Amy Hale: Academic Mercenary

It has been quite a while since I’ve been able to post here. In the middle of February we made a rather quick move to the San Jose area from Florida. I admit I’m absolutely thrilled to be here, and I’m enjoying being a Californian again. It has been extremely busy getting settled in, and we are having a great deal of fun exploring the area.

In being here, I’ve been thinking about my work structure, and wondering if maybe I shouldn’t try to pick up a California school. Although it is not a necessity for me, it is something that I am considering.  To that end, I thought I might feel out a couple of schools here to see if they had any need or interest in offering more online courses. Since I do a lot of Humanities already, I want to flex my muscles by developing and teaching more Anthropology courses. I did some looking around, and found what appeared to be a nice community college in the Sacramento area. I wanted to approach community colleges first because they tend to be supportive of online programs, and I still really believe in the community college mission. This school seemed to have a more robust anthropology program than many community colleges offer, and they had some online courses already so I figured I would drop them a line.

I got a response that was not only somewhat rude (the person didn’t even bother to sign it),  it demonstrated once again that there are fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of online teaching and the capacity of online courses to build and maintain community. The department chair wrote:

“Our professors teach on ground for us as well as online. Our department has a policy of not hiring people who cannot teach in person for us since we are a community college. It is important for all of our instructors to be an active part of our community.”

Uh…why?

First off, I teach exclusively for four year colleges and community colleges and not one of them is in my immediate locality. Why? Because it really doesn’t matter. Students take online courses because <b>they can’t be at a campus!</b>!! It is my job as an online instructor to foster community and cohesiveness with a group of people who are going to be geographically disparate. That is the point of online learning! We can’t be together in space or time, so we do it this way, providing an exchange of ideas, getting to know one another, and learning together.  As I am also a subject matter specialist, I bring my experience as a professional into the classroom, just like any other professor.

Clearly this person has a very limited understanding of what “community” means, and I see that as unfortunate and regressive. I have taught for one of my schools now for seven years, exclusively online. I know my colleagues, they know me. We know our strengths and weaknesses as faculty members. I know about important things going on in the locality of the school, as I do of all of my schools. The important thing in my job is to build a learning community in the classroom, because that’s where it counts. I think she also doesn’t fully grasp that classroom teaching and online teaching are fundamentally different skill sets.

Her comments, however, echo concerns I was hearing when I did a face-to-face workshop on online pedagogy several months ago.  People who do not spend time online simply do not understand the nature of online relationships, and they are skeptical that they really exist. The problems come in when these people start to make assumptions about the overall effectiveness of online learning based on their personal lack of understanding of the medium. Given the fact that online learning is happening, and its growth is inevitable, I think there needs to be training about online learning for all educational professionals, regardless of their personal interest in teaching in this way.  If educational professionals do not understand what online learning is about and how it is done, they are not going to be in any sort of position to support it, and they’re going to be less likely to do so.  This will only be to their detriment, especially as our economy shifts, because the numbers indicate that things are only going to get better for people in my field, and worse for the departments who refuse to embrace it.

Since Spring terms have begun and I’ve been in the process of designing, redesigning and updating a number of courses, it has again made me think about the use of video and other media in online teaching. One of the great things about the software and learning platforms that we use, Blackboard, ANGEL, and others, is that they have the capacity to offer a student a very rich learning experience, that address a number of different learning modalities. We have the ability to do podcasts, insert video, use animations and incorporate all sorts of other fun teaching strategies. However exciting these may be, I have discovered a number of difficulties in implementation that frequently leave my online classrooms much more text oriented than I would prefer. Frequently I have noted that students come to me with difficulty in accessing the media as it is presented in the LMS. Perhaps they don’t have the right media viewer, there are system compatibility issues, they might be using a public computer, or they might have a poor internet connections.  Perhaps the student is in the military deployed in another country where for any number of reasons they are unable to take advantage of the features we want to add into our classrooms.

