0.3 Findings  (Page 19/22)

According to research on indicators of higher-level thinking in online discussion boards, when students disagree with one another and argue various points, they are engaged in higher level thinking as described in Bloom’s taxonomy (Bloom, 1986). When students simply agree with each other, there is often little learning taking place.

Challenges of teaching online

When I initially asked Ed what kind of challenges he encountered teaching online in the spring semester, he couldn’t think of any. However, when he thought back to the first time he taught the course, he recollected difficulties the students had in learning to work the online quizzes.

We had a lot of problems with students, I don’t care what my instructions were, “Gee, I didn’t know this quiz was closed and that if I got out I couldn’t get back in; I didn’t know the quiz was going to close on this day; gee the time changed and I didn’t know it affected me.” We worked out all those problems. Tim was the in-house guy that could take care of this and take it off of me.

Although Ed had used Online Day for the two previous semesters, it was the first time he had taught course with the Online Day resources embedded in Blackboard. Ed felt this extra navigational layer of entering through another program might have made access more difficult for the students. Ed felt like the biggest problem that semester stemmed from “the kids not knowing how to get into Online Day. We get into it kind of through the back door, in the sense that we do have it now on Blackboard.” The students basically had to know how to use both systems in order to complete their assignments.

When asked what he thought might be done differently to help the students overcome this obstacle, a frustrated Ed responded:

They just have to familiarize themselves with computers, concepts like Blackboard, online registration. I’ve had some students say, “Look, I’m not computer literate.” Well, to get through this university you need to be computer literate. So they struggle and most of them make it okay.

This was a surprising comment coming from Ed, who was totally dependent on Tim to make it possible to teach an online course. He was bewildered about what went wrong this semester:

It seems like I had to kind of keep going back and nurse some of them along. The students did not drop out, they simply failed the exam. Coming into the exam, they had quiz averages of 34. I know it’s not the course, because 80% made A or B. There were one or two Cs and two Fs, so maybe they just didn’t finish.

His comments show how easy it is to lose touch with online students. If the majority are active in the online discussions and doing well on the automatically-graded weekly tests,

a student could fall behind and not be noticed. Ed didn’t grade the students for each week’s participation in the discussion board, so one or two students’ absence could go unnoticed.

Orientation for online students

In thinking about a possible solution to the problem, Ed told me that the university used to require all students to register on campus. When they arrived, the students went through an orientation program where they met the teachers and could be taught face-to-face what they needed to know to take the course. Ed really liked the program and felt it was essential. However, the vice-president decided to do away with orientation because he felt it was a hardship for the students to come to campus, and might negatively effect enrollment of distance learners. This policy was a sore point with Ed, who had made his opinions known about the importance of face-to-face orientations in the past. Although very frustrated with the situation, Ed would not bring up the problem again, because he knew he would just be “shot down.”