Encouraging and Supporting Asynchronous Learning Networks

Randal A. Lemke, Ph.D.
Northern Virginia Community College

"How can I teach in this way when I am already working at capacity?" is a question that faces all
faculty when they begin to teach asynchronous learning courses (ALN). It is rooted in the fact
that they will probably be more frequently and more closely involved with students than they
would be in a classroom. They will also probably spend more time designing and preparing for
the course. Fortunately, an ALN environment can also bring to faculty members the benefits of
the collective efforts of a team. Whether at the departmental level or through a separate
administrative unit, the work of developing and teaching ALN courses can be facilitated by
instructional technologists, technicians, and clerical personnel.

A New Way of Teaching and Learning

Teaching and learning in an asynchronous learning network (ALN) is fundamentally different than
that done in most college and university classes. Much of classroom teaching is based on faculty
presentation of information to a group of students who are then responsible for demonstrating
that they have accumulated it. The instructor is on center stage and determines the official agenda
of the course. In the audience of lecture halls and classrooms, students are called on occasionally
to demonstrate their comprehension and are tested periodically to determine their retention. The
emphasis is clearly on teaching with the expectation that if it is done well, students with ability and
ambition will learn. With an audience of 50 to 200, faculty are hard-pressed to do much more
than this, although adding tutors or teaching assistants enables more individual dialogue with
students about their learning. Two major problems are inherent to this form of teaching: (1) it is
no longer prudent to be indifferent if students fail to succeed and (2) even for the ones who do
succeed, if they are not skilled at learning they will not be able to assimilate and use new
information when the knowledge they gained in college goes out of date. Just as private and
public organizations are pushing for higher quality products and results, our educational
institutions face the same challenge. Our society won't succeed without high quality learners who
can continue to upgrade their skills and knowledge, so simply sorting out the successful from the
unsuccessful is not an adequate role for higher education.

ALN faculty move from the center and invite all students to come onto the stage. Learning
becomes as important as teaching. Faculty still determine what is to be learned and set standards
for students to meet, but their role is no longer just to present the information. In an ALN, the
stage is not suddenly full of professors; instead, the professor is to be found among the students
through asynchronous communication. Professors no longer have to make repeated presentations
of information for each class, as it can be done asynchronously through videotape, screen-cam
lectures, CD ROM's, and audiotape. Relieved of this burden, they can use the same ALN to set
up discussions among students, monitor collaborative activities, respond to inquires for help,
check students' progress, initiate new activities in response to students' work, and in other ways
become involved in their learning. The faculty members' skills and creative abilities are directed
towards setting a stage full of rich learning experiences and helping students use them. ALNs
hold the promise of improved student learning to eliminate failures and create graduates who can
continue in their professional and personal lives to learn from the richness of information now
available in our society.

Observations from Phase I of Northern Virginia Community College's ALN Project

If ALN classes are fundamentally different from the classroom, then ALN classes can benefit from
different support and administrative structures which encourage and support faculty in this new
endeavor. The results from the first phase of Northern Virginia Community College's (NVCC)
ALN project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, support the position that the teaching is
different and illuminate the need for providing faculty more support. In the Fall of 1994 four
courses in chemistry, calculus, and engineering were developed; they were first presented in the
Spring semester of 1995. The chemistry course was team-taught while the others were each
presented by a single professor. About 100 students enrolled in these four sections, and their
learning outcomes were comparable to other Extended Learning Institute (ELI) at NVCC (Sener,
1995). During the development of these courses and upon reflection of this process the following
Spring, it became obvious that faculty members were being asked to change their role
dramatically. A matrix of skills needed for teaching ALN courses was developed as was an
inventory of incoming skills. With the support that is provided by ELI, faculty do not need to
become expert in these skills but do need to be proficient.

Faculty use of collaborative learning was to teach students team-based work skills and to help
them form a peer group to assist members with problems they were having in the course.
Computer conferencing skills were necessary so that students and faculty could communicate
asynchronously about course matters. ELI delivery skills were needed because these courses
were being taught in parallel with 80 other ELI courses and used many of the same procedures.
Knowledge of distance education concepts was needed so that faculty began to understand their
role and how it differed from classroom instruction. Finally, video production skills were
necessary so that faculty could make the best use of video taping sessions and be able to best
convey the information of the course to their students.

Faculty member two was the only person to have taught at ELI previously, and even he had to
develop new skills to be successful in ALN teaching. He and the others worked extremely hard
during the Fall semester to prepare their print, video, and on-line materials and developed most of
the skills they needed. Because of the press of printing and video production deadlines,
development of collaborative and computer conferencing skills were for the most part delayed
until the faculty started teaching the courses.

With the beginning of the Spring semester, faculty began to play out their new teaching role.
Instead of classroom lectures, students viewed videotapes prepared by their faculty member;
instead of classroom discussions or a recitation section, they worked with students on-line in a
computer conference; and instead of weekly laboratories, students either did home-based labs or
attended weekend sessions on campus that covered more than one lab activity. Faculty
communicated on-line from their office or home, and students used campus or their own
computers. Assignments were sent by mail to the ELI office, and faculty worked there to grade
and respond to them as they did with exams that students took at a campus testing center.

Encouraging ALN Faculty

Anyone thinking of beginning an ALN activity should ask what will encourage faculty to
give up the familiar patterns of the classroom to take on the large task of developing and
teaching an ALN course. In much of higher education, teaching is not as well rewarded as
research or service activities, so how can one make it attractive for faculty to do so? Even
at a community college like NVCC where there is no push for research, what motivates
a faculty member to step outside of the norm to develop and teach an ALN course?

