A Pair of Books for Distance Educators
by Mark J. Drozdowski
IF YOU’RE LIKE me and most other people who’ve passed through college and perhaps graduate school, then you’re probably not terribly familiar with on-line education. As so-called traditional students, we learned in a classroom with the professor and fellow students right in front of us. The idea, then, of taking classes and earning degrees via the Internet might seem strangely foreign. It certainly does to me. So when evaluating books and articles extolling the virtues of on-line learning, I approach the task with equal parts fascination and skepticism.
E-Moderating and E-tivites are two such books. These neologistic works—published in 2000 and 2002, respectively—are the products of Gilly Salmon, an instructor at the Centre for Innovation, Knowledge and Enterprise at Britain’s Open University Business School. Research for these books comes from her experience with distance learning students enrolled in the MBA program. Both books present “how-to” solutions and discuss, to some extent, the philosophical underpinnings of learning via an on-line environment.
E-Moderating (“e” stands for “electronic”) examines the facilitator’s role in computer-moderated conferencing (CMC). This form of distance education—which can either complement a classroom-based course or substitute for one—is normally asynchronous, meaning that participants can “attend” at any time and at any place. Students read each others’ messages posted on bulletin boards and respond. Occasionally such courses will involve live chat sessions. For now the medium employs text messages, although audio and visual features loom on the horizon.
CMC harbors obvious advantages. It obviates the need to travel and to rearrange work schedules to accommodate class time. As such, CMC has become popular within corporate education, as Salmon points out, particularly when employees are distributed across various locations or travel often. Further, students normally reticent in classroom situations might find this relatively anonymous and less extemporaneous approach more comforting. With conferencing, one can “rewind” a conversation and examine “footprints”—comments others have made in previous iterations of the course—before posting an informed contribution. And disabled students can avoid problems with physical access; even blind participants can use Braille printouts of messages or speech-synthesis software.
E-Moderators have a clear role in this educational model. They preside over on-line discussions, using various “e-tivities” to promote and facilitate active participation and learning. E-moderators provide “sparks,” or “small pieces of information, a model, concept or example to which participants can react….” What’s more, they discourage lurkers, freeloaders and sponges—students who prefer to read conference messages without contributing their own. Above all, suggests Salmon, e-moderators promote mutual respect among students, develop a sense of community, defuse problems and counsel any “apparently alienated or offended individuals.”
But they’re not content providers. According to Salmon, “The goal of the e-moderator is to enable ‘meaning making’ rather than content transmission.” In other words, e-moderators are typically not subject matter experts. Rather, content is provided by print, video, audio and CD-ROM course materials; on-line discussions revolve around these materials. E-moderators, says Salmon, should “avoid directive interventions and ‘right answer’ responses.” They simply stimulate debate and offer ideas, not answers. At best, she contends, e-moderators “pull together the participants’ contributions…collecting up statements and relating them to concepts and theories from the course.”
Likewise, e-tivities, writes Salmon, are “based on the contentious premise that teaching techniques are more important than ‘content’ delivery.” Contentious, indeed. She admits that students learn “not so much product…as process—in particular the creative cognitive process of offering up ideas, having them criticized or expanded on….”
Such disclaimers beg the obvious question: What’s the added value for students? If an on-line course does not have a classroom component and does not have an “expert” conveying knowledge, then it’s up to the students—with only a facilitator for guidance—to extract meaning from the “content” materials. To whom can students turn for answers? One e-moderator reveals that his students “expect me to be more knowledgeable than they are,” but that “as moderator, I don’t usually enter the thread much, leaving it to them to discuss the assignment with each other.” Perhaps e-moderating represents the highest form of Socratic learning.
Because e-moderators (facilitators) and e-tivites (what they do) are so intertwined, the books overlap considerably. They’re similarly organized, including brief case studies, mostly from European institutions, and actual threaded discussions from on-line classes. At the core of each book lies the author’s five-step model of learning that moves participants along stages of access and motivation to on-line socialization to information exchange to knowledge construction to development. E-tivities takes the model a step further by introducing Lou, a cartoon character who appears at each stage. Lou is a rather disheveled stick figure no doubt conceived by an art-school dropout.
Both also offer several appendices called “Resources for Practitioners.” These mini-chapters range from one to 10 pages. In E-Moderating, they discuss choosing a software system, understanding lurkers, and supporting novices. In E-tivities, topics include sample “sparks” (e.g. “If you were an animal, what would you be?” and “What’s your favorite gadget and why?”) and a list of “emoticons,” such as the smiley or wink.
These latter examples prompt me to warn that both books have an effusive tone about them, as if the author is excessively excited about her discoveries and equally exuberant about revealing them. The abuse of exclamation points confirms such suspicions. On one page, I counted five. Five! And warm fuzzies abound. As one student exclaims, “Finally—I wouldn’t have believed a virtual course could be so ‘touch-feely’! Hugs all round from me too!” Or, in on-line lingo, ((((O)))).
Beyond such concerns, I’m left pondering other questions. Although Salmon contends that “on-line education might eventually become standard with just a few elite face-to-face campus universities and training schools remaining,” she nonetheless admits there’s “no widely agreed method for working out CMC costs.” Nor is there “a standard way to measure the educational or other benefits.” So costs and benefits remain unclear, yet traditional education faces certain peril. Finally, I wish the books examined how on-line learning might be adapted to various courses and disciplines ranging from humanities to hard sciences.
So what are the implications of e-moderating for adjunct faculty? According to Salmon, e-moderators work part-time, typically from home, while holding full-time jobs or other part-time employment. You might thus find new adjunct opportunities within the on-line realm. And don’t assume you have to become affiliated with a non-traditional or for-profit institution. For instance, Cornell University, through “eCornell,” offers on-line certificates involving mentors with half- or full-time positions, often in remote locations. If you’re interested, visit the E-tivities Web page (e-tivities.com), which offers snippets of the book, including the five-stage model (you can see Lou and draw your own conclusions); facts about e-moderating training ($395 US) and related courses; information on Salmon’s group’s consulting services; user testimonials; and links for additional reading.
Of course, should you wish to pursue on-line opportunities, you’ll want to review E-Moderating and E-tivites. They deliver what they promise—an inside look at on-line conferencing and the role of facilitators. I simply had hoped for a more thorough discussion of how actual content is delivered and how learning is evaluated. I certainly came away with a better understanding of the enterprise, but neither book did much to curb my skepticism.
