Same Time, Many Locations: Online Education Goes Back to Its Origins

Marcia Miller/UT Austin

One of the hottest tickets at the University of Texas at Austin these days is a seat in a face-to-face classroom for an introductory psychology course.

Most of the 1,500 undergraduates who take the course each semester watch the lectures online, but 24 are chosen to attend in person in the studio classroom on the two days a week that it meets.

The course’s professors, James W. Pennebaker and Samuel D. Gosling, work to make it entertaining. Mr. Pennebaker says they present “like it’s a TV show” — think The Daily Show, fake remote newscasts and all.

The professors keep students involved with humor and high production values along with daily in-class quizzes, small-group exercises that connect students with one another online, and, often, writing assignments based on something that came up during the class. “We’re trying to really push engagement,” says Mr. Pennebaker.

Of course, that engagement can be a challenge when most students are watching via laptop or smartphone from dormitory rooms, the swimming-pool deck, and other locations.

Texas has been experimenting with this kind of large-scale, real-time distance education for introductory courses since 2012. Now the university is making a major commitment to synchronous online courses — those in which students must watch remotely at a set time — with plans to eventually use them for all major introductory courses. By this fall, nearly one out of five undergraduates on the campus are expected to be taking at least one synchronous online course.

To longtime observers of higher education, the university’s moves might seem like a flashback to the pre-broadband era of the mid-1990s, when colleges relied on synchronous offerings in their first online courses because the technology didn’t allow for much else. Since then most of the excitement, support, and growth in distance education has come as a result of advances in courses that students can watch at their own pace: asynchronous online education.

The flexibility of the asynchronous approach has attracted millions of working adults. It has also opened up opportunities for professors, instructional designers, and education companies to incorporate more-creative technology-based teaching materials into their courses and, more recently, into their MOOCs. For many institutions, the asynchronous factor was also what helped make the online educational offerings profitable.

But today, decades after colleges began embracing courses that students could take at whatever schedule best fit them, the pendulum seems to have begun swinging back toward distance education in real time.

“Synchronous is the new black,” says Jeremi Suri, a professor of history who teaches one of the large-scale classes from a studio on the Austin campus, a 300-person course on American history from President Lincoln to President Obama. “I do think it’s the future.”

Better Tools

Signs of this rising interest are emerging from various corners of higher education, including these campuses:

• Along with Texas, a number of other institutions, including Empire State College and DeVry University, have recently announced new investments in technology-rich classrooms specifically designed to enhance their synchronous distance-education offerings.
• One hallmark of the much-watched new experimental university run by the Minerva Project is its conducting all of its classes via technology in real time.
• Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which began offering asynchronous online courses in 1998 but reintroduced synchronous teaching in 2007, says demand for the real-time classes has been growing steadily. Embry-Riddle had 359 registrations for courses offered via real-time technology when it started; this year it had more than 15,000. Officials say they expect the demand to continue.

What’s giving rise to the renewed interest in more-formalized synchronous courses is that the technology for “high-touch experiences” in real time is getting more sophisticated, says Karen L. Pedersen, chief knowledge officer at the Online Learning Consortium, a nonprofit training and education group. Institutions are catching up to their professors, and tools are now widely available that let professors share whiteboards simultaneously or collect comments and on-the-spot poll results in real time.

About 700 members responded to a recent survey by the consortium. Among the findings: Instructors say they aren’t getting the hands-on training they need to use the new tools that are becoming available to them. Full results from the survey will be distributed this year.

To be sure, synchronous courses never actually went away, even as asynchronous programs came to be considered “traditional distance education.” At the same time, many professors teaching asynchronous courses have been developing their own ad hoc systems for connecting with their students in real time.

In addition, the development of so-called hybrid courses, which mix face-to-face teaching with asynchronous activities, along with the emergence of the “flipped classroom,” in which students are expected to watch lectures or other materials on their own time and to use the class periods for activities that engage them with their professors and fellow students, are examples of models that use both activities that must be done together and those that students can do at their own pace.

‘Active Learning’

Several of the institutions now investing in real-time distance education say they’re doing so because it seems to serve students better, although some acknowledge that the evidence is far from conclusive that synchronicity alone makes the difference.

