Judi Kirkpatrick "Distance education is no longer the great evil."
The concept of students learning outside the brick and mortar confines of
the traditional scheduled, teacher-paced, minute-counted class
threatens many educators. The notion of not being in the same room with
students causes some teachers to claim that their teaching could never be
as effective as when they have the oral interaction with their students.
I ask "how do you know that?"
Until we challenge ourselves, our colleagues, our departments, programs,
colleges, and administrators, to pay attention to the possibilities that
emerge in the online classroom, we cannot make these claims. Go into the
online teaching mode with your eyes wide open though. First, pay attention
to what has happened to a good chunk of our curriculum. Do you know who's
administering and delivering your program's credit curriculum through
traditional external outreach and extension programs, allowing our credit
courses to be delivered by someone else, somewhere else in our college or
university? I challenge faculty to retrieve their credits and to ensure
quality and equal rigor to whatever the delivery mechanism for all your
departmental courses.
That should come first.
At a New England community college, 600 credit courses are being taught
this semester through an extension service. Faculty knew they were
offered, but did not know much more than that besides the numbers. What
they did know was that they were curious about trying teaching distance
courses, but with the precedent taking the distance courses out of their
hands, what were they to do???
At a Texas university, hundreds of fycomp courses are taught semester by
semester by teachers not part of the university's writing program or
English department. In fact, this writing program has woken up, and is
recovering their courses. More of our colleagues need to wake up to this
conundrum and make clear the standards and best practice guidelines for
their writing programs, whatever the mode of delivery.
Thus I challenge the best teachers amongst us to deliver a quality
distance-delivered degree program for your students, to work
collaboratively with like-minded faculty towards providing students with
comparable outcomes that any student in the brick and mortar classroom
would have as he/she leaves your program. The very best teachers are best
equipped to take the new tools of the technological and information
revolution and harness them for best possible use, developing models for
good practice. The more teachers become practiced users themselves, the
more their teaching will be transformed. The online and hybrid programs we
develop in our systems will reflect our standards and our best practices.
We should not let our students down by ignoring the potentials of
designing academic experiences through credit classes in online learning
environments.