A Trio of Books Related to Distance Education

A Trio of Books About Distance Education

Reviewed by Evelyn Beck

The landscape in higher education is changing. With very different purposes and approaches, three recent books take stock.

Make Money Teaching Online: How to Land Your First Academic Job, Build Credibility, and Earn a Six-Figure Salary, by Danielle Babb and Jim Mirabella (Wiley, 2007)

Based mostly on their own experience, which is vast, Babb and Mirabella offer helpful, practical advice about how to break into online teaching and then steadily increase the number of schools for whom you teach. For example, they suggest bypassing traditional approaches when possible, contacting department heads directly rather than submitting your application to human resources, where the odds are high that it will receive little attention. While some schools might take offense at such brashness, especially if it circumvents the required channels, this is indeed good advice. If you catch a department head at a time when he or she is fretting about finding class coverage, you will have an edge.

Geared to professionals with little or no teaching experience, this book is very down to earth, very nuts and bolts. It covers types of institutions to work for and training requirements, among other topics. A discussion of salaries is interesting, not just for the specific examples included but also for the way the authors analyze the real rate of return on your investment of time; the most attractive positions are not necessarily the ones with the highest pay rates. And a chapter on technology is particularly good at dispensing advice about how to manage online teaching with work-related travel responsibilities.

What is not as strong here—and this oversight is surprising—is advice about where to find jobs. The Chronicle of Higher Education and a few other websites are mentioned, but most are just lists of online schools. Good sources of job postings like HigherEdJobs.com and FacultyFinder.com are left out. Another disadvantage of the book is that it tends to focus on faculty positions in teaching business, which is the authors’ area of expertise. Interviewing instructors in other fields about their own experience would have been useful.

The focus on business may explain what is the most troubling aspect of this book. The authors suggest that once you have a course set up, it practically runs itself, and you can take on jobs at many colleges simultaneously. The author credits testify to this: Mirabella teaches 50 online courses a year, Babb an astonishing 80 classes annually. Perhaps someone teaching business can successfully juggle so many classes at once, but as an English teacher, I could not do so. Even if many of these courses operate on a condensed schedule, such as five weeks each, an instructor might be teaching eight or more of these accelerated courses at once. If all the grading is automated, then this would be possible, I suppose. But this would not be true of a good many subjects.

New Players, Different Game: Understanding the Rise of For-Profit Colleges and Universities by William G. Tierney and Guilbert C. Hentschke (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

This excellent book, by two University of Southern California education professors, presents a clear, detailed and even-handed look at for-profit institutions in higher education. The purpose is to distinguish for-profit colleges and universities (FPCU’s) from traditional colleges and universities (TCU’s).

FPCU’s make up an astonishing 47 percent of America’s 9,485 postsecondary institutions though they currently enroll only 5 percent of students. However, over the past three decades, they have grown seven times as rapidly as TCU’s, and that growth is accelerating, with enrollment growth of 91 percent from 1998 to 2003 in for-profits that grant degrees.

The 11 largest FPCU’s, which are publicly traded, each has revenue over $100 million; the biggest by far is the University of Phoenix. Twenty schools make up a second tier, with revenues of $50-100 million. And the majority of FPCU’s bring in under $50 million.

The rise of FPCU’s is due to a shift in the way higher education dollars are distributed, as well as the savvy of these institutions in appealing to the marketplace. Government financial support for colleges and universities is shrinking despite a growing awareness of the benefits of higher education. This means that the price advantage of attending a TCU over an FPCU is shrinking. In addition, government support is directed more toward individuals—who now have more choices. And TCU’s, by emphasizing merit-based scholarships over those that are need based, are squeezing out the working adults and lower-income students targeted by FPCU’s. For-profit institutions focus on programs with high employment demand and high pay. They operate small, distributed campuses in convenient locations. And they have the ability to adapt to changes in the labor market, the discipline to contain costs, and unique access to investment capital.

Given the fact that FPCU’s are mostly drawing students new to higher education rather than competing for the students of TCU’s, why are they viewed with such suspicion? The problems come from what strike many as conflicting missions: being a business focused on profits but producing a “product” (higher education) that is generated for the public good. This conflict led to scandals in the 1970s and 1980s, when FPCU’s benefited financially from high student drop-out rates. An overhaul led to new government regulations that 60 percent of students must finish in order for a for-profit institution’s enrollees to be eligible for federal financial aid.

But conflicts continue. FPCU’s and TCU’s butt heads over recognition of each other’s accreditation. Students face difficulties trying to transfer credit from an FPCU to a TCU. And perhaps the biggest divide has to do with the role of faculty and the way an institution is administrated. FPCU’s are run like a corporation, from the top down, with faculty who are mostly part time and who have little if any say in what courses are offered and how they’re taught, much less how the institution operates. In contrast, TCU’s pride themselves on shared governance and academic freedom, which give full-time faculty a major role in pedagogical and administrative decisions. The authors illustrate this distinction effectively with descriptions of two scandals and how they were handled at each type of institution.

My only quibble with this text is its dismissive attitude toward an important component of many for-profits: online education. Distance learning is referred to as “a new pedagogy [that] adheres to a view of the student as passive recipient.”

But this is an illuminating book that should be read by anyone who wants to understand for-profit higher education—and to appreciate some of its benefits such as more counseling and job-placement assistance for students.

Blended Learning in Higher Education: Framework, Principles, and Guidelines by D. Randy Garrison and Norman D. Vaughan (Jossey-Bass, 2008).

Garrison and Vaughan, who both teach at the University of Calgary, mount a convincing case for creating blended classrooms. Their thesis is that traditional face-to-face classes can be improved by substituting online assignments for at least half of the class meetings.

Research about the advantages and disadvantages of both delivery modes backs them up. In face-to-face classrooms, students feel more connected to one another and in most cases more satisfied with their educational experience. Yet the traditional lecture format still used in many courses leaves them feeling intellectually overloaded and emotionally unengaged. And in workshop or seminar-style settings, they hesitate to criticize classmates for fear of hurting feelings. Online, though, students feel less inhibited about evaluating each other’s work, and the online environment also allows more time for reflection.

Ideal, then, is a class that marries the best of both worlds. In such a blended course, trust and community can build through face-to-face icebreakers and small group discussions that establish a foundation for more intensive online interaction between class meetings.

This book is at its best when giving examples of how blended classrooms actually work. Scenarios for a variety of courses help illustrate the way in which the face-to-face and online meetings reinforce each other. For example, in a philosophy class, students post online responses to a reading-related topic; when they get together, the teacher discusses misconceptions about course material gleaned from their postings. In a chemistry class, students who get the wrong answers to problems presented and worked through in class teams get extra help from online tutorials.

Garrison and Vaughn also offer occasional nuggets like the mention of social bookmarking systems such as Del.icio.us or Furl.net that a reader might easily adapt for use. And there are some good rubrics, such as how to evaluate discussion.

What could be expanded is the discussion of weaknesses inherent in the blended approach. Some of the appendices mention these problems. For instance, both students and faculty cite technical problems and increased workloads, and faculty mention student resistance. These important issues could be addressed more directly. On my campus, students don’t realize when they’ve registered for what we call a hybrid. Some of these students don’t own a computer or have Internet access, and the class presents an unexpected burden. Also, my colleagues who teach blended courses have mentioned another issue: In their face-to-face meetings, class time (especially early in the term) is often consumed by students who want help with tech trouble.

Still, this is a helpful guide for how incorporating aspects of an online class can deepen students’ learning in traditional classes.