Texas actually offered reruns of Mr. Pennebaker’s and Mr. Gosling’s psychology class to 800 students one spring semester and found no appreciable difference in grades, completion rates, and course evaluations between them and students who had taken the live class.

It may just be that the interaction that matters most is easier to create through a synchronous format.

That’s part of the thinking at Minerva, which spent millions of dollars to develop its online, interactive course-management system. The founding dean of arts and sciences, Stephen M. Kosslyn, says that the way the college wanted to teach, using techniques such as “deliberate practice,” would be hard to do if the students weren’t all watching at the same time. Deliberate practice involves techniques like correcting students’ errors as they’re presenting information so they can do better the next time.

Minerva courses are conducted online, even though the students are located in the same city. Classes are typically held twice a week, for 90 minutes, in real time. “Based on the science of learning, there was really no choice” other than to make them synchronous, says Mr. Kosslyn, who joined Minerva in 2014 to create its academic program after an academic career at Harvard and Stanford Universities, among other institutions. But it’s not the synchronicity per se, he says, that’s the crucial piece: “Synchronous really forces active learning, and it’s active learning that’s critical.”

At Embry-Riddle, students in “our killer courses,” like mathematics and physics, are especially interested in the synchronous options, says Jason M. Ruckert, vice chancellor for online education. They appreciate the direct feedback that synchronous courses allow, via a system called Eagle Vision, named for the college’s mascot. Embry-Riddle offers Eagle Vision-equipped classrooms at each of its 100 locations. The greatest interest, he says, seems to be from students using Eagle Vision Home, which lets them connect on their own with classmates and professors in real time.

The first of DeVry’s 23 “connected classrooms,” which come with facial-recognition software and interactive touchscreen whiteboards, made their debut in January. Surveys found that students taking courses in the connected classes reported higher levels of satisfaction than those in the university’s typical asynchronous online classes. The rates of students’ continuing to the next set of courses were higher, too. Many of the connected classes outperformed face-to-face classes on both measures.

Professors who teach any of the 100 courses approved for connected classrooms are trained to make use of the tools and “not to lecture,” says Brian Bethune, dean of DeVry’s College of Media Arts and Technology.

DeVry has dozens of campus locations. Initially it used the connected classes as an efficiency tool — a way to economically offer a course even if there were only a few students on a particular campus. In September it will test the use of the classrooms as a drop-in option for its asynchronous online students, giving them a chance to occasionally interact in real time with a professor or fellow students taking the same course.

Economies of Scale

Finances are also a rationale for the efforts at the University of Texas. Its biggest classroom seats about 500, and the campus of 40,000 undergraduates has 10 classrooms that can seat 300 or more. By creating large-scale courses, the university can reach many more students for the cost of hiring a single professor and a few additional teaching assistants. University officials say a professor can teach as many as 2,000 students at once under the new system. That could free up more professors to teach smaller, advanced courses, says Phillip D. Long, chief innovation officer and associate vice president for learning sciences.

For professors, Mr. Long says, “there’s a lot to like” in the model, one of several ventures being developed by the university’s Project 2021 innovation effort. The university hopes the investments it is making in new studio classrooms and in production-staff members will make the venture as “painless as possible,” he adds, calling it a “gateway drug to adopting technology.”

Professors like Mr. Pennebaker and Mr. Suri say they’re already hooked. But the teaching techniques they use to promote real-time engagement are crucial to the success they’ve had so far, they say.

Mr. Suri, for example, takes attendance at random times during each class, typically with a quiz that a teaching assistant makes up on the fly. The quiz is visible for only about a minute, so students risk missing it unless they are watching at all times. “They need to be required to do something at a particular time,” says Mr. Suri. “Structure matters.”

Mr. Pennebaker, who is also director of Project 2021, says practices like the use of daily quizzes and the small-group in-class exercises that he and Mr. Gosling make a point of assigning help to keep students involved.

But as more professors begin teaching the large-scale classes, one of the challenges will be to ensure that every instructor who teaches them is comfortable with the technology and the focus on engagement. says Mr. Pennebaker: “One lousy teacher who teaches to a thousand students,” he says, “would be poisoning the water for us.”

Goldie Blumenstyk writes about the intersection of business and higher education. Check out www.goldieblumenstyk.com for information on her new book about the higher-education crisis; follow her on Twitter @GoldieStandard; or email her at goldie@chronicle.com.

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