PRESENTING MATERIAL

Context. First, a little story. Ron's first online course was PY310 Social Psychology, one he had done in a basic lecture format for many years. He remembers:When the idea of first doing it online came up, my old paradigm told me that I had to find a way to lecture as I always had. "Let's videotape the lectures" I thought. They have to see my handsome face as they hear my learned voice. A nice idea - can be done for about a million bucks by the time the tapes are made, copied, and somehow distributed to students. OK, audio tapes, then ... kind of the same deal. Finally, the obvious hit me: education really doesn't absolutely have to be face-to-face. It can, and it's core always has been, MIND to MIND. Time to think in some new ways... some ways outside the box. Sara adds historic context (she promises not to do this too often):The best education has always been one-on-one, personal tutorials. That is what Socrates was doing for the young citizen males, as was young Montaigne's tutor. Come Industrialization, the powers that be realized they needed educated workers (ex: delivery boys that could read street signs) and citizens (so they'd vote "intelligently"). So there came into being a kind of educational "mass production" in which lots of students got lined up in straight rows of classroom chairs. This certainly can work - but at best, computers give us new ways to break away from the mass nature of the classroom, even if they also cut off the eye-to-eye contact we're all used to. So, the first thing that we suggest to novice onliners is that they step back and challenge as many as possible of the old assumptions that have shaped - and limited - our traditional classes. Try not to start by asking "How can I manage to keep on doing just what I've always done." Instead ask yourself what basic information and skills are at the core of your class. Then perhaps ask yourself "what can online do that I always wanted to do, that I can't do in a traditional classroom?" And of course there is no reason to try to invent the online wheel all on your own. So here is some introductory observations to keep in mind:

 
The "New" Lecture Format. If lecturing is one of your strengths, you don't have to abandon that whole approach just because you've gone online. Many online instructors put lectures online, whether written out verbatim or in pared-down outline form. The same is true of course handouts.  Note that for these "documents" online is in fact better than the traditional classroom in significant ways. Most department photocopy budgets start groaning at too many requests for 25 copies of this, that, and the other thing. Put something up online, and students "make" their own copies free, or pay printout costs themselves. It is also worth noticing that one key end product from a day of traditional lecture is - hopefully - a student's well-organized class notes. As we all know, this is so often not the case, as student notes are incomplete, garbled, and sometimes just plain wrong. Online you have the chance to supply students with the real thing, to which they can return as often as they need.

You may be thinking "But just how do I get my old familiar print resources up online?" If in traditional word processor form, these can very easily be changed into html format. Some editing will probably be needed, but this is not a great hurdle. Your friendly webtechs will doubtless help you for at least your first semesters, and after that we can testify that html authoring software isn't hard to learn to use, at least at the basic "clean up a document" level. Your friendly CAS online mentors can also help you use Textbridge to scan in at least a few print documents - but do note that you will be on your own (or talking to those webtechs) to do the inevitable digital clean up that comes with using text recognition scanning software.

Beyond Do It Yourself. But don't forget that you don't always have to write and/or digitally convert these things yourself. Both of your Mentors happily invest time looking for links to relevant documents, news items, photos, maps, charts, databases, etc on other sites. We also use, when possible, textbooks that have links to their own site. Ron's Social Psych text, for instance, has a site that includes glossaries, practice quirzzes, links to relevant news happenings and journal articles, and other features. Sara, sadly, finds that history text publishers are still a ways behind this, but reports some progress for some texts. She also has put up online her own annotated list of Recommended Web Links for world history teachers - visit it for one introduction to one discipline's kind of resources worth visiting. Anyway, the basic point is that you shouldn't feel that you must invent the online teaching wheel all by yourself. Rather see the web as an endless warehouse with shelves filled with teaching goodies now often instantly available for your classroom - all you have to do is find them and figure out how to use them, of course.

Active Learning. Nowadays, we are all hearing more and more about active learning, in which we flat-out tell the students less, and structure more ways for them to seek out and interpret more for themselves. Online teaching is a natural for this approach. This is so whether you want to do a class that is mostly student-centered activities, or whether you are more interested in using the format change to insert a few active learning touches. If the latter, as you write up notes, you can try leaving a few more "holes" in your narrative, perhaps just telling students to find the information in their text, but also with the possibility to ask them to go off on their own "mid-lecture" to look at an image, listen to a sound file, visit a website, even view a video clip.  Of course you can also go further, asking students to "speak up" in a variety of ways.

