0.3 Findings  (Page 7/22)

I actually had reviewed the book and did really enjoy reading it and then I realized I was teaching off campus, and I’m in a room that has no media, so there’s no VCR, there’s no Power Points. It’s in a rural environment and our students don’t all have access. Some of them have dial-up modems which [are] going to be incompatible with some of the things that I was going to do. I was thinking along the lines of letting them see clips of people using the different techniques and a few of them have been able to do that.

After talking to the publisher’s technical staff about what the students needed to be able to take advantage of all the online resources, Nancy checked with her students to determine their challenges. She found that some of the students lacked access to high-speed Internet about a month into the course. The Online Day videos in particular wouldn’t work on computers without high-speed Internet. “When I was trying to figure out the whole system and found out that dial-up wasn’t going to work, I went and asked them who has what, did all of them have high speed Internet, and they didn’t.” At that point, Nancy felt like it wasn’t worth her time to use any of the Online Day resources. The problem of the technology “haves” and “have nots” created an uneven playing field. Instead, she used Blackboard to post some PowerPoint slides from a previous semester along with a few class announcements, and made use of the Online Day website optional.

Another challenge for Nancy was that some of the students didn’t know how to use Blackboard. Fortunately, however, some of the more experienced students advised the others in class on how to log in and use the system, just by talking them through the steps.

How she taught

Nancy had established the classroom environment to be conducive to communication among the students, as well as between her and the students. She encouraged collaboration by giving in-class small group assignments.

There’s a lot of peer to peer communication because I have them do a case study. We use the same case study and apply the different theories as we’re talking about them. They collaborate with each other on that. I had them do a few other activities, especially in the beginning, talking about things that fueled them, things that drained them, professional development, those kinds of things. So at least once each class period have them break into small groups to discuss a topic.

Nancy used technology in her teaching very little. She did use Blackboard for course management, and also incorporated some PowerPoint slides into her lectures. Nancy assigned one collaborative activity and regular small discussion groups, but she was more comfortable with the more traditional methods of lecturing and class discussion.

Ken, retired therapist

Ken lived in the southeast, where he had a private practice in psychotherapy for 30 years. Before he retired, a friend who taught at a small progressive college in the northeast invited him to join the teaching staff there. He had rejected the idea before because it didn’t pay well enough. “But then as I thought about retirement, I thought, you know, I could really enjoy doing that because I don’t want to absolutely do nothing. I want to sort of keep my hand in the pie.”