0.3 Findings

Covering the material

Mark identified his biggest challenge in teaching the theories course as, “trying to get all the stuff in that needs to be covered” for the licensing exam. He had thought the additional resources included in the package would enhance the students’ learning, especially the videos, but he found instead that technical issues detracted from the students’ ability to focus on the content.

Discovering online day

Mark first became aware of the Online Day course materials at a professional conference where he saw it being demonstrated in the exhibits. Although he was not teaching the theories course the following semester, he thought it might be useful to a colleague:

When I saw the sign, I thought this would be useful to her, because she was actually teaching it online. I wasn’t really planning on doing an online course, but I though maybe I could use some of this stuff in the regular class just for convenience.

Mark had taught the theories course many times before, using different textbooks, which he found to be basically the same. “It wasn’t so much the content of the book, it was the webpage that I thought would be useful to students, because my biggest problem is trying to get good examples of the demonstration of the theory, the purest theoretical demonstrations, and they’re very hard to come by.” The videos he had shown to classes before were quite old and looked dated. Mark was enthusiastic about having the new videos exemplifying the different theories that the students could watch on their own. He felt that videos could play a critical role in their understanding of the therapeutic milieu. Previously he had concerns about the videos taking up so much class time, so he thought the streaming videos would be a good solution.

Student difficulties

However, the students had difficulties accessing the online videos.

Not everybody buys the textbook. Some of them had problems playing the video because they didn’t have the right video player software. Most counseling students aren’t that technically adept. I told them what to do, but I could tell I was talking to glazy-eyed people. That was another problem I didn’t really anticipate.

The reason students didn’t purchase the textbook was economic. Many of the students had lost their homes in Katrina a year before, when floods washed away whole neighborhoods, and their families had not recovered financially. “Not all of them have computers. Some had them, but lost them because of Katrina and had to replace them. That’s still going on down here.” The students had no option whether or not to pay tuition, but the state did not mandate the purchase of textbooks for the course. So to save money, sometimes students tried to get by without the textbook. There were only two or three students who didn’t buy the textbook in Mark’s theory class, but this created difficulties. It meant that the students without textbooks did not have access to the Online Day website containing the videos and the additional resources, either.