| Higher Education Course Migration from F2F to Online Instruction: Problems for Instructors |
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Reflection #2 Educational technologists are brokers. We have no stand-alone academic discipline, despite Robert Heinich's insistence that such a discipline is there for the grasping. Truth is, were it not for the mediative needs of other disciplines vis a vis technology, we would all be unemployed. Fortunately the tidal wave of Distance Education that is currently sweeping across academia brings in its wake an abundance of need for technological mediation. A cursory perusal of the literature, or a brief survey of the Web, would lead one to believe that our primary clientele are the students who are signing up for DE courses in ever increasing numbers. They are, in fact, the end users of technology-mediated instruction, but perhaps they are not or first clients. Except for those IT professionals who actually teach IT, the rest of us work with instructors who teach something else, be it math, history, art, science, and these instructors are a part of the clientele, along with school administrators, with whom we work directly. We are the experts in instructional design, and as we enthusiastically fulminate about the virtues of constructivism and collaborative learning, it is a curious thing that our approach to our clients is so...didactic. At least insofar as our own professional literature gives expression to that approach, we are almost pedantic. What's going on? I suspect that part of the problem here is rooted in the design model. The instructional design team is composed of a variety of players -- the designer, the manager, the graphic artist, the media specialist, and the subject matter expert. The SME is a part of the design team, bringing content to a design that targets learner end-users, and in the end, facilitating the learning process for those end-users. The other players on the team understand the role of the SME/instructor/facilitator, so the temptation may exist to assume the SME also understands that role in the same way. It is also the case that, among all the members of the design team, the SME typically knows the least about instructional design, so a further temptation arises among the design experts to regard the SME/instructor as a somewhat less than co-equal player. Certainly the viewpoint that comes across in the literature does nothing to dispell this notion. There exists plenty of advice -- do this, try that -- from those who have already done DE successfully, but it is amazing how quickly these folks forget how arduous is the task at the outset, how much trial and error, how much time invested, how uncertain the outcome. Perhaps it is in the nature of these innovators and early adaptors to be oblivious to the fact that what to them are minor impediments are to others major barriers to the development of good online instruction. This is where the design model can be helpful, with some adjustments to how we use it. As I mentioned at the outset of this reflection, the IT client under consideration here is not the learner/end-user of some DE courseware in an a undergraduate or graduate degree program. The first client here (not forgetting administrators and the institution as a whole) is the instructor, the college professor who seeks to migrate F2F instruction to an online environment. If we consider the instructor as learner/end-user, then we can apply the model, beginning with assessment of learner needs--analyze the learner and contexts, to borrow from D & C-- and then develop a course migration program offering reasonable expectations for success. We must first determine the needs of the instructor -- how the instructor views the teaching mission, what entry skills come in to play, e.g., knowledge of learning theory, instructional methods, organizational skills, abilities for analyizing outcomes, and attributes involving personal preferences and teaching styles. It is ironic that, for a discipline emphaisizing the importance of understanding and accounting for learner needs, IT often misses the set of instructors' needs that are right under its collective nose. This is where we need to do better. This is the task for this project. To be fair, it is not the case that as a profession we are entirely oblivious to the needs of instructors. There is a small segment of research literature that attends to the needs of instructors who are technologically uninitiated. This will be fodder for the next reflection... |
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