Designing Internet/Web Teaching

Teaching solely on the Web demands a different kind of thinking than I have usually given over the years to the preparation of composition courses. First, assignments and activities must be looked at as a whole, not just in concept but in action. For example, when I planned courses in the past I considered which writing tasks would best serve for the six or so major projects for the semester; I would put them into a general order, adapt them to the 16-week schedule, connect each to the appropriate readings in the textbook, and pretty much let it go at that. During the course, I would have the weekly meetings, the book, and the blackboard to clarify aspects of the assignments, and teach the tasks, processes, and problems. In other words, I would have a lot of "real time" to guide, encourage, cajole, and manage what interactions I was used to in this type of teaching.

In distance education on the Web, I lost the "real time" environment and had to rely on mediation for all the dimensions of teaching. Preparation, then, had to be much more extensive and descriptively clear. Assignment procedures had to be worked out in greater detail to make less necessary the frequent "checking up" that students do when they see a teacher. "Should I put my name at the top?" and "How many pages should it be?" are typical of the mundane details we take care of in real time; in distance ed, these questions need to be anticipated and included in instructions as clearly as possible. When confusion crops up about an assignment, the question-answer cycle must take place over e-mail or, in some instances, the telephone, and as such it becomes more difficult and disruptive; in many cases students just don't bother to ask, and guess about what they are to do. Thus these various details guiding process and product need to be incorporated into assignment pages, simplified, and clarified as much as possible. The design of a course thus becomes a much more time-consuming and difficult job that it was in the past.

The benefit of this challenge is that the amount of thought and projection of teaching content necessary to accomplish course design inevitably forces in-depth reflection on our practice as teachers. In order to anticipate difficulties that arise with students' understanding of ideas and tasks, we have to put ourselves in their shoes--we have to know our audience extremely well. In the consideration of how our students are thinking, and where they might need guidance, comes the increasing ability to put our resources where they are needed. This is a function of experience in teaching that should be constant and intentional in any context--but frequently it is not. In traditional settings, I have found it too easy to attribute student problems to their lack of application and commitment, their fickleness, laziness, or general unsuitability for advanced education. While these attributes may indeed play a part in hindering learning, many of the problems students face come from their inability to put together what the teacher has asked for with their prior experience and knowledge. Content presented in distance education Web-based courses must reflect this awareness of the inherent difficulty of accurate and complete communication in most human contexts, and especially in the foreign electronic environment of computer networks.