As a result, I currently do not base any assessments on online videos or podcasts. I make them optional. However, YouTube is providing much better opportunities for working with media in online courses. It is easy for just about everybody to access, easier for the student to handle than streaming video, and there is so much great stuff out there that instructors can incorporate for students to analyze, enjoy, and think about.  As an instructor, of course, if you desire, you can put up your own content there as well and direct students to the link.

I also really wanted to briefly address the use of Second Life in courses. For the past several years there has been a huge buzz about this virtual environment as a teaching resource. Of course it’s cool, and yes I think it would offer a number of possibilities, but the fact is we have a pretty robust set of computers here at my home, and Second Life frequently does not run well on those!  Again, I think it’s something that is good to keep in mind for an option, and something to look at for the future as more people have access to better and faster technology, but we need to keep in mind that the key to online education is accessibility. That means we need to make sure that the very basis of our courses can be accessed and enjoyed by everyone. Thus, we need to be creative with our assignments and engaging in our teaching style until we are sure that everyone can enjoy the addition of more complex media. The last thing we want to do is make any of our students feel as though they are not getting the full classroom experience. Does that mean that we may be a bit functionally limited, yes, I have found that to be the case, but things are changing.  This also means that as much as we want to get crazy with the bells and whistles, that simplicity is not necessarily a bad thing, and we need to consider the most easily accessible media options for students, which sometimes means going for a lower tech option.

I have all sorts of students taking my classes, and I probably I have a much greater variety in my student body than traditional classroom professors.  Because of the flexibility and wide access of online courses,  I teach a lot of working single parents, young mothers, older students who are retraining, and active military.  I have taught students while they are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan! My students take my courses from Navy ships and correctional facitilites. When I run into resistance about the efficacy of online learning, and I do, I tell people about the ways in which online classes can reach people who might never be able to set foot in a classroom.  I take a lot of pride in helping my students to make the life transitions that my courses frequently signal for them. I especially like knowing that I am helping to give my students a chance they may otherwise never have had.

Wow, what a holiday break.  In truth, because of the way I teach, I don’t ever really get breaks.  It’s part of the bonus that I can teach from wherever I want, so I can teach from San Francisco, London, or Costa Rica, but the downside is that I’m always having to teach.  The same goes for being ill.  I don’t get to just go home and rest, I’m home already, I can rest, but more often than not I just work through whatever is ailing me. I don’t take sick days or even weekends off.  In early December I came down with shingles, which is horrifically painful, and I seriously needed to not work at all.  I just couldn’t, partially because of the pain and fatigue, and also because I couldn’t move my head for a week.   Of course I had what seemed like 10 million essays to grade, feedback to give, and grades to configure, all in the context of panicky students who had been asleep all term and realized that OMG they were failing in the last three days of the class and what can I do to help them.  Bad time to get ill.  What I did was to send all of my students an e-mail and let them know what was happening, what they could expect from me, and what I needed from them.  You know what?  They were awesome.  All of them.  Not only were they sweet, they took responsibility for their actions and their grades, and stopped asking me questions that I couldn’t answer.  This all gave me a “huzzah!” sort of moment: I need to clear some of this stuff upfront.  Even though course rules, deadlines and my expectations are in my syllabi, many students don’t read them entirely, if at all, and they just forget stuff.  I have had FAQ’s in my courses before, but I needed to update them and add to them.  I think that maybe if I put my expectations in different words in a separate spot in the course, that it will help drive some of these points home to my students.  I also need to remember that my students don’t expect for me to be superhuman.  If I’m sick, or if I need to be at a conference or somewhere else, that all I need to do is tell them.  They just want to hear from me, and it will help reduce some of the pressure on me to get everything done yesterday.

I’m off next week to do some research in London and Cornwall.  I’ll be gone for a month.  Normally this all works out well.  I do love my mobility!

