This paper is dedicated to my colleague and
good friend, Professor Diane Jurkowski of York University, from
whom I have learned a lot about teaching and a whole huge lot
about survival with one’s sense of humour still intact.
Abstract
Numerous
other articles will tell you what to do when teaching an Internet
course; this one tells you what not to do, particularly when
teaching one for the first time. It is a personal and frank
account of how a middle-aged university professor tackled the
challenge of teaching for the first time in a new technology,
including general philosophies, words to the wise, costs and
benefits, joys and sorrows, innovative ideas on bridging the gap
between total ignorance of the web and mastery of enough of it to
believe you could do it again, and details ranging from issues of
technical advice (how much programming to learn) to fashion (what
to wear to an Internet exam room?).
[The
pictures accompanying each section are the overheads I used when
presenting the paper.]
Introduction
There are literally thousands of academic
articles, magazine stories, newspaper items, handbooks, texts,
workshops, entire courses and degrees on the subject of teaching
online. Just a small sampling of what is available both in print
and online about teaching on the Internet reveals items that
inform on general issues (Henderson 1999, Hicks Reid and George
2001, Jolliffe Ritter and Stevens 2001, Kaiden 2002, Kouki and
Wright 1999, Peterson and Savenye 2001), address specific problems
of technology and design (Aggarwal 2000, Goldman and Kaufman 2001,
Hailey et. Al. 2001, Schweizer 1999, Sen and Al-Hawamdeh 2001,
Spicer and Huang 2002, Toohey and Watson 2001) and present
pedagogical models (Bradley and Oliver 2002, Coppola Hiltz and
Rotter 2002, Henderson 1999, Miller 2002, Taylor 2002). Savenya
Zane and Niemczyk (2001) provide an excellent review of the
literature in this area. Research in online teaching addresses
such varied topics as role playing (Bell 2001), tutoring (Barker
2002), teaching internationally (Alexander 2002), teaching
tertiary students (Schrum and Hong 2002), teaching in the
corporate university (Prestoungrange et al 2000), and teaching in
specific disciplines such as Marketing (Eastman and Swift 2001),
Nursing (Fonteyn 2002), and even in the theological seminary (Byer
et al 2002). New journal titles reflect an increased interest in
Internet teaching (Journal of Interactive Learning Research,
Journal of Research on Technology in Education, Teaching Business
Ethics). These sources will all tell you what to do to survive
teaching an Internet course. What I want to tell you is what not
to do.
I teach Marketing in the undergraduate
business programme of a liberal arts college of a large urban
university whose students are mainly commuters. For many years I
had resisted Internet teaching. The term “resist” is perhaps
too polite. As head of the Marketing Area, veteran of a quarter
century of teaching experience, and holder of a treasured teaching
award from the College alums, I had steadfastly refused to
condescend to teach on the Internet. I cited among my many reasons
the fact that while a straightforward numbers course like
Accounting might possibly be transferred to web pages, surely a
Marketing course would need the teamwork and interpersonal
interaction that is part of a traditional classroom in order to
continue to be the exciting worthwhile phenomenon that we want our
students to experience and I questioned how that could possibly be
accomplished online.
I owed a favour to a Dean, however, and in a
moment of appreciative weakness, when pressed to teach the
introductory Marketing course on the Internet so we could then
promise our students the possibility of taking the entirety of
their business degree online, I agreed to teach in an upcoming
winter term not one but two new Internet courses. Not only had I
never taken or taught courses on the Internet, but neither of
these courses had ever been taught outside a traditional classroom
by anyone in our university. There were fellow pioneers in other
disciplines, and I began to talk to anyone anywhere who had taught
anything on the Internet. I went to every workshop I could find,
read dozens of books, journals, and magazines, searched the
Internet and read online, and experienced increasingly serious
attacks of panic wondering into what bottomless abyss I had
unwittingly stumbled.
