Interesting article on online teaching and classroom change…here are my highlights:

• Innovate: Online Teaching and Classroom Change: The Trans-Classroom Teacher in the Age of the Internet
  • Online Teaching and Classroom Change:

    The Trans-Classroom Teacher in the Age of the Internet
  • Is an online course in such-and-such subject more or less effective than a face-to-face course in the same subject?
  • those who teach online leave the familiarity of the face-to-face classroom for the uncharted terrain of the online environment, whose constraints and affordances often lead to very different practices. The trans-classroom teacher who moves between the two environments, transferring ideas, strategies, and practices from one to the other, is a mental migrant. The transformations—of the teacher and of the course—that occur in these migrations and the two-way interactions between face-to-face and online teaching are the focus of this study.
  • most VHS teachers also teach face-to-face courses in their own schools at the same time that they are teaching online, and second, VHS requires that all its teachers prepare for teaching online by taking a demanding professional development course—delivered online—on the pedagogy of online teaching (Pape, Adams, and Ribeiro 2005).
  • As part of their professional development, new VHS teachers either create new courses or, with increasing frequency as the catalogue is built, take ownership of existing courses by adapting them to fit their own knowledge base and teaching styles.
  • VHS professional development emphasizes student-centered teaching; collaborative, problem-based learning; small-group work; and authentic, performance-based assessment.
  • only a third were familiar with the principles of backward design.
  • As teachers adapt their courses for the online environment, they are forced to reexamine the course design, reconsider curriculum strategies, and make many decisions about what to take out and what to keep, what to add and what to substitute.
  • finished courses are the result of intensive reflection and look very different from the courses they have been teaching face-to-face. As one VHS teacher described it, “By developing my course, I have had the opportunity to introspectively analyze what I am teaching, why I teach the way I do, and how I can change and improve my communication with students” (quoted in Pape, Adams, and Ribeiro 2005, 125).
  • kinds of changes that might be expected in the move to an online venue
  • online (Internet-based) readings
  • group projects or assignments
  • adding whole-class discussions
  • debates, and peer reviews
  • respondents required their students to use the discussion forums, and almost all reported that their courses included multiweek projects (98%), collaborative group work (95%), and peer reviews (84%), while 69% reported that they had their students complete multimedia assignments.
  • As teachers migrate to the online environment, they find that a whole host of issues—including teacher-student and student-student communication, the extent and nature of reflection, student accountability, and assessment—must be approached differently than they are in the face-to-face classroom.
  • Teaching the online course led these teachers to develop ways to communicate with students they could not see, to find ways to know if they were meeting their students’ needs, and to assess whether, and what, students had learned.
  • How do teachers teach without personal communication? In the online environment, teachers struggled to work out ways to reach and evaluate students when they could not interact with them face to face on a daily basis
  • How do teachers provide instructions that are clear enough? Online teachers also contended with a slightly different issue in terms of teacher-student communication: how to provide instructions that were sufficiently explicit that students could follow them.
  • How do teachers know when their students are confused? In face-to-face classrooms, teachers know if their students are confused by their questions or by the looks on their faces, but in online courses this type of just-in-time assessment has to be done through text, which presented some challenges
  • How do teachers get all students to participate? These teachers were concerned about making sure that all students participated in the discussions and that student-student communications, particularly in the discussion forums, were meaningful learning experiences
  • How do teachers manage pacing and scaffolding? Some of the respondents were concerned with the loss of flexibility in course organization that was the result of planning an entire course ahead of time (a VHS requirement) so that they could not adapt on a just-in-time basis to the student population. This concern surfaced in their descriptions of their struggles with how to pace the course, how to break it into manageable pieces, how to provide scaffolding, and how to organize groups
  • How do teachers know if students are learning? Many teachers were concerned about how to assess whether their online students had learned what the teachers wanted them to learn
  • 75% of the 158 responding teachers who taught both online and face-to-face reported that teaching online had a positive impact on their face-to-face teaching
  • The most frequent changes (defined as those made by 60% or more the respondents) involved course design or redesign, including eliminating lessons that now seemed poorly designed, designing or redesigning lessons using backward design principles, and adding lessons or units from the online course.
  • The second most frequent set of changes (those made by between 40% and 60% of respondents) involved the transfer of a range of strategies learned from teaching online to the face-to-face classroom, most of which revolved around fostering better communication. These strategies included changing how groups were organized, requiring class contributions from all students, providing more timely feedback, providing more written instructions, using class time more efficiently, and providing additional ways to communicate with students.
  • Those who reported making the most changes taught math, science, social science, and foreign languages, while those teaching computer science or programming reported making the fewest changes. English language arts, art, and art history teachers were in the middle of the ranks of changers (Exhibit 9). It seems possible that the teachers in the first four disciplines made the most changes either because these are particularly difficult subjects to adapt to the online environment and so require a lot of rethinking (math, science, foreign language) or because the online environment opens up the range of resources available (i.e., social science, which was primarily history)
  • four areas were class participation, independent learning, questioning techniques, and metacognition/reflection.
  • In online classes, full participation in discussions can be mandated by requiring a certain number of posts each week or by requiring that students respond to one another’s posts. The teacher can easily monitor the quantity and quality of the participation, including who is participating, when, and how often.
  • To be successful in online courses, students need to be self-motivated, well-organized, independent learners; at the same time, taking online courses can help students develop these characteristics.
  • teaching online led to a subtle but potentially far-reaching shift in their attitudes toward their face-to-face students, as teaching online made them realize that they could require more independent work. This realization was accompanied by a shift to a more learner-centered pedagogy in the face-to-face classroom
  • Questioning Techniques
  • To work well, online discussion forums need thoughtful facilitation, including careful attention to how questions are asked. Teachers wrote about how they imported what they had learned about asking questions into their face-to-face classrooms. They also wrote that they were now more confident using open-ended questions with their students and were less likely to provide answers. Others linked this shift to larger changes in pedagogical approach, including a reduction in the amount of time spent lecturing and a shift to a facilitator role
  • Another affordance of the online environment is the time for thought or reflection allowed by the asynchronous nature of the discussion forum. Although posts can certainly be composed off the cuff, in general the fact that they are written and often graded forces students to think before they write. In addition, well-constructed questions can lead to reflective answers.
  • there is as yet little research on the effect of teaching online on teachers and even less on how teaching online can shape teaching in the face-to-face classroom.
  • the trans-classroom teacher’s migratory journey to and from the online classroom can transform that teacher’s face-to-face classroom practice in subtle and important ways.
  • Can we, and should we, find ways to develop more trans-classroom teachers or to make nascent trans-classroom teachers more so, by encouraging more teachers to teach in both venues and by encouraging online teachers to reflect on the changes they make when teaching online? Can we, and should we, deliberately find ways to encourage the transfer of successful aspects of online pedagogy back to the face-to-face classroom, capitalizing on what these trans-classroom teachers have learned by treating them as resources for their face-to-face classroom counterparts?
  • This research, exploratory though it is, suggests that giving more teachers the opportunity to teach online, as well as deliberately encouraging those who do teach online to share what they have learned with their fellow classroom teachers, provides an opportunity to strengthen teaching in both environments.
  Note: This article was originally published in Innovate (http://www.innovateonline.info/) as: Lowes, S. 2008. Online teaching and classroom change: The trans-classroom teacher in the age of the internet. Innovate 4 (3). http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=446 (accessed September 27, 2009). The article is reprinted here with permission of the publisher, The Fischler School of Education at Nova Southeastern University.

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