101.asp
to see how different components of on-line learning will function together more seamlessly in the future. Others cite the development of the Semantic Web http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/ as a key to improved Web capabilities.
But what about today’s overworked on-line educator? Some experts, such as Anderson, insist that an on-line course really shouldn’t take any more time than a traditional class and that the instructor is the one who controls the factor of time.
“In the few studies that have ‘had the stop watch out’ on when teaching both on-line and face to face,” he says, “they are reporting ‘no significant difference’ in time used when experienced instructors properly manage an on-line course.”
