Real Problems in the Virtual World

Introduction

You don’t have to go very far to find critics of on-line education. In fact, you probably need only visit any college campus. There you will find some who are dead-set against the whole notion of teaching over the Internet, while others are merely skeptical, wanting to hear more evidence and perhaps to see for themselves.

I have my doubts, too. Not about the viability of teaching on-line, for I am myself an on-line teacher and I love it.

My reservations

Certain negative aspects of the Web get talked about a lot. I don’t have time even to raise those issues, much less refute them. Suffice it to say that most of the usual critiques are either misguided or are plain wrong.

Today I instead want to talk about the kinds of problems that don’t get discussed much. I have taught on-line and have encountered these problems myself. Most I have been able to verify have been encountered by other on-line teachers as well. Taken together, they show that the world of virtual teaching has its own special challenges, just as the world of live teaching does. I will also show that there are limitations to on-line teaching that should be taken into consideration by anyone thinking about going virtual themselves.

On-line does work. I’ve been doing it myself since 1995, and I’ve talked with enough other people, from other fields, to know that it works for them, too. The format is not, however, without problems. Some problems are inherent in the medium and can be worked with but not around. Other problems are solvable. And there is a group of problems that are illusory. Finally, there are potential problems that are of concern to me.

A Community of Learners

Increasingly, educational literature talks about a classroom—whether live or virtual—as a "community of learners." This phrase describes well what I have witnessed in my on-line classes. The more I teach in this environment, the more I come to place at the core of my pedagogy the creation and nurturing of the classroom as a place where individuals gather to study and discuss a common body of material.

The great challenge of any on-line course is creating a sense of community among the students, and between the students and the teacher—the sense of being engaged in a common dialog about common concerns. Without the creation of a community—a class—then all we are left with is independent study—a digital update to correspondence school. There’s nothing wrong with independent study, but its uses are limited and well known and not the focus of this paper.

The problems discussed below derive from two assumptions. First, that by "on-line education" we mean the form that is fully virtual, Net-based, and asynchronous. And second, that the preservation of schoarly standards is not just desirable but necessary. In other words, that the on-line version must be the academic equal to live teaching.

If we devalue teaching and learning, then many of the problems I’m going to discuss simply go away. If we define "on-line" to mean independent study, many of the problems go away.

I believe these assumptions are warranted because Net-based, asynchronous teaching is the normal mode for fully virtual courses, and because the preservation of scholarship is a concern voiced repeatedly by most people in higher education. Many of the sillier things said by the general media and others stem from the fact that these two assumptions are either ignored or are explicitly rejected.

Creating the Classroom Community

First impressions matter. The first few pages of the Web site, the first e-mail contacts, need to be friendly and informative and inviting, even as they begin to set the tone for the course itself. I find myself putting more and more thought to those initial contacts.

I should have been doing that in my live classes, too, but I never thought much about it. I used to teach a Western Civ class MWF at 8:30am. It was my wife who pointed out to me that since this was a survey course on a Monday morning, mine might be the first college classroom some of those students ever entered. I might be the first college professor they ever saw. I try to remember that perspective when running my on-line classes. First impressions matter.

In a traditional class, students fool themselves all the time. They walk into a room at the same time every Tuesday and Thursday, and they tell themselves they are in class. They are in the room, after all. Years of public schooling has convinced them that the primary, outward sign of "going to school" is the physical act of walking into a room and sitting down. The teacher talks, they listen, and that’s school.

The illusion is more difficult to maintain on-line, but I do get students who will log in to the discussion board regularly but who participate minimally or not at all. This behavior is even stronger in classes where participation is optional. While it’s easy to say the non-participating student is lazy or has chosen to do other things with his time, the dynamic is more subtle and leaves room for action by the teacher.

Just as the teacher’s behavior in a live classroom can encourage or discourage discussion, so too it can on-line. There is actually quite a range of impediments to getting everyone registered to be in the community of learners.

