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Reflections on Learning and Teaching at a Distance: The America in the Sixties Course

by Sloan-C

I. THE CHALLENGE

As an American history instructor with some twenty-odd years of classroom experience, the opportunity to offer a course on the web in the spring of 1997 posed interesting new challenges and problems. I think it fair to say that I was a reasonably good classroom teacher receiving at least some recognition from my students and colleagues for teaching. I was, and remain, very comfortable in the classroom, interested in engaging students in conversation, more than in lecturing, but doing both discussions and lectures as the situation and numbers required.

Using the web as a vehicle to teach a course: America in the Sixties immediately required some rethinking of how to manage the virtual classroom and, more importantly, how to interest students, not physically present, in the subject itself. How would I also help them to learn more about the period we would explore together, the exciting and frustrating decade of the 1960s in the United States?

As the new Director of a well-established distance education program, the University Without Walls, Skidmore College, the task before me was to offer a required history course for our students, all of whom would be at some distance. After talking with a few colleagues and some reflection, what seemed particularly important was that we try to duplicate the most meaningful experience any of us had had in a classroom: the graduate seminar. So from the outset, my goal was to create an exciting, interactive learning environment, using the web, which put undergraduate students at the center of our work and in touch with each other as well as with myself. In the end, nine undergraduates took the course.

II. ASYNCHRONOUS CHATROOM: THE SEMINAR EXPERIENCE

I immediately began working with our IT support folks to create an asynchronous chatroom that I hoped would be the crucial piece of web architecture: our virtual classroom. As I said, our adult University Without Walls students were all at a distance, some as close as Albany others scattered around the nation. The resulting "room" asked students to log on with their own name, which provided immediate access to a divided screen, the bottom half, blank and ready for their new comments; the top portion maintained a running record of every comment made by all students. A student who wanted to discuss an issue or respond to an earlier remark could scroll through the top window or use the find feature to locate the item in question. Once the student completed his or her comments they simply logged off and the new remarks were posted to the top window.

This chat, or seminar arrangement, allowed students to access each other’s remarks, and my contributions, whenever they wanted, any day or time. It proved to be as powerful an educational activity as one could wish. It also, of course, required some obvious work and monitoring on my part.

I began the course by posting my syllabus as a separate document and then created a weekly list of topics complete with questions for initial conversation. I quickly discovered that if the conversation was to work it required that I had to read every student’s remarks and, about twice a week, make a contribution of my own. Such a process also meant trying to summarize the comments, indicating by name who said what and, as in any good seminar or discussion session, summarizing the conversation while trying to suggest new directions for thought and conversation. Nothing especially new about this: good teaching has always required, to my mind, generating interest, creating opportunities for student involvement and bringing one’s own expertise to the conversation in such a way that students are encouraged to participate, not be overawed by the professor’s presence or their own weaknesses. Michael Sedore, Director of Instructional Technology at St. Lawrence University contributed one important idea, not pursued, but making considerable educational sense. Michael suggested that in response to the instructor's course page each student would begin immediately to create his/her own website similar to a portfolio with interactive potential to reach all other students and the instructor.

III. THE WEB

What was especially exciting was that the chat room allowed the immediate creation of web links if a web address (URL) was cited in a student’s comments. As active links the other students could immediately access all kinds of information regarding the Sixties, and particularly information not provided by myself. I had already modeled that activity by taking the time every week to link new web sources as we considered each new topic. The web resources on Vietnam, Civil Rights, the Beats, the cultural aspects of these remarkable years, and so many other topics, are simply staggering. Sites devoted to every conceivable personality and issue exist, from Martin Luther King Jr., to Dylan, to Kerouac, Ginsberg to the Digger’s archives, from Khe Sahn to the Tet offensive, from Women’s Lib to the Weather Underground. As many have observed, not everything found there is reliable but neither is everything in any library. The ability to access primary materials, obscure information, images, sounds, and video makes the web the most exciting educational tool and educational challenge of our time.

IV. COURSE ORGANIZATION

Having created the chatroom as the centerpiece for our group discussions the rest seemed pretty straightforward, if not always entirely easy. Using the html extensions to Microsoft Word 6.0, I created a link to the Sixties homepage that offered the students a course description and syllabus. In addition, I created links to a course schedule, to lectures that I had written in the past and a link to a wide variety of course resources including bibliographic materials, video resources and, as the course unfolded, links to valuable web sites.

V. LECTURES

It was never my intention to duplicate the traditional lecture classroom. While necessary for large groups, lecturing has never seemed to me to be especially good pedagogy. Nevertheless, I decided to post some of my older lectures, drawn from earlier courses I offered on Vietnam, Modern America and America Since 1945, more or less as readings to supplement the nine books I required for the course. While nine books seem like a lot, and while I asked every student to buy all the books, the reality was that many of the students could get only a portion of them. I estimate that every student read about 5-6 books for the course but not all read the same ones. The lectures then became supplemental to the other reading and provided some sense of my perspective. It is important to note, again, that these lectures were not the central point of contact or learning for the course.

VI. INSTRUCTOR'S CONTRIBUTION

As I indicated briefly above, my critical work and my main contributions to the course were several. Insofar as the crucial point of student and faculty contact was to occur "in" the chatroom, the arrangement and my response to that activity was most important. Initially, I planned a course schedule, which entailed selecting both topics and the order of our extended conversation. Essentially, I provided a week in the schedule for each topic, beginning with the Beats and moving through the Civil Rights Movement, the War in Vietnam, and the enormous cultural conflict that erupted in America; in total, ten topic weeks with time built in for a break and for conversations that drifted beyond the weekly boundaries.

