Most professors agree
that more work goes into designing an online course than a face-to-face
one. But if those professors are interested in improving their teaching
skills, it might be worth the extra effort.
So say researchers at
Purdue University at Calumet, who believe that learning how to do
distance education properly can make professors better at designing and
administering their classroom-based courses.
“Most of the
professors who teach at the university level have had no experience
with pedagogy or instruction in general,” says Janet Buckenmeyer, chair
of the instructional technology master’s program at Calumet. “They’re
content experts, not teaching experts.”
Since most professors have spent their lives holding forth from the
front of a lecture hall, many have not had to engineer their lesson
plans with the sort of rigor required of a well-designed online course,
Buckenmeyer says.
When teaching online, she says, “You have to
pay more attention to the navigation of the course, the clarity of the
course, the objectives of the course, the reason why you’re assigning
activities and assessments, [and make] certain everything is perfectly
clear to the students. In a face-to-face situation, you can get by with
just coming in and not having prepared and winging a class session. You
can’t do that online.”
. . . In order to teach well online, she says, professors need guidance.
That was the thesis behind the creation of Calumet’s Distance Education Mentoring Project.
The project takes faculty who are looking to adapt their classroom
courses to the online environment and teams them up with Web-savvy
colleagues. Those mentors advise the novices on best practices for
online course design and oversee them through the first semester of the
online version of the course.
. . .
Casimir Barczyk, a veteran professor at the
Calumet school of management, is an alumnus of the Distance Education
Mentoring Project.
. . .
What he learned was how to engineer assignments and assessments
toward explicit educational objectives. If Barczyk needs students to
learn how to think analytically about hiring rubrics, for example, he
would not use simple true or false question to evaluate their progress.
After learning the value of objectives-oriented course design in
his online courses, he applied the same principles to the classroom
courses he had taught for decades. Student performance improved in
both, he says.
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