One of the things that finally convinced me I
might be able to teach a course on the Internet was the enormous
success of a colleague whose dynamic, personal and caring in-class
teaching style I had admired for twenty years. Diane Jurkowski
teaches Organizational Behaviour, which is as teamwork-oriented
and interaction-dependent as Marketing, and she appeared to have
mastered the challenge of bringing to the distant monitor screen
the same enthusiasm and witty personal touch that enlivens her
classrooms. Given that I had admired and learned from this
woman’s teaching for decades, it is not surprising that when I
set out to prepare to teach my first Internet courses I would talk
to her. What is surprising, given how much I valued her advice, is
that I did not listen to her. And that was the inspiration for
this paper: to give you some tips about what not to do when
teaching on the Internet, especially if it is your first time, and
to do it at a conference where you may be more likely to listen to
the words of a relative stranger than those of a close colleague.
Here are ten major mistakes to avoid when teaching an Internet
course.
Ten Things Not To Do When
Teaching An Internet Course
| 1. Don’t
Ignore The Advice Of People Who Went Before You |
 |
This one is self-referential given the topic
of the paper, but it bears repeating. Talk to people who have
taught Internet courses and listen to what they tell you. Why
would they lie to you? I refer here to genuine advice from
colleagues whom you respect and who care about you; beyond the
mire of pride-laden university political battles that led either
Woody Allen or Henry Kissinger, depending on how you heard the
story, to quip that the reason university politics are so vicious
is that the stakes are so small, most colleagues have no reason to
lie to you about Internet teaching, and the odds are slim that
problems they have faced in each of seven different courses are
things that will not also be a problem for you. Hearing the advice
of colleagues who had taught on the Internet, my problem was not
that I mistrusted their judgment or doubted their stories. It is
just that Internet teaching is so very different from traditional
classroom teaching that even when someone tells us directly that
something will be a problem, as professors without Internet
teaching experience we tend to convert their problems into ones we
know from the classroom and assume that we will be able to handle
it. The problems are not the same and neither are the solutions.
Listen to the advice of experienced colleagues.
| 2. Don’t
Expect To Hear Consistent Advice
|
 |
Realize that you will rarely hear consistent
advice from any two people you consult. One colleague will tell
you that a particular piece of software is superb while another
will insist it is useless. One will recommend doing all your own
programming while another will recommend leaving it to the
computer experts. Some professors and students favour the idea of
setting a time when everyone in the class will sit down together
at their computers and have a live online chat. This may work for
some classes, especially smaller ones, but in classes of
seventy-five and more, I prefer to recognize that most people take
an Internet course because they do not have to be in a particular
place at a particular time. Teaching is an individual art and
different things will work for different people. Listen to anyone
who has advice to give you, but ultimately you will need to choose
what works for you.
| 3. Don’t
Leave Preparation Until The Last Minute
|
 |
This rule accompanies practically every piece
of advice ever given anywhere but most of us ignore it, especially
those of us who thrive on deadlines, claiming we are more
powerfully creative at the eleventh hour. We have all experienced
times when we had to prepare at the last minute. I had always
thought the concept of a teacher staying a week ahead of her
students a pathetic joke until in my first university teaching job
I was hired as a last-minute replacement to teach an esoteric area
of a subject I had not worked with for more than five years. When
I first agreed to teach the new Internet courses in that upcoming
winter term, I had planned my schedule so I would be teaching only
those two courses, envisioning cozy hours in my northern winter
office working out all the details with nothing else to distract
me. It was some seven months prior to the start of that winter
course that I suddenly realized, with a lurch in the stomach
familiar to first-time teachers and bungee jumpers, that in order
to teach a course on the Internet starting in January, I was going
to have to have everything ready to upload to the web in December.
What had stretched before me as a long leisurely summer suddenly
became a mad rush of preparation of materials for something I had
never done before.
