With contributing authors Dr. Donna Murdoch, Penn GSE VOLT instructor & Cat McManus, Penn GSE Doctoral Candidate
From early learning to high school, college, professional education, and beyond, can the landscape of for-credit online higher education become more competitive? We think the market is significantly saturated at this point. We don’t need more (or a more diverse array of) programs; the real missing piece is the lack of preparation and support for people who will be online instructors. Online instruction is not the same thing as teaching face-to-face, and many don't realize it until they find themselves teaching online and in hot water.
By 2003, 81% of colleges had at least one online class, and from 2002 to 2008 there was a 187% increase of students taking online classes. In 2010, 83% of CEOs and small business owners considered an online degree to be as credible as one earned traditionally, and today, 96% of traditional universities offer online courses. In 2013, President Obama pledged over $500 million for the creation of online course materials as part of his commitment through ConnectED, a government initiative designed to make education more accessible and affordable. With more than 7.1 million undergraduates enrolled in one or more online classes in 2013 (33.5% of total enrollment,) academic leaders on campuses have indicated that online instruction is crucial to their institutions (Allen & Seamen, 2014).
Many models makes a comfortable bandwagon
Online instruction now takes many forms in higher education. At both the Master’s and Bachelor’s levels, there are new competency-based education (CBE) providers that give learners credit for existing competencies, which enables students to spend less time to earn a degree (WGU, SNHU, U Wisc, Capella); prior learning assessment is also growing in popularity. Then you have the Minervas of the world: 1/2 the price of a Harvard (for instance) -- and you go to a different city every semester, all over the world.
The upshot of this is that there are many new and potentially exciting models of online learning and many new degrees that never existed in the past. Many universities see the growth of online programs as a way to generate much needed additional revenue without using classroom space and at the same time increasing accessibility. Some programs are developed and run in-house, while some are facilitated by companies (for instance, the widely-publicized Starbucks-ASU arrangement).
Moving beyond “correspondence courses”
Online education has made great strides since its inception. It has evolved from electronic correspondence courses ("read your text, comment on that message board") to rich, collaborative environments that help instructors connect with students, help connect students with students (in some cases around the world), share multi-media content ideal for learning, and even provide video discussion. Each year it’s more credible and more accessible, and each year more students sign on.
Online courses and programs can now effectively reach thousands of people, and we have devised ways that allow instructors to actually touch individual students to be sure they are comprehending material, being introduced to new perspectives, or being inspired by particular arguments. But in general most institutions fail to provide instructors with the support they need to use these new tools in ways that will enhance pedagogy and learning. Given the emphasis on personalization within education, it seems a contradictory impulse to hope to multiply an institution’s impact on students through establishing online programs while failing to give instructors the support they need to know students really are learning.
Teaching quality matters -- but support is lacking
We contend that the real issue -- and the one that largely goes unaddressed -- is that the majority of people who teach online are given virtually no assistance in learning how to teach online. Professional development for these instructors is limited to lunch ‘n’ learns, basic learning platform support, and other technology-related resources, but generally fails to expose instructors to the best techniques for online instruction.
In contrast to popular practice (if not popular belief), you can't just take a course and "put it online" - it needs to be restructured so that content is compelling, interaction and collaboration are interwoven, and assessments are done in ways that are more project- or writing- based. Instructors need to learn how to foster the instructor/student relationship and encourage student-to-student relationships as well. Consider the conclusion from this 2001 article on the the differences between face-to-face and online learning:
Contrary to intuition, current Web-based online college courses are not an alienating, mass-produced product. They are a labor-intensive, highly text-based, intellectually challenging forum which elicits deeper thinking on the part of the students and which presents, for better or worse, more equality between instructor and student. Initial feelings of anonymity notwithstanding, over the course of the semester, one-to-one relationships may be emphasized more in online classes than in more traditional face-to-face settings.
Even as early as 2001, in other words, we knew that charisma could carry one only so far in online instruction, and that instructional design must come to the forefront.
Who is filling the hole in teaching online pedagogy?
Everything we’ve written leads us to the conclusion that training instructors to teach online is a good investment with potential for large returns to instructor and student learning as well as to institutional budgets.
Nevertheless, there continues to be a big gap in the market waiting to be filled by people (and by programs) who are expert in both online pedagogy and in teaching people online pedagogy. As with all things -- particularly when searching online -- there is a lot of chaff in with the wheat when it comes to finding quality organizations and institutions offering instruction in online pedagogy. There are some examples of programs and organizations that are tackling the issue we’ve described, however. Penn GSE has initiated the Virtual Online Teaching (VOLT) Program, making it unique among its peer institutions in actually offering a program devoted to online pedagogy (full disclosure: one of our authors is a VOLT instructor). Coursera offers a “Learning to Teach Online” course run by instructors from the University of New South Wales; the Online Learning Consortium is a longstanding (founded in 1992!) professional organization devoted to disseminating best practices for higher ed online learning.
Moving forward
We’ve confined our discussion to the dearth of quality instruction in online pedagogy, but the truth is that most brick-and-mortar higher education institutions also fail to instruct graduate students, including student-teachers (or faculty, for that matter), in how to teach at the university level. Looking forward, the question of how to provide quality online teaching not only for higher education instructors, but also for K-12 teachers is at issue. How might this movement towards improved online pedagogy dovetail with national movements to overhaul or rethink professional development for instructors? Moving towards truly effective instruction in online pedagogy requires, foremost, a strong belief that online learning is valuable. But the best online learning efforts will only be successful if the teaching and learning community have put in place the scaffolding and programs to develop the best online instructors.