If participation is required, it’s not enough merely to state so in the syllabus. It’s not even enough to say that participation is 20% or 25% of the final grade. By the time some students figure out I’m serious about this, they’ve pretty well flunked the course. More importantly, I’ve lost one or more members of the class, and the class community is the poorer for that. So it’s in everyone’s interest to get as many people participating at as high a level as possible.

For this reason, I send out progress reports. This lets the students know I’m serious and translates non-participation into a very concrete and understandable F. Done early enough, this flushes out the truly lazy, and they drop the course.

The other side of the progress report is it gives the student a chance to tell me of any personal problems they are having (disabilities, illness, technical woes, etc.), upon which I can offer to help or at least express sympathy. We have a chance to try to work out alternative courses of action. And it gives me the chance to let the student know that I care about them and want to make sure they learn the material. Finally, the progress report lets me speak to those who are participating at the required level but who have room for improvement. I critique their participation much the same as I would critique a paper, pointing out standard mistakes in reasoning, asking for better use of evidence, and so on. This not only helps the student improve, it makes them feel more confident in their participation and therefore feel more truly "in" the class.

The first few weeks of a class are vital to forming a community. This is when the progress reports are frequent and my level of participation is generally higher.

Classroom Problems

A single topic takes at least a week to develop, and they can stretch to two weeks or even longer. Multiple conversations can go on at once, but typically no more than three or four actually do, for the simple reason that each of them take time.

So, we are talking about 25 to 35 topics covered in a semester. I always find myself wishing for more time. This problem is even worse if you are on a quarter system

It takes a week or so to get started at the front end

Spring Break takes out more than just a week, for it’s a few days before everyone is back up to speed and all conversations are in full gear. Thanksgiving break is less of a break, but when students return, they are usually focused on their term paper and the conversation lags considerably.

People wind down early – I’ve found that the conversations falter in the final week.

These are all natural enough, but they eat away further at the ground one can cover.

People at remote sites, who regularly experience delays, will find themselves perpetually a bit behind the discussion. If discussion does not form a significant part of your on-line class, then these issues won't bother you. I've seen a number of classes where the students were not required to talk at all, where the discussion group was offered as an auxiliary

On-line courses are often touted as a place where the shy student can shine. Unfettered by impressions based on gender or race, free from the pressure of being center stage in a classroom, the shy student can speak up, can speak at length, with never a fear of being interrupted or put off by facial expressions.

All this is true, but other difficulties appear on-line. Students report being a little intimidated by putting their thoughts in writing. What’s said in a classroom might be foolish or trivial, but at least once said it is gone and everyone leaves at the end of the hour. On-line, however, your comments hang in cyberspace for the entire semester. There’s a permanency about writing that doesn’t exist in verbal conversation. The positive aspect of this is that students often work harder and are more thoughtful in what they say. The negative aspect is that some students, especially those for whom written communication is difficult, drop out or else struggle.

On-line discussion tends more towards debate, with students analyzing each other’s words. This level of critical discussion is refreshing for me, but some students are put off by it. I think in particular of one older man who had run his own business for 25 years. He was accustomed to being the boss and he was not at all accustomed to having what he said questioned in detail and in public. He recognized this in himself and stayed with the class, and did fine, but I suspect the format was not as congenial as the marketing brochures had led him to believe.

I tend to regard these as minor, but when you are in the middle of a course and suddenly mail stops working, or the web site goes down and stays down for days, or the student experiences ISP problems, the difficulties are not only real, they can be defeating. One of the most common difficulty I experience is the rather simple one of file formats. Every time the software industry goes through another spasm of upgrades, I have students who send me assignments that I cannot read (for they invariably upgrade sooner than I do). The fixes are easy enough: I state in the Study Guide what formats I will accept and, when I inevitably get formats I can’t read, I can refer to the student to the Guide.

More difficult is when the computing center or college or whomever is hosting your course, decides to upgrade software. Or refuses to upgrade. There you are with the new version of FrontPage, but the computing center says they don’t support it. Or they upgrade over the summer and now certain aspects of the course mysteriously stop working.

When the problems are at the student end, the situation is both easier and more complex. Having experience and technical background, I try where I can to help, but I made a decision at the beginning that I could not be both teacher and tech support. More often than not, I have to say that I cannot help and that the student must decide what to do.