Preparing for an Internet course is not the
same as preparing classroom lecture notes or exercises. It
requires much more advanced planning than anything else you may
ever have done and it requires a different conceptualization of
course materials, moving from the linear model of printed material
to the non-linear model of the web. Recognize from the moment you
are first asked to mount an Internet course that it will take
dozens if not hundreds of hours of preparation before the course
even starts. One of the beauties of the web, particularly for a
professor of Marketing, is its highly visual nature, but that
nature also implies that while it will be possible to some extent
to post some new material during a course, for the most part an
Internet student can expect to see the course at the start and be
able to work through the material at their own pace in the order
they find most useful. It may be perfectly acceptable in an
on-campus classroom to bring new materials with you to class each
week, to surprise students with exercises not in the textbooks, to
change the topic for the day if something happens in the news that
relates to the course. Good teaching in fact demands such
spontaneity even if it is meticulously planned ahead of time. But
in an Internet course, you simply cannot leave things until the
last minute and what you post to the web must be right the first
time. In the words of our Associate Dean of Academic Affairs,
“Prepare everything in advance, including scripting if you are
taping lectures, then check and double-check that you have
included everything and that everything is consistent; zero errors
is the only acceptable level of errors.” (Spraakman, Interview
2002).
Timely presentation is also important because
a course website serves as its own marketing tool, promoting what
it offers. Many students find my courses and even my university
through casual access to one of my course websites and for this
reason I use no passwords. This is an area where you will hear
conflicting advice, but my argument is that my university is not
selling knowledge, but rather validating through the issuance of a
degree the student’s acquisition of knowledge. If we are to
accomplish that, the website must be there on time.
| 4. Don't
Let The Course Take Over Your Whole Life |
 |
Many experienced Internet professors tried to
impress on me how easily an Internet course can take up every
spare minute of your day, but this advice did not faze me because
as a teacher who cares about my students I knew that one must
often put in extra time to meet their needs. Marketing colleagues
particularly, speaking in the jargon, advised me to be wary of
setting early in the course expectations of service levels that I
would then begin to feel overwhelmed in trying to meet. In a
traditional class, we have some moderate amount of control over
the appearing of our students; we see them in class and we set our
office hours. On the Internet, you don’t see your students, but
they still need your help, and you can control only when you
respond to them, not when they approach you.
In the first week of an Internet course, it seems simple enough,
and kind, to answer a student’s desperate plea for help when you
happen to check your email on a Sunday afternoon. You may not
feel so sympathetic when later in the course a student writes you
on Sunday evening curtly demanding to know why she has not yet
heard back from you regarding the message she posted that Sunday
afternoon. Don’t plan to work twenty-four hours a day seven days
a week. Recognizing that there will be times you will need to make
yourself available in “off-hours” as all teachers do, try to
set specific days and times when you will work on the course, or
you may find yourself feeling that you never do anything but your
Internet course. Don’t plan to do everything yourself. If you
are entitled to help, ask for it. If there are funds or
time-release available for preparation, equipment, or tutors, if
there is technical help available, use it. Don’t spend time
learning full details of new technologies unless you are
interested; most universities now have excellent staff trained in
these areas.
| 5. Don't
Make Extra Work For Yourself |
 |
The preparation and teaching of an Internet
course itself will take care of providing you with far more work
than you can imagine, especially the first time through. Do not
make more work for yourself by trying to do too much or taking on
responsibilities that belong to someone else. The fact that an
Internet course may easily take up to three times as much work as
an on-campus course is now a concern for many faculty unions in
negotiations on workload. There are few easy answers, but there
are some. The first is to try if at all possible to ensure that in
your first Internet teaching experience, you are converting an
already existing course rather than trying to invent a course and
simultaneously create it for the web.