INTERACTING WITH STUDENTS

The traditional classroom is usually not all instructor lecture. In some courses, class discussion and/or group student projects play key roles. If this is your teaching style, how can you take it into cyberspace. Here are a couple of starting ways:

The Bulletin Board allows the entire class to read what is posted there. Some online instructors use this as a  discussion forum ("So, this week's topic is to discuss the stigma that can come when one is diagnosed as 'mentally ill' .... remember, all of you are asked/required to post xx messages offering an opinion/commenting on a classmate's opinion/whatever.") For at least some students, the online format makes it easier for them to discuss and give opinions. Various classroom-hesitant students tell us that they especially appreciate having time to polish their contributions as well as freedom from feeling "shouted down" by louder classmates. Other students especially like the asynchronous nature of the exchange - whatever the time, day or night, that they are online, they can continue a conversation often begun by a classmate now off at work, or asleep. In this way online classes actually benefit from lacking real-time eye-to-eye classroom form.

Most (although not all) experienced online instructors advise making discussion participation a requirement if you want it to be something in which more than a few take part. Beware, though, of being too zealous. Some instructors report having begun requiring lots of regular student participation linked to lots of instructor participation and feedback. One told Sara the sad story of having begun by saying "Well, I would want all students to participate once each class period, and there are usually three class periods a week. So I'll require just [her emphasis] three postings a week. Of course they must be substantive. And of course I'll grade each one, and provide individual feedback as needed." The result, not unexpectedly in hindsight, was a black hole of instructor effort. In fact, some students didn't post enough, and had to be reminded/given notice. Many posted things that didn't quality as substantive. The instructor several times expanded, and then greatly expanded, her online definition of substantive. She amended the assignment to allow and call for comment on previous postings as well as new comments. She then had to start intervening more often to call for, and enforce, civility. She wrote, and then expanded (and then greatly expanded), an online definition of what is a flame, what is civility, etc. She soon was spending hours a day monitoring, evaluating, recording online comment scores.

Despite this horrible start, this dedicated instructor has not abandoned required online student discussion. What she has done, to use her own words, is "gotten smarter." She now requires one substantive student posted comment for ten of the twelve discussion topics she posts each semester. She begins the semester requiring that students read her fine-tuned essays on What is Substantive Comment and What is Civility. She has developed a simple evaluation rubric (also posted and discussed at the beginning of the course), in which she has only to give students a check, check plus, or "needs work" score for just a few categories. It is almost no extra work to assign and email to students as she reads the bulletin board each day. She then takes some more time, two or three times a semester, to write slightly longer "how you're doing" summary comments to all students.

Note that WebCT's Bulletin Board also allows you to set up multiple forums in which smaller sub-groups can also get together to talk about more specialized topics. This is a great way to help physically-separate students learn to work in small groups, etc - but again be very careful, as you think up wonderful assignments and projects, not to create a situation where the sum total of what you must monitor becomes an unbearable burden.

Chat. WebCT also has a Chat function. This works like any online chat room. The upside is the rapid exchange of ideas and opinions. Unlike Bulletin Boards, Chat exchanges always take place in "real time" with all participants sitting, right then, at their computers. At best, this can produce very exciting exchanges reported to have energized whole classes of students. Reported difficulties come from the downsides of both the "real time" nature of the process, and its high energy. In our experience so far, many online students have very crowded lives, in which instructors just plain can't say "you must be home at 8 pm Tuesdays for Chat." (Hard to do, when the reply is "sorry, I'm on duty in the Emergency Room then.") Some instructors report that discussions may end up being dominated by whoever keys the fastest, with some slower students feeling left out. Still, other instructors report Chat as one of the most successful part of their online class.

Automatic Feedback. While it won't be as personal as Instructor email, Bulletin Board or Chat, don't forget that WebCT offers a number of ways in which you can give students automated, pre-packed individual feedback. These are the automatically graded exercises you can construct, which can be voluntary as well as required, for bonus points, etc, Thus you might create "Did You Get It?" self-quizzes to be taken after a major reading assignment,  visit to a recommended website, or even completion of your own online instructor's essay. Note that WebCT allows you to insert feedback comments following each correct and incorrect answer in its multiple choice quizzes. Properly constructed, such feedback quizzes can become individualized online tutorials. Note also that a small but increasing number of websites have appeared, containing well-crafted online student exercises the results of such can, in some way, be emailed back to a student's professor. Do be on the lookout for these, if interested (Sara can cite several, but of course they are all for history--we like to hear from you if your discipline has such things in place).