One unfortunate consequence of technical difficulties is that the student often assumes that the problem is at her end, that she is doing something wrong. This in turn causes her to feel even more isolated than would a student in a traditional class. If that condition persists, the student loses contact with the community. Even if she eventually gets back on-line, she has missed out on one or more weeks of community building and feels like something of an outsider. Technical problems are minor when they are transient; the longer they persist, the more they impact teaching and learning.

All things can be fixed, of course. Eventually things will settle down. But as the instructor of record, you have to be ready to decide how you will handle the difficulties in terms of grading. How many days can that student have computer problems before it affects his grade? Will you allow him to drop the course without penalty? Will you allow an incomplete? If the whole course melts down, will your university give refunds?

If all that sounds scary, I have to say that I have yet to face any such catastrophes personally. I know of a school out west that advertized on-line classes and had its systems overwhelmed by too many users. The school was forced to shut down all classes and give refunds, enduring much bad publicity. But for myself, the worst I’ve experienced is students dropping the course because of technical problems, usually with their ISP.

How do you handle technical problems? Just like you do technical problems in the real world—on a case-by-case basis.

Student Problems

Students work harder and perform better and learn more, but not all of them do

Some have unreasonable expectations

Don’t have time for a live class

Can work virtual class in between other obligations

The advertising makes it sound easy and convenient

When they find out it’s lots of work, they drop

A variety of problems can make the creation of the classroom community more difficult; so difficult, indeed, that some students will drop out or will remain on the periphery for the whole semester. These difficulties can be administrative, technical or personal.

A variety of problems can make the creation of the classroom community more difficult; so difficult, indeed, that some students will drop out or will remain on the periphery for the whole semester. These difficulties can be administrative, technical or personal.

Timing is crucial in the creation of a classroom. You have fifteen weeks—only ten, if you are on the quarter system—so every week lost is significant. Moreover, the community begins to form from the first day of operation. Introductions are made, people go through the ritual of their first questions and responses, someone makes a joke, the tone for the class begins to take shape.

Someone who comes into such a class two weeks late finds that she is already on the outside seeking to get in. Most schools allow a week or longer for add/drop, so maybe she got in just under the deadline. And then her computer crashed, or she had ISP problems, or e-mail problems, and so another week slipped away.

Now, many students simply pick up the pace, become assertive, and speak up. They make their presence known and so become fully participating members. But another kind of student, the virtually shy student, will instinctively not speak up, for fear of appearing foolish or unprepared.

When this is a matter of one or two students, then it’s the teacher’s job to welcome them explicitly, to get them into the classroom environment. But if the problems are on the university side, then the dynamic of the entire class is at risk. It is as if, in a live course, you never knew from one day to the next whether you could get into the room or indeed if the building would even be there. Let this happen enough times and you lose the class.

Other barriers are worth considering, too. Size is an important one. I set my maximum class size at 30, knowing that five to ten will drop, leaving me with the ideal class size of twenty to twenty-five. At first glance it might appear that a class of a hundred would be quite feasible, as that is rather a small size for a community. We can even assume that the teacher is willing to read the many messages that would be generated. But the students cannot. A hundred students posting three times a week yields three hundred messages—far too great a reading load for most students. They would melt.

Cutting back on the number of messages required is possible, but if a student needs to post only one message a week, then that individual is not participating much in the community. Moreover, that leaves you as teacher with ten to fifteen messages on which to base your grade evaluation, and that’s simply not enough material with which to make a judgment.

There are ways to approach the question of large class size. Use of TA’s is an obvious answer, but I’ve also seen professors who break the large class into work groups and grade only the group reports. Individual students participate at a high rate within the group, but they do not have to read the hundreds of messages from the other work groups. It appears to be a workable arrangement and might be very appropriate in certain disciplines such as the hard sciences.

Timing is crucial in the creation of a classroom.

The community begins to form from the first day of operation. Introductions are made, people go through the ritual of their first questions and responses, someone makes a joke, the tone for the class begins to take shape.

