POSITION ON ONLINE DISTANCE EDUCATION
Approved November 1, 2003
Position of the Two-Year College English Association–Southwest Region
Preamble: Recent technological advances and an interest in distance education on the part of college administrations have led to a strong push toward online delivery of college courses. In many cases, the move to offer online courses has been premature as many critical issues that ground the practice, both pedagogically and in terms of shared governance, have not been worked out or in many cases even addressed. TYCA-SW believes that a basic set of guidelines is necessary for the proper use of this media in English instruction. While we understand the attraction on the part of both administrations and students to online course offerings, we feel it is imperative that such offerings be of full pedagogical benefit to the student as well as fair and reasonable for faculty. With this in mind, we offer the following guidelines for the use of online instruction in English courses.
Guidelines: Within the Western Tradition, higher education has been built upon the foundation that teacher-scholars bring their expertise, ideas, and creativity into the classrooms of the institutions they serve. Sharing the excitement of creativity and discovery inspires students. From the beginning of this tradition, a tradition unique in history, faculty have retained proprietary interest in that which they teach and that which they publish. This policy has served students, faculty, and society well for going on eight centuries. The delivery of a faculty member’s courses online falls within this long established tradition. Therefore, TYCA–SW believes faculty who create courses for online delivery should retain the ownership of the courses they write in the same way as faculty who publish retain ownership of the copyright of whatever they publish. We cite the Galveston College Intellectual Property Rights Policy as a good step in this direction.
As some students choose to take more than one online course during their college careers, clearly they would benefit if they do not have to negotiate new technology each time. From that perspective, it seems only sensible that colleges have their courses on the same platform. We think this is the preferable situation. However, until faculty and administration of a college come to a workable agreement about faculty ownership of course materials, it is in faculty members’ best interest to locate courses off-campus where their copyrights will be protected. While the student is best served by having all courses offered by a college on the same platform, we believe that before we can recommend that step, it is important that administrations recognize faculty ownership of all course materials created.
Recommendations: To answer concerns over the integrity and variability of online offerings as well as security over testing, we recommend the following:
Student/faculty ratios should be low enough to ensure the active engagement of students and high academic achievement. Given the increased difficulty of teaching, critiquing and evaluating online work, we recommend colleges set the cap at 70% of the face-to-face limit for the same courses. We believe this limit should apply not only to courses that are fully online, but also to hybrid courses that have both an online and a face-to-face component.
Courses should be at least as rigorous as similar courses delivered by more traditional means, meeting the objectives and requirements outlined in the official course description as well as national, state, and local accreditation standards.
Instructional technologists able to cope with online security need to be readily available to ensure sites are safe from cheating and hacking.
Appropriate procedures for evaluation and verification that the student is submitting his/her own work should be mutually agreed upon by the instructor and the institution.
As English, especially writing, courses differ greatly from content-based courses, we believe there is a need for some sort of institutional quality control system (a checklist that all distance education courses must meet) developed specifically for English courses. To answer these concerns and others, we recommend the following (with some points borrowed from the National Education Association {NEA} policy on distance education):
Colleges should use only instructors whose qualifications are the same as those of instructors teaching in traditional English classes and who are prepared specifically and comprehensively to teach in this environment.
Courses that are offered should be consistent with the institution’s overall offerings and integrated into its mission.
Colleges need to ensure the presence of adequate infrastructure, with all that that entails, including appropriate facilities and equipment, libraries and laboratories as needed, adequate support for faculty and technical personnel on or off campus and efficient student services.
One question that often comes up is the online load. That begs the question, should there be a maximum number or a maximum percentage of such courses one can/must teach as part of the semester load? Allowing for the unique nature of disciplines, the limited number of distance education courses that might be available, and staffing limitations encountered by different departments, each instructional department within an institution should determine a limit for the number or percentage of distance education sections a faculty member may teach. Department faculty are closest to the scene and have a day-to-day knowledge that makes them the best qualified to make such decisions.
It is a disaster if someone ill-prepared tries to take on a distance learning course. We support the NEA’s statement that such courses should have instructors “who are prepared specifically and comprehensively to teach in this environment.” Any faculty member teaching distance education courses should have available thorough training in teaching such courses and should be required to train until competent. In addition, continued training in teaching distance education courses should be made available. An important question to be considered is, what training opportunities should be provided for faculty in designing such a course? The term “training” perhaps should be broadened to “education” because faculty really need much more than the technical training often offered by colleges. They also need to know something of the theories of distance learning, the rhetoric of hypertext, the current research on differences between reading hypertext and reading printed text, and the pedagogy of distance learning. Many experts in distance learning consider it to be a separate system, different from the “medieval model” of classroom learning still used in traditional classes. Simply transferring the old model of teaching (“I’ll put my lectures on the Web”) is not good online teaching. In addition, English faculty especially need practical training in the nuts-and-bolts of course management such as how to keep from being overloaded with drafts and e-mails from students around the clock. Of course, they also need the technical training in the platform being used to carry the course.
Therefore, TYCA–SW believes faculty should be offered a variety of opportunities both for theoretical education and practical training in distance education by their institutions. These opportunities could take the following forms:
In-service training on technical issues about the platform
Support for conference and workshop attendance
Support for further graduate education in rhetoric or distance education courses
Library subscriptions to relevant periodicals such as Syllabus and The American Journal of Distance Education
Encouragement of faculty research and publication on distance learning
Invitations to experts in the field of distance education for college convocations or in-service training
Acknowledgement of faculty efforts in distance education on evaluations
Another situation that often presents itself is an administration that is eager to offer online courses before faculty feel ready to create them. That raises the question, should an administration be able to order a faculty member to create and/or teach an online course as part of one’s expected, regular, contracted duties? We believe this is a bad idea. Many teachers prefer the traditional classroom setting or fear working so intimately through technology and that should be respected. Our position is that, in order to prevent this, college governing boards should adopt the policy that no faculty member can be forced to create or teach distance education courses unless such an expectation was one of the contingent factors upon which the hiring of the faculty member was made.
Finally, development of new courses with new methodologies is often done by full-time faculty members and in many places merits extra compensation or release time. Galveston College, for example gives extra compensation for the creation of online classes. Course development for distance education, is generally recognized as being even more time and labor intensive than for traditional classes. Every aspect of the course must be developed up-front, with no element left for development later in the semester as sometimes occurs in on-campus classes. In addition, Web-based courses often require the time-consuming task of seeking permission from owners of various Web sites to use their material in the course if the course is to be used beyond the immediate campus. Thus compensation in the form of a stipend or release time for course development for Web courses is appropriate. Therefore, the position of TYCA–SW is that faculty developing Web courses for the first time should be given a stipend appropriate to the time and expertise used to develop such a course or released from their regular teaching duties to allow them time to develop such a course. The Dallas TeleCollege model is one to be considered: it offers a stipend for course development to first-time online instructors.