Don’t give students a trout; teach them to
fish. Wherever possible, download responsibility for their success
to them. When they email to ask about something, encourage them
to go find the answer rather than just writing it out for them. It
is easier for you to write “See Course Kit” than to write
three paragraphs that you have already written but they did not
read. Don’t try to keep too much track of student assignments
and enrolment. They are adults and we owe it to them to let them
take responsibility for their own participation; when there are
many of them and only one of you, you owe it to yourself to give
them as much responsibility as possible. Don’t back down on
rules you had decided were important; every rule you allow a
student to break is guaranteed to cost you time. When I first
taught my marketing course with group work, I established the rule
that after handing in the first assignment, people could leave a
group but everyone kept the same first mark. Later, feeling sorry
for people who had worked with difficult groups, I allowed a
number of students to rewrite the first part. Not only did I then
have extra papers to grade, but I lost the aspect of group work
which I had most wanted to impress upon them, the fact that group
members are responsible for making a group work. Decide on your
rules and stick to them. Don’t spend a lot of time defending
your policies. Internet students seem to feel freer to write and
ask for justification of rules and procedures, perhaps because of
the relative ease and seeming anonymity of email, but they rarely
appear to actually want an explanation. I have created Policy
Pages with full explanations of just about everything I do in my
courses. If a student writes asking why they have to do something,
I can then just email back a short note giving them the link to
the Policy Page. For those who truly want to know why, it is all
there in full detail and it is in the same place for all courses I
teach, so I only have to write it once. For those who may just be
blowing off steam, it is a lot easier response for me than writing
out several paragraphs of explanation that they really did not
want to begin with.
Don’t encourage private correspondence. If
a student writes a private question the answer to which should be
open, post it on the common Discussion Group, just as you would
request of a student who asks such a question during a classroom
break that they ask it in class. It might be something to do with
an upcoming test where to speak only to one student would be
unfair, or it might be a problem from the student’s project work
that you feel would make a good example for explaining a difficult
concept. Make use of automated responses; keep “boilerplate”
replies in an email file. Post grades and examples of full-credit
answers on the web site using numbers to stand for different
comments, and then post only the numbers for each student and a
common list of what they stand for. Don’t accept the
computer-age equivalent of “my-dog-ate-it.” Broken printers,
non-functioning email, the net being down, are all problems a
university student should be able to cope with, and every excuse
you accept not only creates more work for you but is usually
unfair to students who handed in their work on time.
Don’t try too hard to be helpful to those
you may not be able to help. The 80/20 rule kicks in quickly in
Internet courses; a small percentage of students can devour your
time with endless problems they ought to be able to figure out on
their own, leaving you with no time for the fun part of Internet
teaching, which is interacting with students who are keen to
learn. Remember also that few of us are trained psychologists and
more serious problems are better referred to a
Counselling Centre.
6. Don’t
Try to Create An Internet Course By
Just Uploading Current Course Materials |
 |
Don’t ever think of an Internet course as
just like an on-campus one except the lectures are on the computer
screen. Creation of a successful Internet course starts at its
conceptualization. From the moment you start designing, think
“web” and consider all that is available to you that would not
be feasible in a traditional class. One benefit of designing an
Internet course is that it can breathe new life into courses that
may have become stale over years of teaching. Think of it as a
chance to change things in your current teaching that you would
like to do differently. Why send an audio/video stream of you
standing lecturing in front of an in-class course when you never
liked lecturing in the first place and we all know it is not an
effective way for students to learn. The web provides exciting and
different new ways to teach. Make use of them.
Copyright
laws allow for duplication of materials at no cost for use in the
classroom and for replication of such things as advertisements for
projection on an overhead screen, but you may not post such
writing or images on the web without specific and often costly
copyright permission. Check with your textbook publishers who are
usually involved in Internet course production and have material
already cleared for copyright often at no additional cost. Provide
links to other web sites. If you are talking about the mission
statement of Coca-Cola, provide a link to their web page where
students can read the statement for themselves. You do not
generally have to ask permission to link to a commercial site. If
you want a simplified explanation of a concept, check out links to
pages designed by public school teachers. In my Marketing Research
pages, I use a wonderful explanation of the scientific method
provided by a junior high school teacher. Students will go look at
a link you provide; they would be insulted if you were to suggest
they go to the library and borrow a seventh grade textbook. If you
want to take something from the web into your own site, you must
ask permission, but most people who produce web sites are
delighted if you want to use something from their site. Always
ask; something to the effect of, “Unless I hear from you to the
contrary, I will be posting it here” with a link to your site,
reduces required correspondence. I have always heard back and no
one has ever said no, and usually I receive back an email
bubbling over with excitement that someone noticed the site. Give
assignments that require students to search for and evaluate web
information. Book companies often provide online Study Guides and
self-study quizzes that you can arrange to have electronically
marked and returned, either for credit or not. Companies provide
online facilities for creating crossword puzzles and other games
incorporating your course material.