Someone who comes into such a class two weeks late finds that she is already on the outside seeking to get in.

Now, many students simply pick up the pace, become assertive, and speak up. They make their presence known and so become fully participating members. But another kind of student, the virtually shy student, will instinctively not speak up, for fear of appearing foolish or unprepared.

Class size is an important variable in creating the class. Too large, and the community breaks down. Too small, and it never really forms.

Minimum class size for me appears to be ten to twelve. Smaller than that and the class is at jeopardy. Messages get posted so rarely, and are spread across so many topics, that students feel uncomfortable, like being at a party where there are too few people. In this case, students tend to focus on the teacher and the class devolves into more of individual tutorials.

I cap my classes at thirty. Thirty is actually too big, but I count on having at least five students drop the course. Optimum size for me is twenty to twenty-five.

Larger classes can be created, of course. One teacher divides the class into teams. Conversation is heavy within the team, but conversation back to the general class is in the form of reports on the progress and findings of the team. The teacher grades only the reports.

A large class can be broken into sections, with TA’s running the discussion and the instructor grading essays and papers, and fielding the difficult questions. Or the instructor might "visit" each section by turns.

Teacher Problems

How do I prevent cheating? It’s a question that gets asked perhaps more frequently than any other. The perception is that teaching over the Internet is "impersonal"—whatever that may mean—and that the perceived distance between teacher and student leaves the door wide open to cheating.

But it’s easy in a writing-intensive course to detect plagiarism and cheating. By the time of the first exams, I have read enough student messages to have a good idea of each student’s literary voice. False notes are easy to detect.

It’s more difficult where "objective" exams are used. In fact, it’s impossible on a multiple choice exam to know whether the student at the other end is looking up the answers or getting help from a friend. A number of strategies are employed to make cheating more difficult (e.g., timed exams), but the plain fact is that there are no guarantees.

It’s also a fact that there are no guarantees in a live class, either. About the only way to be sure is to conduct verbal exams personally. So, all testing allows for at least some possibility of academic dishonesty. The only real question is, what level of risk is acceptable to you?

Here the problem is not that Net-based teaching is a Bad Thing, but rather that we can’t get there fast enough. Teachers either want to go on-line, or they are being told to go on-line, and they want some help getting there. And they complain that they aren’t getting it.

In most cases, not only are teachers not getting adequate training, they never will get it. Universities aren’t equipped to provide that level of training. The best most manage to do is to target some subset of the faculty, get a grant, and provide some support that way. But it will never be enough. By the time the training is through, the Internet has introduced new tools, and the tools closely affect the pedagogy. No school can re-train its faculty every year.

Moreover, our conditions of employment don’t really allow for that. Most of our time is devoted to teaching, research, and public service. That’s how we’re evaluated. The implied understanding is that we spend our "spare" time improving our mastery of our subject. There is nothing in that scenario that allows for improving our typing skills or our handwriting or learning how to run a film projector. So long as those were the only skills at stake, learning them on the side was relatively trivial.

But the Internet is not trivial. A tool like Photoshop takes hundreds of hours to master, and there must be a score of such tools that belong in our skill set. And in areas like information architecture, nobody even knows yet what the right skills are!

Teachers will never receive adequate training. The best thing to do is to accept the fact and get on with it. I tell my faculty: learn to learn. Learn how to learn new software quickly. Acquire some standard sources of information regarding on-line teaching and Web design, and keep up to date. Choose your areas of specialization (graphics, sound, Java, whatever) and outsource the rest. Don’t rely on students for that; use your media center or private contractors or a friend—someone who will be there semester after semester and who will produce consistent work. I realize that’s asking a lot. But at least it’s realistic.

Grading written discussion, where each student accumulates something around 50 messages over a semester, is time-consuming. I have developed a whole set of techniques to ease this burden, but it is in nevertheless roughly equivalent to grading a major term paper.

Grading papers is a challenge because interlineation is difficult electronically.

