Does it Take More Time to Teach Distant Learners? (No, really...)

Does teaching online take more time than teaching on campus?

For many faculty, the answer seems obvious.  But is the obvious answer correct?

I've personally come across only one research study that went beyond personal impressions.  Years ago Christine Geith and Michele Cometa did a pilot study that worked closely with nine faculty who were each experienced in teaching both campus students and also distant students.

In order to compare 'apples with apples,' each faculty member interviewed was experienced in teaching both distant learners and campus learners in comparable courses,

They began by asking each faculty member which type of teaching was more time-consuming (per student): teaching distant learners or learners on campus. Everyone agreed that teaching distant learners was more time-consuming.

But when these nine faculty each thought about it some more, most decided they'd been mistaken.

Each spent about 45 minutes estimating how much time they'd spent in each of the different activities that make up "teaching a course."

• One third concluded they'd spent more time (per student) teaching distant learners (as they'd expected);
• One third concluded they'd spent more time teaching campus learners; and
• One third decided it was about the same.

From this pilot study, it appears that teaching distant learners isn't necessarily more or less time consuming than teaching students on campus. 

How can that be?

Experienced faculty can adjust elements of the course over a period of years. Eventually, 'time invested per student is more a result of time available.  (The same thing is true of university budgets, for example; the cost of teaching a student is determined by how much money over time has been available to teaching them.  I've written more about this surprising result and its implications in Ehrmann (2010).  When trying a completely new mode of teaching, a faculty member may feel compelled to invest an uncomfortable amount of time per student But after a while the workload can be tweaked until it's tolerable.

The big difference in time invested, surprisingly, was from one faculty member to another.  These nine faculty varied enormously in how much time they spent per student.  

In other words, personal preferences and circumstances have a major effect on how faculty invest their time in each student.  The mode of teaching apparently doesn't.  

*****
Ehrmann, S.C. (2010) “Improving Higher Learning by Taking the Long View: Ten Recommendations about Time, Money, Technology and Learning.”  Change Magazine, Taylor & Francis, September/October, pp. 16-22. (This article was reprinted in the January 2011 issue of Planning for Higher Education, published by the Society for College and University Planning, pp. 34-40.)

Beyond "Comparability"

My colleague Patty Dinneen and I are just finishing up a column for publication in the next issue of "Distance Education."  (In the last issue, Natalie Milman and I wrote a column about ways in which online educational formats make it easier to identify and respond to the different needs of different students in the same course.)

This new column, entitled "Beyond 'Comparability,'  begins:

“Comparability”: an institutional strategy for assuring quality in online and hybrid courses by insisting that the content and, sometimes, the assessments be “comparable” to courses already offered on campus.  

As a standard, “comparability,” sounds reasonable enough.  After all, this sameness makes it possible to compare the quality of learning outcomes without regard to delivery method.  So long as the distant learners get test scores that are comparable to the students on campus, all is well and no further thinking or oversight are needed.

In a similar vein, Richard Clark argued in a classic article that the quality of learning is unrelated to the technology used for teaching.  For example, previous meta-analyses of huge numbers of studies of ‘presentation’ (i.e., information from a single source is made available to many students) – these studies had shown that students who are taught by presentation learn just about as much, no matter what the medium of presentation.   It doesn’t matter whether they get the presentation via live lecture, video tape, streaming video over the internet, or textbook. Clark also pointed out that the activity of self-paced instruction (SPI) produces substantial learning gains over the activity of presentation. But SPI implemented using paper produces almost as much learning as SPI using computers. According to Clark,  using technology for teaching is analogous to a vehicle delivering your groceries to your home.  The quality of milk  is the same, whether the delivery truck is made by GM or Ford.  Technology and quality are completely unrelated, he argued. (Clark, 1983: 445)

But Clark’s analogy is misleading, and his conclusion is the problem with the standard of comparability as well.  It’s true that any teaching/learning activity can be implemented with a variety of technologies or facilities. However, for any particular teaching/learning activity, some facilities or technologies are a better fit than others.  For example, SPI can be done far more easily and inexpensively with digital technology than with paper; that’s why such tutorials have become more common as computers have become more common and why paper versions of SPI have become almost extinct.  The process approach to writing, a pedagogy, spread once computers became common because rewriting is easier with computers.  Course activities involving analysis of video (e.g., video recordings of science experiments in action; film clips) became more common when individual manipulation of video became inexpensive and easy.

Once the medium or tools of learning change, it also becomes easier to change who is involved in the course.  Obviously distance learning makes it possible to involve not only more students but also students with specific kinds of backgrounds or needs.  Equally important, the institution can make different choices about who to use as instructors, or assessors of student work, when those activities can be done online.

Changes in learning spaces and tools can also enable improvements in assessment: self-grading assessments can be administered more readily online, for example.

And the dominos keep falling.  When changes in learning spaces and tools enable improvements in the activities, assessment and people, the content and goals of the course, or course of study, can be improved, too.  In the early 1980s, for example, Prof. Marvin Marcus of the University of California Santa Barbara, was able to use a new computer lab in mathematics to begin offering the math department’s first minor in applied mathematics, consisting of several on-campus courses and an off-campus internship program in which students applied their skills to solving problems faced by community agencies.  A more recent example: the Internet and cheaper international communications have helped Worcester Polytechnic Institute make research abroad become so easy, inexpensive and common that applications research abroad has become a signature activity of that institution.

