0.3 Findings  (Page 4/22)

Concern about online day

A major complaint Laura had about the online Day material was its ephemeral quality; it was available to the students during the course and for a limited time only afterwards. She felt this was a problem, because the students might use it to review for the licensing exam which was two years away. The students had all received a hardback copy of the textbook along with access to the website, but Laura thought the ability to drill with the test bank questions would help them right before taking the test.

Laura wanted to learn new teaching techniques, but chose to try out features of the Online Day with students on a voluntary basis. She was very careful in the way she expressed herself, and in creating new expectations for the students in terms of requiring them to learn with technology.

Lyle, the thespian

Lyle was one of the less experienced instructors, having taught for four years including two years of teaching while a graduate student. He worked at a state university in the Deep South. While working toward his doctorate degree, he took a course in college teaching specifically aimed at adult learning. He was the only participant in this study who had taken any kind of course in how to teach.

Discovering online day

When Lyle attended The Southern Association for Counseling Educators, he discovered the Online Day materials in the exhibition hall. “There was a booth there. A woman was working on a computer and I started to talk with her and voila!” Lyle had chosen to adopt the Online Day resources because he felt that the videos and research articles added another dimension to his course. He taught two sections of the course which met weekly, face-to-face. One met on campus, and the other at a satellite location about 60 miles away. He taught one class off campus each semester. “It’s an overload, so I get paid extra for it. That’s a lot of incentive.”

How he taught

Lyle taught the course by assigning a chapter a week, and the students had to take the online chapter test before coming to class. At first the students complained about taking the test on the material before they had been introduced to it in class. However, Lyle reported the students came to class better prepared and had much higher level discussions than they would have otherwise.

The two sections of the course had very different personalities. The on-campus class had 23 students, four men and the rest women. There was no Internet connection in the classroom, so Lyle could not use the course website or other online resources in class. He tended to lecture to the class, because they were not very active in discussions. The students were less focused on personal change and more focused on how to get the information they needed for the tests.

The off-campus section consisted of 10 women, about half of whom were teachers returning to go into school counseling. It was a more mature group. Additionally, the off-campus classroom had Internet connectivity. As Lyle put it:

Obviously with the technology backup, I get more examples, and it’s easier for us to have a conversation. It’s a smaller class, so that’s not really a fair comparison. It’s all female, so it seems like it’s a more intimate environment, where we’re talking about their personal change plans and looking at the theories.