Tuesday, July 17, 2001

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Kathy S. Gresh Online Instructor Cautions Against Having Too Many Activities By DAN CARNEVALE Kathy S. Gresh is an instructional designer at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at the Johns Hopkins University. When designing online courses, she tries to build in tools to help the professors interact with their students, such as electronic bulletin boards and live chats. But she also says it's important not to overwhelm the professors or the students with too many activities. Q. What are some techniques to make sure the professor doesn't feel overwhelmed? A. If the faculty has a good bulletin-board discussion going -- it doesn't have to be a lot -- the faculty can actually check in three times a week, half an hour a day maybe. That small amount of interaction really satisfies the students and keeps the conversation going. And the students, they really add a lot. They are working professionals, so they bring their own experiences into the topics. The other thing is the live talks. Even if they only do them three times over eight weeks, the students really gain from faculty interaction that way. ... Where the faculty can really tend to get overwhelmed is with e-mail. So there are a couple strategies that are in use. First of course, the most obvious one, is to have a T.A. as a first line of defense. We also have faculty who have instituted -- and it's worked for about four years now in this one course -- where the student has to go to the bulletin board and ask a question there, unless it's a personal question. But if it's a course-related question, they'll ask the question there. Another student is required to answer that question before a faculty or T.A. will interject an answer. So that way you get the students also talking to each other and helping solve their own problems, and it also cuts down on e-mail traffic that faculty has to answer. Q. What if students answer the questions wrong and the class gets off track? A. Well the faculty and T.A.'s monitor the conversation on a daily basis. But yes, that could happen. The other thing that they do is faculty and T.A.'s will take an e-mail that seems to apply to everybody and post that e-mail on the bulletin board or respond with an answer to all the students so you don't get the same question repeated over and over. And then they save the e-mails and use them as Frequently Asked Questions for the following year. If there's something that just wasn't working out in the course, then they take that aspect and work it into their course for the next term so you won't have that question popping up again. Q. Have you run into problems of a course having too much or too little interaction? A. Yes, both extremes. We've had reluctant faculty, for instance, who haven't really wanted to participate in the program. But because the course was a core-required course, it really needed to be in the program. So they would just want to have the lecture-content delivered, and maybe a midterm and a final, and no bulletin-board activity, no live talk -- just the T.A.'s answering e-mails and things like that. Q. What was the end result of that? A. Very unhappy students. We've developed a quite-detailed course evaluation. And at the end of every course we have a wrap-up session with faculty. And once they see that -- all the faculty really take a great deal of pride in their courses, and they really hadn't understood the whole online medium and their importance in working with the students. But without exception, all the faculty have added in the interaction when it was lacking previously. We have had cases where for one term it wasn't there. And students have actually complained to the program office about it, and that helps also, and we don't discourage them really. Q. What about the other extreme? A. We have some great faculty who are just really enthusiastic about this. And they want to have all kinds of interaction. And they have really quite heavy homework assignments and exercises and group activities. With all of our students, most of them are working full-time jobs, and they're working as practicing physicians, so their schedules are quite heavy. And it's really hard, especially since the students are in all different time zones, to have them get together for all these group activities, so sometimes they've had too many group activities or too many required live talks. Our live talks are archived so you can read them later, but they require the students to be there at night. And it's just been too much. Students haven't been able to keep up. They feel that they can't really get into the content because they're so busy trying to track down group members or participate in some of these activities. Usually in that case the faculty realizes it while the course is running, and they'll cut back then, or they'll definitely cut back the following term. Q. So it sounds like the students are the ones who have final say as to how interactive the courses are. A. They really are. We consistently go out to our students, not only with the course evaluation, but we encourage them to give us feedback on what's working and what's not working. And because they see that we really use the answers they give to us, because they're staying in the program, they'll see that we've changed something because they gave feedback. So it really helps a lot. Q. Is it pretty easy for a professor to change the amount of interaction in a course after the course is designed? A. Yes. They can adjust it pretty easily. You can always cancel a live talk and say instead, we'll use a bulletin board, or cut back on this bulletin-board exercise. It's fairly easy. Q. And they could add more, too? A. Yeah, they could do that, too. They would just send out e-mails to the students. Q. So how do these online courses compare to traditional courses in terms of interaction? A. For the courses that are survey courses, the interaction is much richer and better than it is on the on-site classes. If you consider you have a class maybe with 100 to 200 people in it, and the faculty are often running out of time just during the hour lecture, then they might be able to take one question. In these courses the students have the opportunity to ask a lot more questions, and there's a lot more discussion. Where in the on-site, they're not able to do that because there's not enough time or the class is so big they feel intimidated. So in a survey class, it's much richer. When you have one of the smaller-type classes like we have on site, which are really based on discussion in the classroom, then it's much harder to keep up that same degree to get students interested in really sharing on the bulletin board and things like that. I mean a faculty really has to work at it. Normally you can't just post a question up there. You have to really prime it and reinforce it to get the students participating. We find that especially with students, when we have the on-site students participating in the classes, because they already have a sense of community because they're on campus, they don't feel like they need to have this other sense. But really they learn a lot because most of the students on campus have a lot less experience in the field than the online students. So they will gain a lot as they'll participate because they learn from the experiences of these people who are much more experienced than that. But it's a lot harder to get them to participate. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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