When universities change technologies and/or facilities (e.g., from campus-bound to hybrid), faculty ought to take a fresh look at learning goals, content, teaching/learning activities, and assessment. The change of facilities will make some goals harder to pursue than before, others easier; some teaching/learning activities easier, others harder; and so on.  The problem with “comparability” as a standard is that it discourages faculty from thinking about how they might take advantage of new learning spaces and tools in order to offer more valuable hybrid or online courses of study. 

Remember the old tale about the tiger that had been caged since birth. It would roam its cage ceaselessly. One morning it awoke. The bars had been removed. But for a long time, the pacing tiger didn’t notice. It continued to pace within the boundaries of its vanished prison."  ....

The column goes on to summarize nine different ways in which online or hybrid formats create the potential for courses that are more valuable and more effective than do campus-bound course formats.

The column ends, in part:  "If “comparability” should not be used to provide a quick and easy method of quality assurance, what should we do instead?  Our answer is simple: we should evaluate online and hybrid offerings in the same way we ought to assess campus-bound offerings:

1. Are we doing the right thing?  Use internal and external points of reference to discuss whether the goals are valuable.  This will almost always involve comparing ‘apples and oranges’ so it’s important to think carefully about what points of reference to use. 
2. Are we doing the thing right? Ask whether there is a good alignment between that goal, the teaching/learning activities proposed, and the facilities and technologies to be used to support those activities.

Do you think that we should abandon ‘comparability’ as a standard for quality assurance for online and hybrid programs? 

How can hybrid (and online) courses be better than campus courses?

Many institutions want to offer hybrid and online courses in order to improve the economic bottom line: to make better use of expensive campus space, increase enrollments, and allow working students to carry bigger loads and graduate sooner. Those aren't bad motivations.

But it's also the case that, in selected ways, good hybrid and online courses can be better than campus courses that rely mainly on lecturing, textbooks, and students doing homework alone.

By "hybrid" I mean courses where the instructor allocates more time to work outside the classroom by shrinking the time that students and the instructor spend on the classroom. The goal: improve learning while not increasing total time spent on the course by students or faculty.

Here are a few ways in which such hybrids and online courses can be superior to traditional classroom formats (especially when classes have more than, say, 30 students). Can you suggest others?

Large campus-bound courses teach one message to all students, a message which may motivate some students more than others, at a pace that may be right for some students, too fast for others, too slow for still others. In contrast, courses that do more (or all) of their work online enable faculty to offer more than one version of lectures, assignments, and even tests. The goal: to excite and engage a larger fraction of all students by giving them challenges that mean something at a pace they can maintain. For example, a class in biology might offer three versions of some lectures or assignments: one version pitched more toward future health care practitioners, another for future engineers, and another for future scientists.  (These different versions need not be created by one faculty member all at once. Faculty might split the effort, or a single faculty member might develop different versions over a period of years.)

Just in time learning: In order to motivate students to come to the class sessions prepared, use online quizzes, discussions, or assignments that are due just before class.  Gathering data just before class can also help instructors create classroom activities that respond to what students have learned, or  what they still misunderstand.

More thoughtful pace of discussion: Traditional classrooms, especially when classes are large, offer few students a chance to answer questions, or discuss issues.  Online discussion (e.g.,, threaded discussions on Blackboard) give all students a chance to talk, with each other, and with faculty. The time-delay gives students a chance to think about what’s been said, and to think about what they want to say. Many faculty have observed that students indeed become more thoughtful when the pace of conversation slows down, and there’s no danger of being interrupted.

Expand the visual dimension: Traditional classroom formats are dominated by words.  But the visual dimension (still, motion) is potentially crucial in many disciplines (e.g., art history, health care, sociology, engineering, ...). For students to develop an educated, intuitive understanding of visual materials, students must be able to (a) call up one or more visual artifacts, (b) discuss those artifact(s) with other students and the instructor while pointing to elements of the visual materials ("Notice the contrast between this and that."). Student discussion of visual materials can often be done more easily and inexpensively online (e.g., using Elluminate, Adobe Connect, Wimba, or other real-time conferencing systems or created narrated presentations using software such as PowerPoint or Prezi.)

Open the conversation: Traditional classrooms have a closed door: discussion is limited to the faculty member and students registered in the class. Online discussions are more easily expanded to include significant others outside that group: outside experts, students who differ from those in class, members of the public.  For an extreme example of this, see my previous post.

Expand the variety of students and classwork settings: Online and some hybrid formats enable a program to recruit a student body of unusual talents and diversity.  For example, some hybrid programs (often masters programs) combine substantial online work with periods when students and faculty gather in one instructional setting (not always on the home campus). For example, Prof. Maida Withers, at George Washington University, leads a new blended (hybrid) master's program in dance. Students applying for admission were required to have identified their settings near their residences where they could practice, choreograph, and present their dances.

Expand the expertise used in offering the program: the more interaction is online, the easier and more natural it is to use instructors and guest experts selected for their fit to the program. Guest experts can speak with a classroom from a distance, but it's even more natural if everyone is online, as natural as a conference call. Some instructors use a 20 minute guest presentation or discussion, involving a different specialist, every week. Assign a reading, and then give students an opportunity to interview the author online.

Increase the specialization of the program: Put all these pieces together: it's possible to offer incredible programs that can be be unusually specialized in order to attract (distant) highly motivated students-- interdisciplinary degrees in HMO management, sustainable recreation, 21st century literature and culture, ...  Such programs might be targeted at small, high-paying, recently created job markets. Such programs could be taught by a combination of local faculty and top experts from around the world. The program design would ideally be hybrid: a mix of online education with gatherings of faculty and students at appropriate sites for intense work and coaching.