AU prepares major effort in distance learning

BY SALLY ACHARYA

In the musical Brigadoon, Scotland is a place of magical transformations. This semester, the magic of the Internet is transforming faculty back into students—and it also has its origins in Scotland.

From his home in a “wee village in central Scotland,” former registrar Don Bunis is leading nine AU faculty in an on-line course that prepares them to launch AU’s first major effort in distance education.

The nine faculty are each recipients of $2,500 grants to develop on-line courses for this summer, a grant that comes with an unusual requirement: They must prepare for their own courses by logging on as students to a course on distance education taught by Bunis, now a specialist in distance education.

AU’s first large-scale foray into the field comes a year after the successful piloting of a course last summer by Meg Weekes, assistant dean of Washington Semester. “It’s a thorny thing,” she says of distance education. “A lot of universities have had their distance education program go belly up. We didn’t want that to happen with this initiative, so we started slowly,” with a pilot course last year and now the extensive preparation of faculty by Bunis.

“As they experience being on-line learners themselves, these faculty members will learn what on-line students need,” says Bunis via Internet from the rolling hills of Scotland’s Earn River Valley. “That first-hand experience will influence the way they design and teach their own courses . . . The intellectual content is being supported by personal experience. That’s the way adults learn best.”

It also has them “burning the midnight oil,” in the words of Weekes, one of the faculty-turned-students. Weekes confesses that she was leery about teaching without the face-to-face communication that she enjoys in the classroom. But the uncertainty of the post–Sept. 11 environment had highlighted the need to have alternative ways of reaching students, “so I was willing to put aside my doubts a little bit and explore this,” Weekes says.

Success is far from automatic in distance education. Studies show that up to a third of all students in distance education classes drop out within the first two weeks, in large part because they don’t feel a sense of community, Weekes notes.

Weekes, in fact, had prepared for her first experience as a distance educator by taking an on-line course two years ago through another university. It was not an encouraging experience. She had trouble logging on, got little technical support from the course providers, and ended up dropping out—an all-too-frequent experience, and one that AU wanted to avoid in its own offerings.

Bunis says, “From a faculty member’s point of view, it is challenging to teach students they cannot see. It also takes a great deal of self-discipline for the faculty member to move from the traditional role as ‘the sage on the stage’ to that of ‘the guide on the side,’ which is more appropriate to approach on-line instruction. The traditional lecture style simply does not work well on-line. A faculty member who is particularly charismatic in a classroom has to learn a whole different way to engage his or her students . . .

“For the institution, the challenge is to understand how much support distance students and faculty need and to take the necessary steps to provide it.” That’s the support that Weekes didn’t find in her first on-line experience, but which she tried to provide in her pilot last summer—a pilot that generated stellar reviews, a result that AU is working to duplicate this summer.

Summer could be “an ideal time” for distance education, Provost Neil Kerwin told the Faculty Senate, because that’s a time when students working in their hometowns often sign up for courses at other universities to complete needed credits.

“We probably lose a large number of our own students to other institutions over the summer,” Kerwin told the Faculty Senate.

Last summer’s pilot, a course called Justice in the Face of Terror: Government Responses to Terror, drew 28 students. “These are students who would have taken an AU course if they could have,” Weekes said, “but they weren’t staying at the dorm [over the summer].”

In spite of her initial doubts about distance education, Weekes ended up a convert. “You actually are talking to people all the time,” she says. Unlike many classes, where it’s not uncommon for a few confident and articulate students to dominate discussions, “every single student talked every time,” Weekes notes. One graduate student admitted to never having spoken in class before. “It was a really wonderful thing. There are people still writing to me. We’re still communicating,” she says.

But that’s not an automatic result—which is one reason the faculty grant recipients are required to take a course on the subject before jumping into it themselves.

The nine new courses will be held via Blackboard and not through “synchronous” technology; students will be able to log in any time from anywhere over the summer—whether it’s Wisconsin or Timbuktu or an airport in between.

Subjects of summer courses will range from special education to international relations to the legal system. Three will be under the auspices of the Washington Semester Program, with the rest falling under different schools and colleges.

Bunis won’t be grading his faculty “students” who will be offering this summer’s courses. “Their success will be measured by the level of student satisfaction their courses achieve, as indicated by the results of student evaluations,” he says. His confidence level is high. “I think these very talented classroom teachers are well on their way to success as distance educators.”