by Rebecca Ganzel

Students enrolled in Aaron Doering’s Online Learning Communities class sometimes meet outside, on a broad terrace whose marble balustrade borders a picturesque sea. It’s always calm here; no one ever slaps a mosquito or seeks shelter from bad weather. Discussions are lively, but be prepared: At any minute, the student next to you might take off in flight.

Students in Aaron Doering’s Online Learning
Communities class learn about virtual-learning tools
in a virtual setting: the online world of Second Life.

Where is this idyllic spot? The virtual world of Second Life, a popular Web site where people create artificial spaces for travel, socializing, and yes, learning. Sixty colleges and universities have set up classrooms there, the Christian Science Monitor reported last fall.

“The purpose of the class is teaching how to teach online. I practice what I preach,” says Doering, assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, who coordinates the College’s new distance learning certificate.

“Community is a key issue for online courses,” he continues. “You need to use the technology to get the students engaged.”

Doering’s class combines computer delivery with face-to-face meetings. During spring semester ’07, Doering and his students met for three and a half hours every week, about half of the time in an actual Peik Hall classroom, the rest online. In addition to Second Life, Doering uses whiteboards (shared online notebooks) and discussion areas powered by the University’s WebVista online-course software.

Instructors in the College are drawing on an evolving digital toolbox as they expand the classroom beyond its traditional boundaries and provide new ways of learning. Online communications cross the limitations of space, allowing experts from around the globe to contribute to class discussions. Web logs (blogs) create ongoing opportunities for instructor-student interaction.

Blogging to ‘best practice’

Ann Zweber Werner’s epiphany came as she was contemplating how to design a teaching unit that would reflect the new state standards in principal licensure, which, for the first time, imposed the same requirements on both elementary and secondary principals. She was curious about the similarities and differences between the two groups’ experiences and decided to go straight to the source for the most accurate information.

Werner, program director of licensing for educational administrators in the Department of Educational Policy and Administration, is quite familiar with the secondary principal perspective; she was a high-school principal for more than 20 years. She asked three Minnesota elementary-school principals to share their experiences by keeping detailed blogs for one year. The writers’ identities are kept completely anonymous; readers know only that one is from an urban school district, another from a suburban one, and the third from a rural area.

The reason for such secrecy becomes evident when you read the honest accounts (and sometimes raw emotion) that the bloggers express. Werner asked the principals to address four questions each day: What were the main topics of the day? Who were the participants? What were the emotions involved? What did you do about it?

The frank, first-person narratives describe what it’s really like to be a principal in 21st-century America. "Traditional textbooks talk about things from a ‘research voice;’ they give you one-page case studies and suggest steps to take," Werner says. "But so many administrators say, ‘I didn’t learn how to do my job until the first day I was in it.’"

These blogs form the heart of what Werner calls Layered Learning Modules (LLM)—content-driven learning units that can be used as part of a class or stand alone as resources for anyone who wants a quick primer in the subject. Each blog entry is coded so that students can find topical information easily. The LLMs include related blog entries as well as specific layers created by an individual or multiple experts on a particular topic within the larger subject area, fostering a multidisciplinary teaching approach. The School Safety LLM, for example, will draw on expert authors from the Departments of Educational Policy and Administration, Educational Psychology, Curriculum and Instruction, and the Institute of Child Development, as well as administrators in the field. Each module is presented in video and audio via the University’s online meeting software, Breeze. Relevant text chapters and bibliographies are also delivered via the Web.

Werner has used insights gained through the blogs to shape state licensure requirements, powerfully affecting the K–12 community statewide. Additional blogs are underway with middle-school principals and directors of community education, and plans call for future interaction with high-school principals and school superintendents. She hopes the real-world accounts will help policymakers and the public as a whole understand the complex and demanding nature of educational administration. Additionally, the blog content may influence professional-development course design for teachers and administrators alike. Werner plans to start selling her LLMs through UMart, the University’s online store, this summer.