Some problems get created because of the hype surrounding on-line education. For example, we frequently hear that teaching on-line requires you to be a different sort of teacher than you are now. Gone are the days of the "sage on the stage", we are told. The lecture as the principal mode of teaching is doomed. On-line teaching is student-centered, and that’s different from traditional teaching.

We think: what I’m doing now works. It feels right and my students like me. Why change? Who the hell are these so-called experts, anyway?

And so we resist.

Web-site design is like writing lectures, but it’s different. It’s like writing a textbook, but it’s different. It is like teaching, but it’s different. It’s like publishing, but . . . well, you get the idea.

Designing a web site for teaching purpose is sui generis, and we have mainly our instincts and experience to guide us. Web site design is at least as much art as science and every site very much reflects the personality of its designer. This is good. Anything else would, in my opinion, be a kind of false advertising. My sites, for example, are generally clear and orderly, but seem to be perpetually unfinished around the edges and messy in the corners. That’s a pretty accurate reflection of me, and it is from me that students will be taking the course.

The objective of every course web site is clarity. We want the students to be able to find their way around, to know what is important, what they should be doing first, second and third, and so on. Creating meaning and structure from Web pages is a form of information architecture and it is one of the more challenging aspects of teaching on-line.

Information in Web space tends to be flat; that is, every page presents itself as equally important, unless you as the author do something about that. The techniques are pretty much the same as they are in print—use of headings, fonts, inset boxes, and so on—but the difference is that traditionally we have not had to worry about these things because we have presented most of our information to students verbally or through chalkboard, slides, transparencies, Powerpoint, etc. As the information on a Web site accumulates, this problem passes from the information being uniform to boring to downright confusing.

One of the Web’s strengths presents a closely-related problem. The hyperlinks that can so easily be made and placed in a document have the potential of making our information even more confusing to the student. I keep links to a minimum and I restrict them to clearly-defined sections of my web (e.g., a Further Readings page at the end of each lecture). Even so, I have no control over the structure of those external links. As soon as my students leave my site, the pedagogy changes. Do this too many times and again the students wind up being confused rather than educated.

One way to create meaning is to structure the syllabus so that the sequence of the course is clear. We are accustomed to having our syllabus communicate what is important about the course, but the sequence of the course is pretty clear: show up at the scheduled class times. On-line, of course, there are no scheduled class times, only the due dates for papers and exams. But I create a calendar of events anyway. I invent milestones, simply to create a sense of progress through the material, like making chapters in a book.

Another traditional tool put to new uses is the Study Guide. Some teachers will make such things for their live classes—how to study, how to write a paper, how to research—but I have to confess I never thought much about it in my live classes. When I went on-line, however, my Study Guide started out mainly as a resource for computer issues but has grown to be several pages long covering all sorts of subjects.

I have also developed some practices that help create structure. For example, I e-mail each student a welcome message on the weekend before classes start. I have a conference for each chronological section of the course; I close each conference as we finish that section, and the new conference doesn’t appear until the weekend before that unit is due to start. That helps create a sense of movement through the material. I leave the discussion board open even after the semester ends so people can finish up conversations, but the real termination point is when I e-mail each student their grade. I have learned to do each of these activities the hard way: by failing to do them and thereby creating a least a little sense of confusion and uncertainty.

Doctor History

The more content you put on-line, the higher is raised your Net profile; that is to say, the more likely it is that your pages will turn up in a Net search. This means that you will get an increasing number of unsolicited e-mails from people wanting information from you.

In my field, this takes the obvious form of students at other institutions trying to get me to help them with an exam question or a term paper. My favorite is one I encountered early on: the student wondered if I could give him three reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire. By Friday.

Then there will be the specialty questions. In my field, the most common is genealogy. "I have traced my ancestors back to the English Civil War. Do you have any information on Sir Neville Higgenbottom who served with the Leicestershire Light Cavalry and fought at Floddam Field?" Or, in a different vein, I get curious messages from students in middle school or high school who say they have been given an assignment in which they are to "interview" an expert. There follows a list of canned questions that were obviously given to them by their teacher.