At ELI, ALN and other distance education faculty seem to volunteer for a variety of reasons:

• Faculty see the possibility of teaching outside of the classroom as a break from the
  monotony of teaching five sections a semester. Being able to mix their teaching load between
  the classroom and ELI is a welcome relief. Also, because they can gather students from
  throughout the area, faculty sometimes get to teach an advanced or specialty course
  that would not attract enough students on campus to merit running. Being able to teach these
  courses is seen as a benefit for community college faculty who usually just teach introductory
  or survey courses.
• Faculty come to ELI for the same reasons that students do, in that they want to work asynchronously so they can take care of other professional and personal responsibilities more easily than if they were scheduled for five classes on campus.
• Faculty come to ELI because they are intrigued with the technology and want to see how
  they can get it to work for them. Computer, video or other technologies attract curious faculty to ALN or other ELI courses.
• Faculty come to fulfill their teaching obligations and justify their positions because ELI
  makes it possible for some students to take courses who could not attend campus classes.
  ELI has worked to make the above factors attractive to faculty. Once faculty commit to teaching an ALN
  course, it gives them further incentives.
• Faculty who work at ELI have much more access to computer technology and the Internet
  than their campus-based peers. Faculty are not at the ELI office daily so they share workstations that have typical productivity tools and access to the World Wide Web. They
  can also get the same capability through a remote access server so they can dial-in from home or campus to the ELI server. This is an unusual amount of access for NVCC for which faculty have expressed their appreciation.
• Faculty use the technical and instructional supports available to them (see Figure 1). Having instructional technologists, video production staff, computer technicians, and clerical help is encouraging to faculty, who do not find this level of support on campus.
  
  Teaching load is a factor in almost all faculty decisions about volunteering to teach via an ALN. It is important not to create a disincentive for faculty by expecting them to teach a much larger number of students just because they no longer have classroom sessions. If faculty are asked to
  teach two or three times the normal class size, they will not be able to make the desired change in teaching roles, as they will be turned into graders and reactive respondents to student problems. For faculty to be truly engaged with students, class sizes have to be kept in line with classroom quantities, or an instructional team of faculty, graders and instructional assistants needs to be employed.
  
  Finally, after considering these external rewards, most faculty members come to ELI and stay
  because they are able to teach and communicate with students in a different way. Their internal motivations to serve students can be satisfied in this form of teaching, and sometimes they find
  it even more rewarding than they do the classroom. ALN and other faculty who use computer conferencing, in particular, have a tool to communicate very directly with individual students in
  a manner not possible to them in most of their classes. Faculty who truly want to communicate with students will find that ALN courses provide them more opportunities than they expected.
  

Supporting ALN Courses

To provide students a rich environment of learning opportunities and communication capabilities,
ALN courses require an extensive amount of development prior to their first offering. Faculty
benefit from a large amount of assistance, whether such support is provided by a centralized
administrative unit like ELI at NVCC, or by computer, video, and faculty development personnel
from several campus units. At ELI a faculty member is joined by an instructional technologist, a
video producer, computer technicians and clerical staff to constitute a course development team.
The instructional technologist is either an academically trained instructional designer or a master
teacher who has developed design skills from experience. The video producer has academic
training in television production
and experience adapting this knowledge to instructional video.
Computer technicians are assigned to install hardware and software systems, to maintain
computer the conferencing systems, and to assist faculty in using the technology. Finally, the
clerical staff prepares and copy edits manuscripts and makes arrangements for course materials
duplication. The faculty member is the sole determinant of what is taught and what are the
standards for student success. The instructional technologist is a consultant to the faculty on
distance education techniques. Similarly, the computer technicians and video producers provide
advice and training to the faculty so they can use the technologies efficiently without having to
learn (to do so) by trial and error. Instructional development teams were constituted for the four
ALN courses developed in Phase I and, except for the faculty members, the teams were almost
exactly the same for all courses. Delivery of these courses in the Spring of 1995 brought together a different group of people to support the faculty member. Typically clerical personnel, the computer technician, a student tutor, testing center personnel, and occasionally the instructional technologist work with the faculty member to run the course. Clerical personnel sort faculty mail, file student exams, maintain student records on the college student information system, and staff a hotline where
students can call for assistance on administrative issues. The computer technician maintains the
computer conferencing server and trouble-shoots modem and communication problems for
students. The student tutor, who has taken advanced courses in the subject, provides students
assistance via computer conferencing, telephone, or through on-campus meetings; for courses
with campus-based laboratories, the tutor is also the lab assistant. When students are ready to
take their exams, the testing center personnel administer them and send the exams to ELI for the
professor to grade. Finally, the instructional technologist is called upon if an unforeseen difficulty
arises and the faculty member needs help devising a strategy to resolve the problem.

Through support systems such as these, faculty members are freed from administrative trivia and
given professional and technical support to develop and deliver an ALN course. NVCC has
provided that support through ELI, which is a centralized administrative unit that complements
the College's five campuses. It has on staff four instructional technologists, a video producer, two
computer technicians, and six clerical support personnel who form the development and delivery
teams. In addition, it draws on the services of the College's Telecommunications Center and the
campus testing centers. Faculty come from all five campuses, and the credit for the student
enrollment is returned to their home campuses. A great benefit of this kind of organization is that
it centralizes an activity and allows for the development of specialists who can support the faculty.
It removes from faculty the responsibility to become an expert in distance education, video
production, computer systems, etc. Instead, it lets faculty members use the expertise of ELI's
staff to assist them in conducting their classes.

Sources:

Sener, J. 1995. "Developing a Distance Education Engineering Program for Home-Based
Learners: Lessons Learned." Proceedings from the New Approaches to Undergraduate
Engineering Education VII. Gorham, ME: University of South Maine.

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