I heard a horror story the other day from a dear friend of mine who was taking an online course.  She reported to me that the professor offered no grades on the written assignments until the end of the course, and gave no feedback at all for any written assignments.  When she went to the college dean to see if this was going to be the standard amount of interaction for an online course, the dean said, basically, “It varies. The Professor had e-mail problems. You should do your homework to find a better professor next time.”  I was disgusted by this.  I work my butt off to try to get to know my students and to give them useful feedback on their work. For me, that is more important than being on the discussion boards.  That is the one to one supervision that my students get from me.  I just don’t think neglecting your students is acceptable in any format.

This kind of stuff gives online learning a bad reputation.  Both learners and academics are very skeptical of this form of teaching (although honestly, if more professors were actually trained in any sort of pedagogy, they might not even ask the initial question).  People actually believe that online courses are entirely computer run.  To combat this perception, online professors need to work a little harder at demonstrating our humanity, and building connection with our students.  This is not as difficult as it sounds.  Yes, you need to be present in your classes, but you also need to have a personality.  Work on your writing style, be funny, be human. Let your students know a bit about who you are.  It’s much easier for F2F profs to perform and entertain, which really helps to establish a student following and also builds classroom success.  We can do it too, we just need to work at it. When students and colleagues see that there are real people teaching online courses,  they will be harder to dismiss.  The statistics about the efficacy of online teaching already support this, we need better marketing.

As a final word, teaching this way is not for everyone. If you don’t want to, don’t know how and can’t balance it with face to face teaching, don’t do it.  You will quickly realize that online courses don’t run themselves, and no one will be happy with the results.

Educational theorists just LOVE the thought of group projects.  They increase collaboration!  Build transferable skills!  We get to be all techie and use wikis!  Don’t get me wrong, wikis are cool and useful, but that’s not the point here.  Group projects are really difficult to manage in an online setting and students just don’t like them all that much.  First off, many students take online courses because they require a certain kind of independence.  They may need to log on at odd hours and do assignments in their own time.  They have kids, jobs and other committments that make working with others difficult.  Also, I have many, many students who are deployed military or who have obligations that make group work impossible.  This means that I have to always have an alternate assignment for those who can’t participate.  What usually happens, and this goes for the classroom setting as well, is that one or two people get the research and writeup dumped on them.  No matter how hard we want everyone to participate equally, someone emerges as the leader, and is the motivating factor, and one or two people in the group ride their coattails to a better grade.  How do you solve this?  Peer evaluations?  Oh, sure.  Don’t you just want to write an honest evaluation of the person who did nothing in your group for your prof?  That’s horrible!  I wouldn’t want to do that.  It may not always be a matter of some people getting a free ride, many, many of my students have literacy problems.  English is not their first language, and yes, I take that into account when I grade their work and try to make sure they get the writing help they need.  Is it fair to make other people in a team situation be responsible for these students who need extra attention?

Believe me, I value collaboration.  When I teach F2F I LOVE to get people into groups, give them a project and a time limit and then let the fun begin. Online presents other challenges, and I feel more like a babysitter than a facilitator.  I would love to have these projects work well and feel that all my students are getting good results from them. I really would, but I am still unconvinced. If some of you out there have had good results, let me know what you did.  I’d love to hear about it.

It is a frequent maxim among online educators that’s the discussion board is the heart of the online classroom. Indeed it is, and it is also the part of online teaching that is perhaps the most daunting for novice online professors. There are a number of different strategies for managing a discussion board, and while I won’t get into those here, I think it’s worth while discussing the types of things that make good discussion questions.

I firmly believe it is my role as an educator to have students engage with and demonstrate knowledge of the material that I am presenting to them. I also require that they demonstrate critical thinking skills, and can apply the coursework to their everyday lives. I teach humanities, and I think a lot of students go into the course believing that there is no real application for this stuff, and most of them leave feeling quite enriched, much to their surprise.   So, when I craft my discussion board, I want the discussion to meet certain criteria:

1. I want the question to be stimulating and open ended, possibly a bit provocative.

2. I want the question to force the students to engage with the material they have read or viewed, and to form opinions about it.