And so on. The whole phenomenon presents an interesting dilemma. On the one hand, we have a tradition of something called "public service" in which we are expected to share our expertise with the surrounding community. This traditional expectation was fine—the number of people in Boise, Idaho with a burning interest in medieval history is comfortably small. But the Internet is big and growing bigger. Moreover, a public school teacher would never think to send her class of 35 over to my house to ask, each individually, a set of questions. But somehow, doing the same thing via e-mail is thought to be both educational and polite.

We can, of course, decline or even ignore such requests. But there is a small matter of image at stake here. When I started out, I had my e-mail address at the bottom of every page. In my most recent course, I have a link at the bottom of every page called "comments and questions." The link takes you to an inquiry page where I explain a few things: I get lots of mail, I may or may not answer, I don’t do genealogy at all so don’t ask, and if you have content questions, here’s a list of books to read. If, after having read those books, you still have questions, then here’s my e-mail address. I still get the questions anyway, but I don’t feel so bad when I ignore them.

This all sounds amusing and maybe even trivial, but it touches on what I believe will prove an important issue: the ancient tension between town and gown.

How much is too much for the students?

How much is reasonable for the teacher?

Where do TA’s fit into this?

General Problems

All universities restrict access—that’s what admissions requirements are. That’s why we have service areas and charge out of state tuition. Universities are almost by definition elitist, not for everyone. So fretting about access is a bit disingenuous.

In any case, access to computers and the Net increases daily. Soon, everyone in America (at least) will be able to get to a computer that is hooked to the Internet. But that doesn’t really mean much unless they can use what they find there.

The real barrier to access will be literacy. Here I mean more than just the ability to read and to write. I mean basic computer literacy as well, and that means the ability to think in the abstract. I know exactly who is computer illiterate. It’s that person, regardless of age, in my training workshops who is unable to see past the keyboard. This person never learns the principles of cut-and-paste, but only learns a sequence of menu options and keystrokes. The first time the software changes, the individual is lost.

That’s the extreme case, but I’ve seen it often enough. Some of these people are college education and reasonably intelligent. They might even be able to use a computer in their daily job. But they will never be computer literate because they cannot see past the keyboard. And such a person is extremely unlikely to succeed in a virtual college course, for virtuality is all about abstract thinking.

Beyond computer literacy is information literacy. Success on-line means the ability to use the Internet effectively as a resource for information. That means the ability to use search engines effectively, of course, but it also means the ability to scan large amounts of information quickly, to scan Web pages and determine what on them is important, and to be discriminating about the information found.

There are whole sections of our society (and not just in our society) for whom a computer offers very little meaningful or relevant. They do not work with information and they do not work in the abstract. Merely providing computers with Net connections will accomplish next to nothing given these larger issues. Access is not the point. Literacy is.

How many courses & programs does it take to make a university? Fifty? A hundred? Five hundred? Let’s say a thousand and work with round numbers. If our university has a thousand courses offered every semester, what will happen if 90% of those are offered on-line?

The most obvious effect will be scores of buildings standing empty. This state of affairs, however unlikely, is not likely to bring smiles to the taxpayers.

Let’s say 50% of the university goes virtual. That’s still half the campus standing empty. And it still means a genuine hardship for the students. The university will have to spend an enormous amount of money to bring new trunk lines to campus, to upgrade the network and the servers, and to increase help desk staff. Lots more money spent. And empty rooms, to boot.

Oh, very well, let us say that only 20% of the curriculum is virtual. At least that gets the students back on campus, relieves the load on the technical infrastructure, and the taxpayers won’t see empty buildings. And maybe it even helps the parking problem.

But which 20%? It helps to work with specifics here. Let us take some discipline that can move readily to the Internet, something text-based, like history. Two scenarios are possible.

In one, the entire history program goes virtual. We take two or three or five such programs and make them fully virtual (or 95% or whatever) and the rest of the curriculum stays live (or 5% virtual). In other words, we target by discipline.

This means that our history survey classes are all virtual, and that means lots and lots of students on campus are going to have to take at least one virtual course. And that means that the history teachers are going to have to contend with handfuls of "problem" students who are utterly computer illiterate but who "need this class."