Global experts

Most of the online components of courses taught at the University are asynchronous. That is, they do not require students to log on simultaneously to communicate with each other or their teachers. The online video-enabled meetings that are a hallmark of the classes taught by Peter Dimock, a teaching specialist in the School of Social Work, are a notable exception.

Dimock was a classic early adopter of computers. He landed one of the University’s first Technology-Enhanced Learning grants, established to promote the latest online course software, shortly after he joined the faculty in 1998. “I wanted to offer an online course in psychopharmacology, since you don’t need face-to-face interaction to learn about cells and how drugs work in the body,” explains Dimock, who was in clinical social work practice for 25 years. It was the first online class for many of his 25 students.

Dimock’s course delivery has evolved since then. He uses the latest version of Breeze to bring national experts into his Co-occurring Disorders class, virtually and in real time. Students benefit from the real-world experiences of licensed social workers located as far away as the San Francisco Behavioral Health Center and the Harvard Medical School. “They also have many of their assumptions about practice challenged and are forced to think critically about the contrasting information they receive,” Dimock explains.

All students can and must participate in the live interactions. Dimock requires students to develop focused questions to ask the experts and grades them on their contributions. “They can use a mike attached to their computer, or a Webcam, or just type in questions,” Dimock says. “You can participate no matter what your technology.”

Enhanced communication

It’s a good bet that Michelle Everson spends more time on the computer than she does sleeping. By the fourteenth week of the 16-week Introductory Statistical Methods class she instructed this spring, the discussion board had posted 2,015 messages total—390 by Everson.

“I check [the discussion board] often—at least twice a day,” Everson says. “And I model how to respond. I cheer them on, let them know they’re on the right track, correct misinformation.”

In the online-only statistics courses she teaches as a lecturer in the Department of Educational Psychology, Everson has developed weekly modules for maximum student participation. Students check the modules once a week, do homework assignments, and join in discussions (in asynchronous discussion rooms). For instance, on Monday students might learn about the week’s eight-point assignment. They would have the whole week to complete it, but first would have to post initial thoughts about the assignment, say by midnight on Wednesday. They would then return to the module to respond to other students’ comments. Finally, groups of four to six students would choose a group leader to summarize the discussion for Everson by the following Monday.

Everson has learned to love the give-and-take of online discussion and the way she can see the whole conversation from start to finish: “There’s a lot of rich information we instructors get online.”

The right tools

Start talking about online classes to anyone in the College and Yelena Yan’s name is bound to come up. The online instructional designer in the College’s Academic Technology Services (ATS) office and Ph.D. candidate in educational psychology seems to have had a hand in every online course developed at the College. The title of her completed masters thesis, “Social and Learning Interaction Online,” was apropos.

Yan has designed one of Everson’s statistics courses and a school-safety LLM for Werner. She will be developing eight new online courses from the 45 faculty proposals approved by ATS this fall. The remaining projects involve interactive multimedia, video development, podcasting, and blogging.

Designing online instruction for one class takes about a year, Yan says. For each course, she first takes careful note of the instructor’s in-person style. “Just putting materials up is not a course,” she says. “We make sure that the teacher’s style is compatible with what they want to do online.”

Yan helps instructors understand the complexities of the online teaching environment and determine how much time and effort they are willing to commit to become comfortable with the necessary tools and skills. If instructors can’t identify the areas in which they need help and where to turn for that help, the students will feel the impact, she says.

She appreciates the wealth of electronic tools that are available to bring about the crucial interaction between instructor and teacher. But she cautions that no tool is a magic bullet. Blogs, online chat rooms, virtual worlds—they’re all just vehicles toward a larger goal.

“Just because you have a car, you are not necessarily a good driver,” Yan says. “All it means is that you have the hardware.” Where you go is up to you.

SCREENSHOT: Aaron Doering
ILLUSTRATION: Jupiter Images