Many traditional
classroom components can be easily adapted for an Internet course.
My course websites pose numerous “Waving Hand Exercise”
questions for students to think about and respond to in the
Discussion Group. These are identified by an animated graphic of a
waving hand, a nod of recognition to the origin of the exercise,
the classroom question in response to which a student raises a
hand. You can often hold a discussion on a case study online more
effectively than in a classroom where few may have read it for
that day. You can do group decision-making exercises. One of my
favourites is “Alligator River” which challenges students to
rate from least offensive to most, the ethical behaviour of six
different people in a story where no one is innocent.
Group work is not only
possible on the Internet; it is actually easier. In the last many
years with the sad fact of even full-time students working nearly
full-time to support themselves leaving the possibilities of free
meeting times outside of class reduced to Sunday afternoon or
Wednesday at three in the morning, a large percentage of students
have already been doing the majority of their group work by
email. An Internet group assignment that gives students
permission to do all their group work by email relieves guilt as
well as saving time. The possibility for cross-cultural learning
is an added benefit. One term a student in Egypt worked in a group
with one in the wilds of northern British Columbia, while in
another group a woman in Florida about to give birth worked in a
group with a young full-time student in Georgia and an older
executive taking courses part time in Canada.
| 7. Don’t
Expect More From Online Students |
 |
While the Internet provides exciting new ways
to reach students, it is important to remember that they are still
at heart the same students you have known in the classroom, with
the same needs and shortcomings. There is a strong tendency to
think that because these brave souls are studying in a new way
with new tools and new vision, they are forward-thinking
advance-planners who will therefore read instructions and prepare
work ahead of time. They generally won’t. A number of
experienced Internet colleagues warned me that Internet students
do not read instructions any more than traditional ones, and
despite their universal agreement, I was certain that they must
all be wrong. Clearly, to me, any student who was possessed of
enough self-motivation and awareness of their own academic skills
to enrol in a course taken through the Internet would obviously be
the kind of student who actually prepared readings ahead of time,
started assignments early, and found materials on their own,
knowing as they would that they would have neither an in-class
professor nor even fellow students to easily consult with when in
need of help. I was eager to teach such students; I had daydreams
of a class where, since there was no classroom to which to come
empty-handed on a due-date, everyone would send in their work on
time and come to the computer screen fully prepared for the
discussions on the readings. My colleagues, again, did not lie to
me. Students who take Internet courses are not much different from
those in traditional courses, especially in the crucial areas of
reading instructions, responding to professorial requests, and
preparing ahead of time. Among the top four problems that staff
listed in an informal survey of the difficulties they experience
with Internet courses was the large number of inquiries they
receive from students regarding information that is already
provided on the website. In cases where in a traditional classroom
you would demonstrate something in person, try to find ways you
can do that same demonstration online, either through a
video-stream, a series of PowerPoint slides, or audio instructions
with still-photographs. One colleague created a step-by-step
PowerPoint explanation of how to prepare a paper for submission to
his Internet course (Saindon, Interview 2001).
Adjust your expectations to student behaviour. At one point when I
offered an Internet course test on two different nights to
accommodate schedules, I emailed a class of seventy-seven
students to request that they tell me on which night they would be
taking the test. Only nine wrote me in time to be of any use;
ultimately only 44% wrote back at all, and 73% of those took more
than a week to do so. You cannot count on quick response time and
hence might as well not ask such questions. I now simply reserve a
room big enough to hold the entire class on both nights I am
offering a test.
Internet students still need deadlines. One
of the real challenges of Internet teaching is finding innovative
ways to create deadlines while avoiding the rigidity of
week-by-week work. Some professors, for example, require students
to respond to specific Discussion Group topics within a two-week
time frame, but this does not work in a class where I am trying to
provide a truly flexible learning experience.