It also means that we have to train the history faculty to go on-line. It means that they get evaluated differently than do faculty in other departments, and maybe even compensated differently. The dean of this college needs to be able to understand the medium and deal with problems as they arise.

This doesn’t seem to be a very desirable scenario. It appears to create as many problems as it solves, if indeed it solves any problems.

Very well, then, the 20% that goes

Will we teach in both formats and hire more teachers?

Will we abandon the physical version?

My course is on the Net, which means several tens of millions of potential readers. Even in the relatively recondite and inoffensive fields of ancient and medieval history I have had my share of angry notes. A Muslim is furious over my evident ignorance of the Quran. A Macedonian claims that I have no right to call Alexander the Great a Greek. Another fellow tells me on general grounds that I do not deserve to be called Doctor.

Very well and amusing enough. But a case I read on-line talked about a course on clinical depression. The class discussion was open (it ran off a newsgroup) and was read by a fourteen-year-old boy. Fortunately, the boy’s mother noticed his activity and intervened, but the point is that what is appropriate discussion inside a classroom is not necessarily appropriate in a public street. Or in someone’s living room.

There’s a reason for the protection of academic freedom, a reason for the division between town and gown. Not only are academics protected from society; society is protecting itself from the free discourse of academia. In fact, one can argue that academic freedom depends on place, or at least it depends on barriers. My web pages are open to the public, but as webmaster I work with a number of faculty from our nursing program. They cannot make their pages public because those pages could be interpreted as dispensing medical advice—not only unwise but actually against the law.

The chief benefit of teaching in public is that I also have several million potential critics. I have had many messages from individuals correcting this or that error of fact in my pages. I made more mistakes than I should and every one of them was an honest mistake: I plain had the facts wrong. Whenever I receive such a correction, I think of all the students in my live courses to whom I taught such misinformation, with no one to correct me. In that sense, my on-line lectures are better than my live ones.

The promise is consistently that education on the Net can happen any time, any place. That’s an interesting claim with some interesting philosophy behind it. In the first place, it is a clear statement of consumerism in education—that the university’s job is to deliver education at the whim of the student.

This attitude is flawed in several respects and leads to unfortunate consequences. One of the most immediately evident is that many students sign up for my on-line classes because they have concluded that they "don’t have time" for a traditional on-campus course. Some drop out, when they find out that the virtual class takes as much time or more as a live class. But I know from evaluation forms and from direct e-mail that students have a distinct impression that "any time, any place" somehow translates to "less time at my place."

OK, fair’s fair: the propaganda doesn’t explicitly say Net-based classes are easier or take less time. Surely words like "convenient" carry some sort of implication along those lines, but students really ought to be more sensible and responsible.

The slogan is misleading in other respects, too. For example, if your exams require proctoring or maybe your course requires some physical, synchronous component (such as a musical performance, or a swimming class), then clearly such activites cannot be held "any place." In fact, if your class has any sort of synchronous requirement, then "place" will be restricted to certain time zones—unless, of course, the instructor plans to stay up 24 hours a day!

Most serious and significant, however, is the very notion of convenience. Certain activities are intrinsically not about convenience but are about sacrifice. Many philosophers would say that indeed all the most valuable activities involve sacrifice; indeed, our own folklore is filled with wisdom to that effect. Important activities do not so much involve fitting them in to odd moments and corners of one’s life, but rather involve placing those activities at a premium and dedicating significant amounts of time and energy towards them. Education that is as convenient as shopping will be about as significant as shopping.

The "any time, any place" mentality is akin to the mentality of the diploma mill. While plenty of students happily subscribe to this mentality, a significant portion do not; and another significant portion comes to realize some time after graduation that they could have spent their time in school to better advantage. I see some of these students in my virtual classes. They cannot come back full time, but they know perfectly well the difference between school and "education delivery" and they are eager to learn a little history.

Now, it’s is true that I have had students from all over, including out of the country. They can log into the discussion board at any time and can read the Web pages at any time. But much of the design of my Web site and the pedagogy of the course is dedicated to creating a sense of time and place: the Web site is a place to visit; the discussion board is a place to hang out and to work. I construct exercises and sections to create a sense of movement through the material, of making progress together, of a beginning and an end.