Tech. Almost without a doubt, some of your interaction with students will be replying to crisis messages about tech problems. Our reply is always short: Go directly to the webtechs: they know much more tech than we do; they have much more experience in long-distance diagnosis. We urge you to take this seriously. Online students vary widely in their computer expertise, not to mention the hardware and software they are using, plus their own levels of anxiety. All these kinds of problems can eat up a lot of your time if you let them - let the good folks who are paid to provide tech advice do so. Of course you can still let anxious students notify you that there is a problem - after all, you may well have to come up with some pedagogical remedy to their having been cut off in mid-exam, or having lost their whole submitted essay as they forgot to "save" and then did something stupid rather than hit "finish," or whatever. But as for the tech difficulties themselves - do make use of Washburn's very, very good tech support policy: it's an outstanding one.

ASSESSING STUDENT PERFORMANCE

Exams. For many of us, the bedrock of student assessment is the closed-book in-class exam. How do we take that on to the web? In some senses, you don't! Of course you can require all students to come to supervised locations for all exams. But assuming you are building a totally online course, there is really no way to know for sure that they are taking your online exam alone, with their book closed, without another window open to your textbook site or to their own notes, or even that a friend isn't peering over their shoulder, taking notes for their own future benefit.

Here are a couple of approaches we've worked out. Ron gives closed book tests, on the honor system. He sets a fixed time limit and deduct points for exceeding that limit. This doesn't prevent cheating completely. It does make it nearly impossible for the student who has done no preparation to do well; there just isn't time to take the test AND read the chapters.

Sara prefers not to give cheating students even a little advantage over those who are more honorable, so she makes all required work open book, structuring it (as does Ron) to make sure it calls for the kind of responses that can be looked up in a moment's time. She requires a mixture of different student activities. Map exercises and frequent short essays are not only open book, they also have no time limits on how long students have to prepare them. She thinks of them as "take home" assignments. But she also ends each of four course sections with a "keep 'em honest" limited-time online objective exam, intended to force each student to learn at least much of the basics. Since she (like Ron, from whom she got the idea) gives students a five day window, any time during which students may take her 35-minute exam, she did originally worry some about one friend telling another about what was on an exam. But then she discovered the WebCT alternative exam question option, which lets her construct several alternative questions for one topic, with WebCT then randomly varying which alternative shows up on different individual exams.

Another word concerning the "exam window" approach to online exams. Both of us find that it is very popular with students, who like being able to find an exam time that fits their own schedule. We both schedule the window so that it includes the whole weekend, but also gives significant weekday time to for those who prefer working then. (Of course the usual pattern emerges: a few eager students take the exam early, and then most put it off until almost the very last moment, whenever that is. ) We also like the practice, from the instructor's point of view, since it practically eliminates the need to give makeup exams. ("Surely, even if you dog was sick, there was a moment in the five days when you could drop her paw long enough to take the exam...")

However you decide to test, if you are doing it online with any kind of time limit or cut-off due date, be prepared for tech emergencies and disasters. It almost always happens at least once: a frantic email saying "I was taking the exam and my system cut me off! I hadn't saved anything!! Help!!! Please!!!!" We've found that it is all but impossible to determine if this is fact or fiction. Many, perhaps most, times it is fact. Maybe it's the system or the phone company; sometimes the student hit the wrong key. Figure out as best you can, ahead of time, how you are going to deal with this. One way can be dropping the lowest grade - the "each student gets one free disaster" policy. Another is to have a "Disaster Alternative" exam or assignment ready, probably advertised as slightly but distinctly more challenging as a disincentive to anyone claiming such a disaster. But we also recommend, especially your first semester, being ready to be a little more mellow than you might be in class. Students really do get very nervous online; they really do make dumb mistakes; network connections really do disconnect at the most inopportune moments.

Of course prevention is also very useful. We now begin each semester asking our students to complete the online WebCT orientation training and then to take a short WebCT familiarity self-test (ask your friendly webtech for a copy, if interested). We  also both offer a Warmup exercise in which we have students practice doing each of the different kinds of WebCT test questions they'll be asked to do in our online exams and exercises. (For Sara, this means her students answer a couple of very easy multiple choice questions, identify map locations using the matching function, and insert a few words into a  paragraph submission box.) Sara makes the WebCT quiz and the Warmup exercise worth up to 1 bonus point each (to be added to a 480 point course). Ron makes his voluntary. Either way our students report liking the "try it out" opportunity very much. The few students who just can't seem to get it, we then send immediately to webtech to practice and consult more. The result so far has been relatively few disasters by exam time, and thus an easier life for us too.

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