What I have done instead is to provide optional
assignments, each consisting of an early part of the final
assignment, which students may complete by a certain date and send
to me for individual grade-free feedback. This was one of
literally dozens of ideas I learned in the months before teaching
my first Internet course by surveying my then-current students on
what they liked and hated about Internet courses they had taken.
Internet students need to reach us, and in some ways, with their
busy schedules, you can be more available to them through email
than in a traditional classroom, particularly in classes that meet
only once a week and for students who are also working. For many
years I held “office hours” for my evening students but few
ever came; they work all day and get to campus only for class. On
the Internet, they can reach me anytime and I get back to them
quickly. The timing of reaching a professor is important. A
student writing a paper at eleven o’clock at night would never
telephone me to ask a question but well might email me and have a
reply in ten minutes if I am online, which they know I usually am.
Internet course facilities are useful to
students who need extra help. If someone raises her hand in class
and says that despite fifteen minutes work on an item in the
classroom she still does not understand, I can keep the whole
class waiting while I go over it once again or I can ask her to
come see me after class and hope she does not have a train to
catch. On the email in an Internet course, that student can write
me and receive the individual help she needs. I can block and copy
the student’s exact words and write a personalized note that
says, “See, here’s where you went wrong.” If what I am
explaining to her is something that others have asked about or
appears to be something arising out of unclear explanations, I can
post her question anonymously, with my answer, to the general
email list. Students also can express themselves at greater
length than would be feasible in a classroom where other students
begin to roll their eyes and you feel that as the professor you
must move things along. If someone wants to write a long piece on
the Discussion Group, others can feel free to read the first few
lines and move on. I read them all, sometimes finding gems in the
later part that might have been lost if I had had to gently cut
the student short in a classroom discussion.
Remember that your Internet students may
still feel more comfortable with some old-fashioned printed
material. Although all my course materials are online, students
receive a long and detailed letter in the mail about a month
before classes start, outlining the important rules and giving
them links and email addresses to which to refer. Don’t leave
anything unclear; lay it out in the letter and the course kit.
Many years ago at a conference of the American Marketing
Association, I heard award-winning teacher, scholar, textbook
author, and friend Bill Perreault speak on teaching large classes.
At that time my classes had swelled to sixty from thirty-five and
I was feeling a little hard done by, until I learned that by
“large” Bill meant eight hundred Introductory Marketing
students in one class. Among the many superb suggestions Bill
gave, most of which I have implemented over the years, he talked
about a course kit that was in essence a legal contract. He drew
it up, gave it to the students, asked them to read it, and, as a
condition of staying in the course to sign and return the attached
agreement form. Then when students asked, “Can I hand this in
late? I’m going on a skiing trip to Vermont,” Bill would say,
“Well, hey, it’s okay by me personally, I’d love to go
skiing myself, but we have this agreement; let’s go see what the
course kit says,” and, opening it up, poring through it,
pointing finally to Article 10, Subsection 3, Paragraph 4, he’d
say, “Oops! No can do. The course kit says you can’t hand it
in late. Guess you’ll have to get it done BEFORE the ski
trip.” The course kit, letter, and web site establish a formal
agreement between you and the student. In the words of an
Associate Dean responsible for overseeing Internet courses, “Be
explicit on what you will deliver and deliver on your
commitments.” (Spraakman, Interview March 2002)
The occasional student does not even realize
there is any difference whatsoever between your Internet class and
another on-campus section of the same course. A colleague recently
received a telephone call just before the midterm exam from an
irate student angry that everything in the course seemed to be
done on computer and he did not have one. When it was pointed out
to him that the course syllabus specifically states that one must
either have the necessary computer equipment or make use of that
provided in the on-campus computer labs, it became apparent that
he was unaware he was taking an Internet course. Don’t forget
that your Internet students are still students in need of
guidance.
| 8. Don't
Underestimate The Power And Problems of Technology |
 |
Although some colleagues recommend leaving
all the technical work in an Internet course to computer experts,
I advise you to not shirk off too much of the technical
responsibility. You learn a lot doing things yourself, and when
something goes wrong you may be able to fix it instead of waiting
in queue for your service ticket number to come up. You also will
be better equipped to help your students with pages whose
construction you understand. I am largely self-taught on the
computer, including web design, and I have created an entire page
called “The Idiot’s Guide To Using This Web Site” out of
things I learned from my own silly mistakes. The major piece of
advice I offer new designers of web sites is to not try to be
Michelangelo and paint the Sistine Chapel. Keep things simple,
consistent, terse; concentrate on content and but without losing
sight of the importance of the visual effect of the web site.