In other words, a good course is not about just any old time and any old place, but about a particular place and time. It’s an experience you cannot get anywhere else because it’s my course. The Web site is open to anyone on the Internet, but only registered students can turn in assignments and have me grade them, and only they can enter into the class discussion. My operating principle is: information is free, but education costs money.

My school knows that I teach students from outside Idaho. These are few in number, but what if they became greater? What if half the students were out of state? Ninety percent? What if this happened in dozens of courses? At what point will the taxpayers object?

Marketing is different; and admissions

Financial aid

Who handles admissions? Who qualifies?

Who handles registration? Our ContEd registers separately from the rest of the university. When does registration happen? A virtual site is up all year round. Shouldn’t students be able to register at any time?

The promise is consistently that education on the Net can happen any time, any place. That’s an interesting claim with some interesting philosophy behind it. In the first place, it is a clear statement of consumerism in education—that the university’s job is to deliver education at the whim of the student.

Education is not about convenience. It’s about effort and sacrifice.

Education that is as convenient as shopping will be about as significant as shopping.

Mixing Real with Virtual: A Special Case of Problems

Virtual Universities

My school knows that I teach students from outside Idaho. These are few in number, but what if they became greater? What if half the students were out of state? Ninety percent? What if this happened in dozens of courses? At what point will the taxpayers object?

The line between the university and the community is likely to get blurred further with the introduction of advertising on university pages. We see this already with the use of amazon.com on syllabi to ease the ordering of books.

It is a great convenience and I intend to use it myself. But it does tend to obscure the line between the university and the rest of the world. Some places will surely handle this badly; I can only hope and trust in the good sense of the average citizen to be able to tell the difference.

But the practice does point out another fallacy in the "any where any time" fantasy. I once had a potential student from Brazil who was defeated by the difficulties of paying the fees. Without an American-recognized credit card, conducting business with us proved too difficult. She was understandably critical, saying that if we are going to open the door internationally, we have to be prepared to deal with these sorts of problems. Even if the university thinks it’s prepared, if we start out-sourcing things like book vending, will those sources be likewise prepared?

A common charge levelled against virtual courses is that they are necessarily and inherently inferior to live teaching. Electrons and phosphors will never replace the excitement of face to face. CITE

Well, of course they won’t. Electrons aren’t the point, any more than chairs are. Net-based classes are not inherently impersonal, and lecture halls with 300 seats are not inherently personal. Just as live teaching ranges from seminars to labs to lecture halls, so Net-based courses can take more than one form. In virtual space as in flesh space, what matters is the teacher, the student, the subject, and the dynamics between the three.

But, after all, wouldn’t a live class of twenty be preferrable, for both student and teacher, to a virtual class of twenty? I certainly would have thought so. After three years of teaching on-line, I deliberately took on a live course, just so I could get back into the classroom.

I was disappointed. I’m a good teacher. I love to lecture and have many years of good reviews that say I do it well enough. But teaching on-line, where I had to rely heavily on discussion, had taught me to value that form, and in two different classes—a Western Civ survey and an upper-division course on the Crusades—I found that students in the virtual class routinely read more outside the requirements, created more thoughtful discussions, and were far more engaged and involved in the course than were the students in the live class. I might write this off as a unique experience except that I have heard much the same story from other teachers.

References

Gold, Larry and Maitland, Christine. "What’s the Difference? A Review of Contemporary Research on the Effectiveness of Distance Learning in Higher Education." The Institute for Higher Education Policy, April 1999. Available on-line at http://

Baer, Walter S. "Will the Internet Transform Higher Education?" Annual Review of the Institute for Information Studies, pp. 81-108.

Owston, Ronald D. "The World Wide Web: A Technology to Enhance Teaching and Learning?" Educational Researcher 26, March 1997, pp. 27-33.

Mason, R. and Kaye, A. Mindweave: Communication, Computers and Distance Education. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994.