Tn the past when I have been given course shells to alter, the problems with the discussion board questions have come in two categories : the first problem is that some of the questions did not require critical thinking skills, they were questions with specific right and wrong answers that ONLY demonstrated command of the material. The second bit of that is good, but it completely shuts down discussion.  If there is one right answer, students really aren’t going to be discussing very much, now will they?

The second kind of problematic discussion question, from my view, is the one that refers to the course material, yet does not require students to engage in it. An example of this would be to state that gladiatorial games in ancient Rome were nasty and exploitative, can we think of any similar sporting or entertainment spectacle today that may have similar features. Sure, that’s going to get the students talking, and they may understand at the end of it that gladiator games were nasty, but because that can be inferred from the question itself, and it does not force the students to do any extra reading or to show that they themselves know anything about the context of the original sport. In other words, they can totally fake it.

One of my favorite discussion questions from my early Western Humanities courses involves getting them  to read a section from the Roman poet Juvenal, to discuss the ways in which his writing may still be relevant today, and to see if they can relate to it at all. I have been amazed by how much his work deeply resonates with my students, and the frustrations that it inspires in them that they are all too willing to discuss.  And in reading the discussion posts I can tell that they’ve read it, and they’ve taken something away from it. And that makes me feel like I’ve done my job.

This is an essay I wrote a couple of years ago and have updated it to reflect changes in my life and career. I hope it is of use to people.

I am frequently asked for details about my rather unusual career and how I got to be doing what I’m doing. I started with online education in 1999, when I helped develop a set of blended delivery courses (online and face to face) for the MA in Cornish Studies for the University of Exeter. I continued working with these until I returned to the States in 2001 on a 10 month grant project for the State of Florida. I had the good fortune to arrive three short weeks before 9/11 which caused a moratorium on most academic hiring in Florida and elsewhere. I did find that there was a need for people to teach courses online, however. I had done it before, so I signed up to teach two online Humanities courses for St. Petersburg College. I figured that it would tide me over while I looked for more “permanent” work, read “tenure track”, through the rough times. I just loved it, though. I enjoyed the challenges of building courses online and teaching students who would otherwise not have the opportunity to pursue higher education. My students were special, and the teaching was some of the most satisfying I had ever done. Online teaching calls for a completely different pedagogy, and it was one that I found very challenging. I realized I was the happiest and most satisfied I had ever been. I asked “could I make a living this way?” I ran some numbers and the nature of my job search changed. Today I am an adjunct for four different schools, St. Petersburg College, Florida Community College, Northampton Community College, and University of Maryland University College. I primarily teach Humanities and Anthropology core courses, and the amount I teach varies per term. There are some great things about earning a living this way, but it’s not for everyone. Here I will address some of the very real benefits and drawbacks to becoming a cyber prof.

PROS
This job can be very comfy. I don’t have to get dressed up to go to work, in fact, I don’t have to get dressed at all. I can teach from anywhere that has a decent internet connection, anywhere in the world, and I can do it on my own time. I can live where I want and travel when I want. If I have an illness or family emergency, I can attend to it without worry, and as I have elderly parents, this is a good thing. If I want to leave for a couple of weeks in the middle of a term, I can just do it as long as I set aside time to get my work done. I don’t have to sit on committees, or go to meetings. I have no commute, and no stacks of papers to deal with. It’s very environmentally friendly! Since my only office is a home office, I get great tax deductions. There is no pressure to publish so I do it for myself. I am making a pretty good living for someone with my type of degree, and I have the freedom and flexibility that I love. It works for me at this stage in my life where I need these things. However there are things to consider…

CONS
To make a decent living teaching online you have to teach A LOT. I generally teach about 10-13 classes per term to earn the kind of money I want to be earning. The reason I can do that is because all the course prep is done ahead of time, so I can handle more courses. I certainly couldn’t do that face to face! However, all the grading can be totally insane. I have lots (but I also assign essays so I do have myself to blame). Online teaching takes a lot of time. It’s like comparing apples to oranges, though, so you need to learn a bit about how it works before you decide if it’s for you. Even with all the nifty bells and whistles, online courses don’t run themselves. Not at all. To be a good online prof, you need to be a good teacher, engaged and personable. There are tricks of the trade, but I will address those in other blog entries.

