| Higher Education Course Migration from F2F to Online Instruction: Problems for Instructors |
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Issues and Problems, continued |
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Training: Training issues fall into two catagories: 1) technical, and 2) pedagogical. It is unclear from the evidence in the literature that faculty make a clear distinction between technical training needs on the one hand, and technological training needs that would include pedagogical issues, on the other. Dooley and Murphrey's study (2000) is relatively rare for making that distinction. The recognition of the need for training of both types is clear enough among educational technologists (Fink, 2002, Luck, 2001, and Diaz, 2001), and one gets the feeling, when reading the case studies of innovators like Furr (2003) and Matuga (2001) that these pioneers in DE were cognizant of the pedagogical differences between F2F and DE early in their careers as DE educators. But among early adaptors there is no clear evidence that pedagogical training of any kind is an issue foremost in their thinking. There are several possible approaches to faculty training, and we will discuss some of them later on. What ought to be noted here is that pedagogical training may be a delicate issue for some faculty, and this should be addressed with some measure of diplomacy. Technical Support: Technical support is one of the issues that all faculty agree upon, whether or not they are already doing DE. (Berge, 1999; Schifter, 2000). Except to note that faculty rank technical support--hardware that works, access that is reliable--among the top concerns for distance education development and implementation, not much else needs to be said in terms of assessing need. Obviously everyone -- teachers, students, administrators --wants infrastructure and hardware to work in a reliable manner. Interestingly, there is some anecdotal evidence that administrative decisions granting authority to individual departments and colleges for technology acquisition, development, and support, may prove to be counterproductive to the institution's long term strategic plans and goals, (Collegis, n.d.) even if such decisions receive faculty approval in the short term. Institutions laden with a conglomeration of non-integrated technology infrastructures risk alienating faculty who would otherwise be favorably disposed to online instruction. Administrative Support and Professional Recognition: Administrative support covers an array of issues from individual faculty needs for online course development time to larger institutional culture issues affecting attitudes and faculty morale. The common thread here is administrative authority to make policy decisions that often set the tone for discourse within the institution. We will consider here several issues that reside under the administrative umbrella. The first issue that often surfaces in research findings is the amount of time required to develop and maintain an online course (McKenzie, et al, 2000). Faculty developing their first online course often find that time required far exceeds their expectations based on time requirements for a traditional course. Prep time for an already developed online course may diminish over time, but even in such cases the time required may exceed typical prep time for a traditional course (Pachnowski and Jurczyk, 2003). Administrators may do well to consider policies granting release time for course development and workload adjustments during the first semester ofiinstruction. Workload is itself an issue for DE faculty. Research findings are fairly consistent in reporting the perception among DE faculty that Distance Education is more demanding than traditional F2F instruction (Bower, 2001; O'Quinn, 2002; Wilson, 2000; Wolcott and Betts,1999), in terms of course delivery as well as prep time and maintenance. Moreover, DE faculty express concerns over a lack of appreciation, not to mention reward or compensation as incentives for undertaking the additional workload required for online instruction. |
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