CHANGES IN FACULTY ROLES
We would be foolish not to acknowledge that there is pedagogy embedded in online technologies that we use to teach.
For example, one of the most significant changes that occur in online teaching is the change in the role played by faculty. The faculty online is much less of the knowledge provider, authority and source of wisdom. The feedback we receive from JIU faculty consistently indicates that online faculty find themselves in new roles of students‘ fellow discoverers, knowledge facilitators and guides.
This shift in faculty roles is happening because traditional classroom is dematerialized in online environments. Synchronicity of education is no longer necessary and social concepts and institutional rituals connected with it are being changed. With this change teachers core professional identity is being re-defined. 2
Again, we need to acknowledge this change and use it to our advantage. It means that we should not insist on replicating synchronous face to face teaching online, we should translate it.
One of the strongest lessons from JIU experience is that synchronous methods of teaching are not the most appropriate for online teaching. As much as we want to pretend that synchronous chat sessions resemble class meetings - they really do not. A week long face to face meeting scheduled once a semester will not make much of a difference in the success of online program. In fact translation of such a meeting into an asynchronous mode may fit students‘ needs much better.
At JIU we took the lesson that asynchronous education is the correct mode for online content delivery even farther by dividing traditional roles of faculty into two complementary but asynchronous functions. Content Experts who are faculty responsible for designing courses are chosen for their research accomplishments, publications and excellence in thinking. They are charged with the design of the courses that are then implemented by Teaching Faculty. Teaching Faculty work directly with students. We claim that we use best faculty from both research and teaching worlds – an option that would not be possible without asynchronous model of course delivery.
There are other teaching related concepts that are changed by the online content delivery. In an online classroom human presence is mediated by text. Class participation shifts from speaking to writing. This brings up a major change to conversational, social aspect of learning. A long-standing tradition of school being a place and time allocated for talking may no longer be valid in the near future.
Online, asynchronous delivery of knowledge tends to increase modularization of the teaching units. Asynchronous delivery calls for a pre-design of classroom content. Process of pre-designing fosters a-priori definitions of what we will teach and how we will teach it. Modularization of content helps us to do it efficiently.
Asynchronous, online classroom also seem to foster the use of qualitative and self-assessment methods. Traditional ways of judging students‘ learning will need to be re-thought in light of these preferences. For example, all JIU exams are open book exams. Ninety percent of assessments used in our courses are qualitative assessments such as essays, research and position papers, online discussions, article reviews and group projects.
What do we gain through implementing all these changes? We empower students to take control over their own learning. I will talk more about it in my next point. Possibly, more insight into students needs will allow us to customize our teaching, to encourage more student participation, more critical thinking and more questioning of knowledge principles.
What do we loose in asynchronous teaching? Eventually we may loose some of the traditional authority held by academic faculty. Some of the concepts associated with the traditional faculty roles may disappear. Faculty may stop being seen as guardians of the organized and stringent inquiry. Are we undermining authority of knowledge by taking these roles away from academic teachers? Possibly yes.
What elements of the old faculty role do we want to preserve? The one thing we want to preserve is the role of teaching. In a new way, through facilitation and responsiveness, faculty can preserve its teaching related authority. Even without traditional conversational contact between teachers and students, intellectual connection between teachers and students can and should be preserved. Responsiveness to students’ online inquiries, quality of feedback will become most important in online classrooms. It is difficult to lecture online, but it does not mean that we cannot transfer knowledge and theoretical perspective online. In fact good, involved, high quality teaching may be even more important in the new environment then it was in the face to face teaching.
CHANGES IN THE ROLES OF STUDENTSThe identity and role of students also changes in online classrooms. Online learning involves a shift in who is responsible for learning. With less mediation between the student and the course material knowledge acquisition becomes much more the responsibility of the students.
There are several implications of this shift in responsibilities.
Design of online courses need to allow for students‘ more involved, constant, continuos, immersion in the course. Since online course materials can be accessed at any time, they need to support independent and self-paced learning. This means that quality of learning materials needs to carry some of the pedagogical functions that used to be fulfilled by students‘ interaction with face to face classroom faculty. For example, it is very important that all online course materials - readings, exercises and assignments - support specific learning outcomes.
Online, responsibility for initiating discussions tends to shift to students. Course materials need to support this responsibility with comprehensiveness and presentation of multiple points of view. They need to give students a solid base of valuable discussion topics.
Online students become discussion initiators and moderators as well as discussion participants. Different skills will be needed to fill these roles and appropriate skill acquisition needs to become a part of all online programs. For example, teaching effective online communication, teamwork and collaboration needs to become part of the curriculum even for programs that are not directly teaching communication.
What do we gain by supporting these changing roles of students in online environments? In an online classroom students can afford more time to think and to craft responses. Online collaboration allows for a slow, shared work through texts. It gives everyone option to see how others think. Online classrooms can become places of true sharing of ideas, collaborative thinking and discovery. They can expose our students to multiple points of view and culturally different thinking. All these can happen if we allow for more student control over the learning process.
Of course, there are dangers to relinquishing faculty control over education. Student controlled instruction can lead to the lack of context and to diminishing quality of learning experience. With less control over what happens in the classroom teaching faculty need to make sure that they still provide context to what is being learned and that they effectively guide students through the course. Online teaching calls for careful knowledge structuring efforts from the instructor, more modeling and more feedback. What we do not want to loose in online classrooms is coherence of education and learning.
6. CHANGES TO COLLEGIATE CULTURE
These and other changes that online teaching and learning brings to education processes will cause significant changes to traditional collegiate cultures. Changing teaching practices, changing faculty and students roles will change academic institutions as we know them today.
As William H. Graves points out virtual universities will foster disaggregation and disintermediation of traditional educational models.3 Structures of traditional universities will change to new, less compartmentalized models. A long tradition of differentiation among academic disciplines may be challenged as different departments are being forced to collaborate to survive.
On the other hand, since students will be able to choose educational institutions according to their interest rather then geographic proximity, universities will be pressed to specialize and focus their offerings at the institutional level.
In the process we may lose some traditional roles played by the academia. Academic institutions may stop being centers of inquiry and become centers for applied training and skills acquisition. Quality of teaching as opposed to traditional research focus will become more and more important in academic faculty evaluations. When students take control over educational process contact between academia and business may become much closer. Increased choice among universities should promote competition and that in turn should increase quality of academic offerings.
What will we loose by fostering this change in collegiate culture? We may loose academic focus in areas that are not easily applicable. Marriage of education and business can have mixed efforts on program quality. There are gains to be gained if we start treating education as a business, but there are also loses if we limit education to business.
One aspect of the traditional academic culture that we may want to preserve is the authority of scientific and critical inquiry. The high quality value attached to any education may need special preservation efforts. Traditional safe guards of peer review and accreditation may need to be replaced by different, but equally strict norms of certifying academic validity.
7. CONCLUSION
Implementing change to important social concepts--such as education--requires careful consideration. Careful consideration means that we will pay attention to all, desirable and undesirable, aspects of the change we are implementing. Online learning and teaching already is a permanent feature of our educational landscapes. The time to ask difficult questions is now. Future of education may depend on how well we think through our answers.
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