You don’t get the hassles of working for an institution, but you don’t get the benefits either. As of this writing it’s still hard to be a fully online prof and be tenure track with one institution. I know some who are, but they still have many face to face duties with an institution. Their lifestyle is still quite different from mine. I don’t get insurance or other benefits from my job, I pay my own way to conferences, and I don’t have much by way of collegial stimulation. I do belong to mailing lists with all my institutions and within various disciplines, but it isn’t the same as meeting a colleague over lunch and discussing your latest research. Conferences become even more important in maintaining an academic presence and in just getting the stimulation and encouragement that many academics need.
Also, if you’re one of those academics who just love the prestige and exclusivity of the ivory tower, this may not be for you either. While some academics are terribly jealous of what I do, others look down their noses at online teaching in general. In doing a salary comparison of where I am now and “regular” professors in my field I’m competitive, and earn more than many of my peers in traditional academia, but that may not always be the case. Right now that’s fine with me, but it may be different a few years down the road. I realize that this is a very new way of doing things for universities. I’m hoping that somewhere down the road, institutions won’t care if their profs are on site, and those of us who choose to develop online education as their specialization will be full players. I’d love to be able to develop graduate level courses or seminars, but that isn’t possible for me just now. It isn’t where my bread and butter is, and that’s just fine. I’m helping to impart important concepts to people who need them, and I get greater joy from that at this stage than lots of theoretical noodling. I can do that elsewhere.
Also, realize that it is hard to keep up an active research profile and make good money this way. It’s hard to find the time to keep writing (although I still do). You don’t get the sabbaticals or holidays that most active researchers have the luxury of. Then again, no one is going to ask me to write any grants to earn my keep.

HOW DO I GET STARTED?
So you think you still want to do this? Ok, let’s go. Remember that it may take awhile for you to build up enough institutions to make a good wage. Schools typically have course caps on adjuncts, so you may need to get a few schools together. The first thing to do is look at what you can teach and do a search for schools that have strong online programs. I’d suggest community colleges first because many other universities tend to draw on their own talent pool in developing their online courses. If you’re not in the US look at the Open University or in Distance Learning programs. Very simply, e-mail their distance education coordinator and tell them that you’re interested in getting started. You will most likely need to do some training in online pedagogy and on how to operate and develop content for online learning management systems. I have been trained in Web CT, ANGEL, and Blackboard, as well as taken courses on proprietary systems, and have also taken a number of workshops and courses on advanced online pedagogy. If you already teach face to face, this training will be very valuable for you. As I said, it’s like apples and oranges, and you need to learn to do this properly.
Be sure to make sure the schools you are looking at are accredited and have a good reputation. There are some online programs that don’t, and you don’t want to be affiliated with them. If you are business or technologically oriented, you may wish to investigate accredited and respected corporate training programs and institutions. They are often in need and it could be a good way to go. Right now business, health and technology online programs are more developed than those in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It’s only a matter of time, though, before more curricula go online. If you have more questions or want specific recommendations, please feel free to contact me and I will try to be helpful.

Welcome to my new online enterprise. There are a lot of blogs out there for online educators, both in a university and corporate setting, but I wanted this one to be a bit different. I wanted to not only engage with new online learning strategies, platforms and technologies, but also to share a bit of what my life is like as a “cyber prof”, thoughts about academia, and tips for people wanting to do this. I am passionate not only about the potential of online learning for students, but also for educators. There is real freedom here, and real learning, and I want to share it. I also want to share the pitfalls and concerns. I hope you find my words useful, and maybe even occasionally entertaining and thought provoking.

No reason to get excited!  Dr. Amy Hale’s old website is being updated to this new Wordpress blog!