In the Classroom (I)
I'm Not Really a Professor, But I Play One on TV: Confessions from the World of
Technology-Mediated Instruction
by Natalie Simpson, University of Buffalo (SUNY)
"Digital Access" is my fault. During the spring of 2003, I convinced the University at Buffalo (SUNY) School of Management to allow me to pilot video course-casting with a group of 378 undergraduate students. These students would normally be split into two large sections for their required course in operations management (OM), and my point was that video-based instruction wouldn't be any less personal than the existing auditorium-based OM experience. In my proposal, only a small sub-set of the 378 students would attend in the classroom where I would teach as usual. The class would be captured as it happened by a third-party technical director, switching camera views given whatever was most appropriate from the perspective of the attending students. The resulting proceedings would then be made available via streaming video to all enrolled students through our course website.
I am providing this detailed description because there is not a single phrase universally agreed upon to delineate this process. "Video course-casting" comes close, my conventional instruction now being "technology-mediated," although most people would simply say the class has moved online. Unfortunately, our faculty had just quit on the idea of developing an online MBA program . . . my 2003 video course-casting project wasn't a proposal to launch yet another online program, but it apparently used enough of the same words to be confused as such. To remedy this, I coined the brand-name "Digital Access" to differentiate this from the other online class initiatives, and received the organizational green light.
Seven years later, six courses are designated "Digital Access," enabling five professors to provide instruction to over 3,100 registrants every semester. In early 2006, I proposed including students on our branch campus at the Singapore Institute of Management in my Buffalo-based Digital Access class. Today we do this routinely, providing five core undergraduate courses to both campuses simultaneously via "Global Access." Emboldened by this success, we began encouraging our undergraduates to participate in study-abroad trips and "take their Digital Access classes with them" in another successful spin-off we now call "Digital Abroad." And finally, completing my penchant for branding, we created "Community Access" in partnership with the United Way, facilitating non-profit organizations' use of our video classroom headquarters while it would otherwise sit idle during school holidays.
But, at the end of the day, I am just one professor now teaching to 700 students scattered across three continents. On a happier note, students do think well of my teaching and of this rather impersonal class. If you think I've been bragging about being at the forefront of instructional technology and innovation, please let me correct this. Presented for your consideration are four confessions that I consider--for better or worse--to be central to my success in technology-mediated instruction.
My Students Don't Come to Class
I can posture myself as one who knows much about instruction, with major awards to prove it. It would be natural to assume that such a person would always teach in-person to a packed classroom of admiring students. Not a chance. Even when I teach hundreds of Buffalo-based students, there are almost always empty chairs in the 50-seat Digital Access classroom. Furthermore, I rarely have visitors during my office hours, the only exception being the usual rush before class deadlines. Even when I travel to Singapore, inviting the Singapore-based students to face-to-face 'consultation sessions' on their campus, I usually meet fewer than half the students enrolled there. Students at either location who do drop by are generally cheerful and frank. "Wow," one student said, solemnly shaking my hand. "It's weird to meet you."
Apparently, what the modern undergraduate does not think weird is e-mail. Of the nearly 700 students in my 14-week class this spring, over half of them e-mailed me personally, sending a total of 645 messages from which I composed 421 non-trivial responses. Some messages arrived during my office hours, sent from within the building. I invested over 150 hours in e-mail correspondence with this group, feeling at times less like a professor and more like some sort of demented OM advice columnist. In 2007, I resolved to relocate this dialogue to a discussion board hosted by our learning management system, telling students we could discuss the material just the same, but "out in the open, where others can browse and participate." I still maintain discussion boards, but here is a confession-within-a-confession: my students aren't interested. As an example, the same group who wrote me 645 e-mails only posted 22 times on this semester's boards.
Ah . . . you say, this is because you are not requiring the students to use the discussion board, awarding them for participation in this online community building device, community being so integral to student success in online courses (Wallace, 2003). True. However, our millennial students arrive already members of the online communities of their choice. How much benefit will they perceive from being cajoled into joining yet one more community not of their choosing? Please don't think I am tearing down the use of interactive online activities for learning. I employ several such elements in my Digital Access class, and have ambitions for more. However, if you can't get a really large group of undergraduates truly excited about a discussion board, I am in your corner. I can't figure that out either.
I Lecture
By 2006, Digital Access had gained enough momentum to co-sponsor a regional conference on instructional technology, and we were lucky enough to recruit one of our speakers from an extremely prestigious university. A group from our university met this guest for dinner the night before, and as the conversation turned professional, our guest took the lead and announced, "Well, as we all know, the lecture is dead, isn't it?"
Everyone beamed and nodded vigorously, except me. I stared at my food, weighing the consequences of speaking my mind at the table. I lecture, and firmly believe in the concept of good lectures. I am aware this confession pegs me as an outdated "sage on the stage," where I should strive to be a modern "guide on the side" with respect to student learning. Now, please notice the context: I teach an introductory quantitative course to a very large and dispersed population of learners. While I fully support the sentiment that we pay constant attention to engaging our students in learning, exactly how helpful is it to be guiding at the side of a not particularly cohesive crowd who'd be the first to admit that they don't know the landscape ahead?
When talking to nonprofit organizations in our Community Access workshops, we stress what does and what does not work well as a Digital Access offering, inviting them to think of these principles in the context of their own organization's training needs. "What does work well" describes when a lecture is not dead: rehearsing any technical, algorithmic, quantitative and/or highly tutorial material, usually associated with the introduction of a subject. Covering this material in even a well-taught class does not create substantial amounts of lively discussion, and extended two-way discussion is what video course-casting simply does not support. Simultaneously, the ability of a learner to anonymously control the pace of a class, pausing and repeating material, is the most valuable in this particular context, a power the student would not otherwise have outside of video instruction.
