When Simmons University decided to create an online version of its master’s program in social work, Dana Grossman Leeman was “voluntold,” as she puts it, to create the first course for the new venture. She was “absolutely dead set against it.”
“I’m a very kinaesthetic learner and teacher, and I’m a devotee of experiential methods,” she says, and she didn’t see how any of that could be replicated online. “And what I loved most about teaching was the relationships that I would develop with students — bringing snacks to class, all of that. I was like, I’m not giving that up. No way.”
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But the dean insisted. Leeman, then an associate professor, came back with a counteroffer: She would develop the course if she could seek help from an outside mentor — Stephen D. Brookfield, an adult-learning expert and professor of education at the University of St. Thomas. What resulted, she says, was “an incredibly intellectually exciting process” in which she worked with both Brookfield and a team of instructional designers from 2U, the university’s commercial partner for several of its online programs.
Now Leeman’s a convert — and more than that, a missionary for better online teaching. In February, as the provost’s newly named faculty fellow for online education, she began offering daily online faculty-development workshops for all of Simmons’s online programs, including those in nursing, business, library science, and nutrition. Already more than 400 of roughly 1,000 people who teach online for Simmons have taken part, including adjuncts who are as remote from the university’s Boston campus as their students as well as faculty members who teach online from the campus.
“We had hit a few bumps in a few of our programs,” says Katie Conboy, the provost. Appointing Leeman to the new post made sense both because there’s demand for the content she’s offering and because she’s so adept in the online environment, Conboy says.
The workshops grew out of Leeman’s experience building the online social-work program, which she directed for four years as it swelled to 1,600 students and 150 instructors, most of them adjuncts. “I could see that there were a lot of faculty who were struggling,” she says. Some were social-work practitioners with little teaching experience; others tried to use the same approaches that had worked in face-to-face classrooms and found they fell flat online. “You have to think differently,” Leeman says.
Instructors participate because they care about their teaching and because they know that teaching well increases their chances of being rehired, she says. “I have nothing to give them but my time and my energy,” she adds, noting that unlike Simmons’s on-campus Center for Excellence in Teaching, her program has no money for stipends, though she’s looking for grants to change that.
She aims to make the workshops useful both to instructors whose courses are entirely asynchronous and to those whose courses include weekly live sessions in 2U’s Adobe virtual classrooms. The Adobe classroom, she says, looks like the opening sequence of The Brady Bunch, but with up to 15 students’ faces on the faculty member’s screen.
Among her top lessons:
Be thoughtful about what you’re doing. Online instructors can’t rely on instincts honed in traditional classrooms, “where there’s a kind of chemistry,” she says. Online, “you have got to be a much more curious teacher. You do that by asking people, How will I make sense of your facial expressions? I think you just shifted in your chair, is that true? What does that mean?”
Use the technology available to you. “There are so many ways that technology can support pedagogy and make it fun and engaging,” she says. “Faculty think, I’ll put up a PowerPoint. But that’s not going to work. How do I use the whiteboard in an Adobe classroom to create conversation? What are different kinds of prompts I can put in a poll or in a chat pod to get different conversations going?”
Break the “fourth wall.” “We don’t have the luxury of bumping into our students on the coffee line. Set up a 15-minute welcome call with students to talk to them about their learning style, what about the content may scare them or excite them, and how you can partner with them so that they thrive. Online faculty need to become a much more embodied human presence to our students. They will give that back to us, but we have to put it out first.”
Create a community. “Learning online can feel isolating. You have to engage your students in the process of community building. Faculty don’t always know how to do that, but it’s important that every class become a cohesive group and feel tethered to the program.”
Leeman repeats workshops at different times on different days of the week to accommodate the schedules of adjunct instructors who may be juggling part-time jobs. She makes videos for faculty members who can’t join a live session. She also brings together groups of faculty members who can talk to one another online about teaching strategies. Other than Leeman’s salary, the only cost to Simmons is the licensing fee for her to use the instructional software the university relies on. She works mostly from home.
“She has very practical ideas — different exercises that had worked in her classes, different ways of conveying information that were less didactic and foster discussion and really just make people more comfortable,” says Todd Herrmann, a lecturer in the online M.B.A. program who came to Simmons after a career in consulting. Giving students video feedback on papers, he says, was a suggestion of hers that went over especially well. He’s about to try another of her ideas, involving funny hats and noisemakers.
“One of the things that does fall flat online is when, at the end of someone’s final presentation, you clap. It’s kind of hollow — 15 people clapping in 15 little boxes. For me and the other students to reach down for a different funny hat and a noisemaker after each one will make it more of a celebration.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