A major rule of technology is to not assume
it will work perfectly. A staff member responding to a survey of
problems encountered in Internet courses cited, “Dealing with
students who are not able to access their course websites or
courseroom/chatrooms, and limited computing support for both
students and faculty.” (Glynn, Interview 2002). Testing is still
difficult in Internet courses. We require students to appear in
person for a supervised test, either on campus or with an
invigilator elsewhere. Technology exists for online testing but so
far it is best used for optional feedback where the grade does not
count. We lack reliable ways to determine exactly who is sitting
at the computer or who or what may be with them while they take an
online test.
Remember that things written in email can
have an unexpected impact; something you might say in jest with a
gentle wink can appear snide or arrogant on the screen. email
does provide the possibility of a cooling-down moment. When a
student says something unpleasant in class, you usually must deal
with it right then and hope you do it adequately; when a student
writes something nasty on the email, you can wait and calm down
before you handle it; you can even call for outside help first.
One writer cautions us about the potential for flaming (vicious
email notes) brought on by problems in Internet courses common to
students with “(a) a low frustration threshold, (b) a sense that
they are victims of technology or other peoples’ lack of
understanding and (c) a tendency to overstate problems, overreact
to them, and lash out.” (Hailey et al 2001:389). Before posting
anything, on the web or in email, re-read at least twice and ask
yourself, “What are the possible consequences of this
message?” (Jurkowski, Interview 2002).
| 9. Don't
Lose Yourself or What You Stand For |
 |
Although this paper starts out advising you
to listen to anyone who has done this before, you also are advised
not to try to replicate what someone else has done on the
Internet. Keep your materials and organization true to your own
style, and take care of yourself in the process. Do what you love
doing and do not be afraid to admit that you like some of the
Internet course advantages such as not having to meet students
each week or be on campus late at night in the icy middle of
February.
Teaching an Internet course is a good time to
put into practice an ancient piece of advice that suggests we
remember that in all things most people are doing the best they
can. Do not waste precious time and energy getting angry with
students, computer staff, your hardware, or yourself. Everyone is
doing the best they can. The lack of human elements such as eye
contact and gestures in Internet language can often spark
annoyance where no malice was intended. I try to read every
message as moderately as I can; that way, even if someone is angry
with me, they do not rouse my anger. Don’t rise to the bait. You
will eventually see students, usually at an in-class test, and you
will feel bad if you have been angry with them. Students may write
long detailed explanations of why they did poorly on a test,
setting up for a potential appeal or perhaps just letting off
steam. Don’t deal with it as a problem until it becomes one.
Find simple answers such as, “Well, do your best on the next
one.” Don’t lecture them. If someone does something really
stupid, like the woman who discovered one week before the end of
term that she had been using the wrong textbook despite an actual
picture of the front of the book prominently displayed at the top
of the course website, she does not need a lecture on reading
instructions more carefully; just find a quick answer that
respects her dignity and still maintains the standards of a
university course.
| 10. Don't
Forget To Have Fun. |
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I have really enjoyed the experience of
teaching on the Internet, so much so that I have made it a regular
part of my teaching and I look forward to it. I found it an
invigorating challenge in my mid-fifties when many things at my
university were beginning to seem dull and repetitious. The
challenge of designing and teaching with a totally new technology
rejuvenated me. It was an enjoyable intellectual challenge to take
more than twenty years worth of copious classroom notes,
overheads, stories, cases, assignments, and tasks and convert them
into web pages, an exercise that forces you to rethink content,
structure, method, and order of presentation.