Video or not, if you prefer to lecture but worry you may be falling behind the times, examine your students' progress and listen to their feedback for guidance on this issue. Forget anybody else. While you might refrain from volunteering your loyalty to the lecture at the dinner table of a prestigious visitor (I didn't have the courage to do that), please know that you are not alone in this belief.
I Use the Chalkboard
Digital Access began in 2003 headquartered in a small borrowed room designed for video conferencing. As the number of Digital Access students grew to over 2,000 by the end of 2005, our school resolved to renovate a classroom specifically for Digital Access courses. We Digital Access professors were asked to draw up a set of requirements for the room. Most of these requirements were obvious to our campus architect, but one was not--a chalkboard. I was one of the most vocal concerning this requirement, as I sorely missed its presence at our current location.
"A chalkboard?" the architect repeated.
Yes. It is a versatile yet reliable tool for working in front of an audience. I particularly enjoy mixing its use in with other forms of instructional technology, giving the students some visual variety as they attempt to track my mad dashes through inventory calculations.
"Well," the architect said slowly, "you understand that the university is moving away from chalkboards. You'd prefer a white board at the front of this room, correct?"
No. White boards, or dry-erase boards, are not perfect substitutes. One can write faster and more clearly on a well maintained chalkboard, and the darker matte background is easier on the audience's eyes. After all, why are most road signs dark colors with white lettering? A white background is particularly disastrous on video, which we suspect was the one reason that did sway our architect into tolerating chalkboards in this otherwise cutting-edge classroom design.
I am offering this confession first as encouragement to anyone who has ever felt a chalkboard could be useful, but likewise worried this instinct was old-fashioned. Multiple chalkboards reside at the heart of our high-tech Digital Access classroom, and--when managed wiselyl--they work great. Furthermore, I'd argue that this dispute over a chalkboard is analogous to a broader message concerning pedagogy. Often, attempts to identify factors that drive successful online teaching in fact unearth factors long associated with any type of good teaching. For example, one study surveyed students in a large accredited online MBA program to identify the keys to student satisfaction with such classes (Martz, Reddy, & Sangermano, 2004). The study advanced 12 recommendations for online program success, but at least half of these recommendations, such as "do not force student interaction without good pedagogical rationale," are applicable to any classroom, virtual or otherwise.
I'm Not Really a Professor, But I Play One on TV
During the earliest days of Digital Access, I inquired if we could upgrade the quality of computer screen images (such as the demonstration of spreadsheets) in the video being streamed out to the students. I was briefed on the difficulties of scan conversion, or the translation of higher definition images into lower quality video. This process muddied the online student's view of anything computer-generated, although the students attending in the room could see these same images clearly on the projection screen. The disparity created by scan conversion could be traced directly to a particular piece of hardware used in our borrowed classroom headquarters, so I asked if better hardware existed elsewhere. The answer was yes. I asked if we could pursue the purchase of this better hardware. The answer was no. I asked why, assuming the answer would be money, and I would then volunteer to help find funding.
"Because," my technology counterpart told me, "it's associated with television studios."
My discipline is OM, making me an accidental traveler in the world of instructional technology. I begged the expert's patience. Why can't we buy this for the students? My colleague spoke in lowered tones that implied the cinderblock walls themselves might be listening.
"Natalie, you need to understand something: the university put a bullet in TV courses a long time ago."
One major criticism of modern applications of instructional technology is that we simply do old things new ways (Black, Dawson, & Priem, 2008). I hereby confess: Digital Access is exactly that. Video course-casting in its fullest form, where one captures a class from the student's point of view with simultaneous attention to preserving both class content and the illusion of attendance, is simply a newer form of the old television course. How helpful is it to deny this? In our defense, look at how we managed to use an old model in many new ways, such as the merging of the Buffalo- and Singapore-based student experience through these classes. Furthermore, students use Digital Access in ways that defy our understanding of its capabilities. Its delivery is categorized as non-interactive, to distinguish the use of one-way video-streaming from more complex two-way video connections that enable online students to speak with the professor and other students during class. Yet our students freely interact with our non-interactive system, reporting that I "got them in trouble" with some figure of authority while watching class on campus. Typically, the student laughed or responded to a question as he or she sat with computer and headphones in a public space, earning a reproachful look or word from a nearby attendant or librarian. "This works for the same reason television works," observed a fellow Digital Access professor. "People choose to believe they are in class."
In summary, my hundreds of millennial students don't care if they meet me but love to write me. They also enjoy my OM class, although I lecture to them and even scrawl on the chalkboard, championing an online delivery model that is ironically older than I Love Lucy. What does this mean to you? Even if you haven't taught outside the context of a conventional classroom, let me be the first to tell you: given you care at all about instruction, you probably already know much more about this technology-mediated world than you realize.
References
Black, E., Dawson, K., & Priem, J. (2008). Data for free: Using LMS activity logs to measure community in online courses. Internet and Higher Education, 11, 65-70.
Martz, W., Reddy, V., & Sangermano, K. (2004). Looking for indicators of success for distance education. In Caroline Howard, Karen Schenk, & Richard Discenza (eds.), Distance learning and university effectiveness: Changing education paradigms for online learning. Hershey, Penn: Information Science Publishing.
Wallace, R. (2003). Online learning in higher education: A review of research on interactions among teachers and students. Education, Communication, and Information, 3, 241-280.