I truly enjoy the pleasant hours I spend
looking for pictures for the website. If this sounds shallow,
realize that I teach marketing which is all about packaging and
presentation, but realize too that the web makes use of a channel
of knowledge highly appropriate to our visually oriented students.
A solid page of prose looks pretty dreary on the web so I had to
call on my creative design capabilities in a far more major way
than I ever had in all my years of classroom teaching. I found it
a tremendous challenge, for example, to track down a picture that
would encapsulate an entire concept. I knew the words from reading
books and doing research and talking for years in class, but in a
web course on Marketing I needed a picture too, to break up the
page, to add white space and interest and appeal, but it could not
be just any picture; it had to serve a purpose. In essence, I had
to have a site that would “market” itself to the reader, and
it has been fun working with that.
I do not paint or sculpt or fish or hunt or
do needlepoint or crafts or woodworking or build model cars or
planes; designing and maintaining my web page is my creative
outlet. I am enjoying being
able “to be of use” as John Irving phrased it in The Cider
House Rules. The fact that I am almost completely self-taught
has meant that I can be helpful to my students in a way I never
could in a traditional classroom, giving specific individually
tailored answers to problems I have recently faced myself. It
makes the students feel comfortable and I feel good having helped
them. If most of what I enjoy about Internet teaching has to do
with helping students, it is not selfless altruism; when my
students are happy, my life is a lot easier, and in these days of
such large classes, it feels good to hear from a student about how
much help you were. It has replaced the personal touch that got
lost in fourth-year-honours seminars of eighty students.
Conclusion
I had been teaching, and living a fairly
fearless life, for a quarter of a century when I was asked to
teach my first Internet course and I was scared to death. It was
so different from anything I had ever done. It was perhaps finally
tenure that rescued me. I realized that at the very worst,
if I fell flat on my face, I would not lose my job for trying
something new. Do not underestimate the fear involved in teaching
a course for the first time with new technology. There may be some
of you who do not experience fear, but for most of us, an Internet
course is different from anything we have ever done in the
classroom and it makes sense that it would be scary. Remember too
what we tell our students is the single best solution for fear: be
as fully prepared as you possibly can.
We go into an Internet course lacking most of
our traditional tools of the trade. When we write on the Internet
we appear as just the disembodied voice of authority demanding,
instructing, complaining, correcting. When we do these same things
in class, our facial gestures and body movements blunt some of the
severity or unpleasantness of what we may have to say. We don’t
even have our wardrobes to rely on. One of my students told me
after the course about a comment made by the man sitting beside
her on the day of the test when I had come early to meet and chat
with them. He had said of me, “She doesn’t look at all like I
thought she would. I thought she’d be really tough, hard, you
know, all business.” I laughed and replied to the woman student,
“And now you know why I wore a long skirt and soft jacket that
night!” How do we appear to our students as we would like them
to see us when they cannot see us? How do we encourage students to
respond warmly and personally without encouraging tons of personal
email? How do we strike the balance between cold and warm,
between technology and humanity, between tough and approachable,
all these dichotomies that are important in any classroom but
crucial on the Internet? We do it by using new technology to bring
into the classroom the same care and concern for our students that
we have always had.
The challenge of an Internet course was how
to recreate the fun, the intimacy, the spontaneity, the human
element of the classroom. It is by no means impossible; it just
may take a little longer and it will take thinking outside the
box. The rewards are worth it. One of the things that surprised me
most was how much contact I had with my Internet students, how
well I got to know so many of them, and how close I felt to them.
I had feared in my first Internet course that it would be a cold
distant relationship without the warmth of classroom face-to-face.
Surprisingly, students seemed more willing to talk, to open up,
perhaps because of the distance provided by email. I felt
comfortable responding to them warmly, helping them out when they
were feeling lost, sharing my experience with them. And they in
turn share their lives with me and with each other. This past
summer we received baby pictures by email from a student who had
been pregnant while taking the winter course.
It is fun teaching on the Internet; it truly
is. Don’t let some shortcomings and difficulties deter you.
There are always problems; the key to success is in how we deal
with them.
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