For each topic, I prepared a preliminary statement with questions that I hoped would provoke a wider dialogue and some debate. During each week I also found myself writing mini-lectures, what I came to call lecturettes, written on the fly and immediately linked to the schedule. I didn’t really try to research these carefully, as I would have a formal lecture, because I wanted them to be reflections that grew directly out of the conversations in the chatroom. I also started each new week by doing some research on the web to find new web sites and resources that students could use as they came to consider the topic and issues raised by their own remarks. This proved to be extraordinarily exciting and valuable. It modeled for the students how they could find important sources on the web and I found great sites that helped with the teaching of this course, beyond anything I have ever been able to do in the traditional classroom. To be able to refer students, for example, to the Diggers (the San Francisco, Haight Ashbury anarchist group most famous for its free handouts of food and all kinds of other stuff) website, and the Diggers archive, complete with fabulous 60s posters, broadsides, brochures, political statements, and food for the head was simply amazing.

VII. SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

We also posted brief student biographical sketches and built in a e-mail list with an immediate pop-up e-mail dialogue box so that students could create back channels for conversations that they preferred not to share in the chatroom. In retrospect, I don’t think the "bios" worked especially well. Instead, as students began to discuss issues presented by the Sixties, and inevitably revealed their own personal and political perspectives, people began to relate to each other and formed their own networks. While this was a planned development, as it unfolded it was quickly apparent that these networks became an especially important means for students to get to know each other better. Insofar as the traditional classroom and larger university is as much a social environment as a strictly learning one, these contacts were crucial in allowing students to develop a sense of their relationship to others and, to a lesser extent perhaps, with me.

VIII. PROJECTS

Committed to encouraging students to have as much direct contact with primary sources as possible and to collaborative interaction, I assigned web-based projects to the entire class. I asked students to create small teams of two or three persons, select a topic, with my assistance, and build a web page for the shared presentation of their material.

With the usual difficulties, that is, with some little checking around and hesitation, most of the students quickly found a partner or team. Topics tended to be too broad initially, as in traditional situations, but quickly became more manageable. Again, the web became an amazing resource. The student projects ranged from a somewhat meager Rock and Roll page that was great to listen to but lacked much solid research, to a fine oral history of the Civil Rights Movement, to a equally interesting and extraordinarily well-researched web page devoted to a history of the American Peace Movement.

As virtually none of the students had created a html document prior to this assignment, it was quite a delight to see how well they did. I fielded some questions and certainly all the initial problems came to me. If I couldn’t solve them, I passed them on to my key computer associate in the IT office, David Maswick. Dave’s e-mail address was also available for students to go directly to David as necessary.

The hands-on creation of these pages was a crucial educational outcome of this course. These web projects offered students an opportunity to solve a range of problems, some social, some technical, and others concerning more traditional skills related to research, writing and presentation. It seems to me that this kind of an exercise is critical as we prepare our students for the world they confront. In addition to the traditional knowledge that a good liberal arts program offers, students need to confront tasks that require teamwork to solve. They need to meet and overcome technical issues relating to the use of research tools presented by the world wide web, precisely the same kinds of difficulties to overcome that their local library or historical archive pose. I hasten to add, that I have assigned such projects in traditional settings for many years; I was especially gratified in this instance to see how well these projects worked out, given the formidable barriers of time and space. Ironically, student’s ability to share the results of their research was, in fact, greatly enhanced, as was the wonderful benefit of being able to archive these projects for other students to access in future years—unlike the traditional projects that often found themselves, literally, in the "dustbin of history."

IX. STUDENT EVALUATIONS

Student evaluations were for the most part quite favorable, several enthusiastically so. I’m unsure that if given a choice, students would prefer the web course to the traditional classroom; I didn’t ask that question in that way. But it was clear that America in the Sixties, as offered, responded well to their sense of a good learning experience and had the added value of being sufficiently flexible to fit their busy professional and social lives.

X. CONCLUSIONS

It seems clear, at least from this model, that the expectations of some and the fears of others, that distance education promises to greatly reduce the costs of education by surplusing faculty, is simply unfounded. America in the Sixties was a very labor-intensive exercise. Certainly other kinds of courses can be conceived and delivered on-line, but to offer a serious opportunity for student-faculty dialogue, the time needed to do so is quite significant. It is perhaps no more than the time required to organize any course and present that course in a three-hour a week format, but it is certainly not less. It might, however, be more educationally sound. Students necessarily must stand on their own feet; they cannot "disappear" as they often do in a traditional lecture-discussion classroom situation. Student contributions to the chatroom also required real initiative and, because their comments were available for everyone to read, real research and attention to the reading assignments. I also like the problem solving, research potential and team aspects of this on-line course. All of those elements ought to be present in any classroom situation, of course, but they were clearly abundant in this course and a crucial aspect of the courses educational outcomes.

This pedagogical experience also suggests that the web offers a range of other kinds of educational opportunities. Can we not also organize courses around a problem, event or personality with the expectation not to present information but, in fact, to solve problems and encourage greater cross-student participation? Much like the car had the look of the horse-drawn wagon; maybe we can begin to redesign the contemporary "course" in ways unthought of as yet. Try as we might, the present lecture-discussion model is a very poor vehicle for genuine student involvement (in most instances) and clearly difficult to open to more flexible tasks like common problem solving.

In short, this was an interesting and satisfying teaching and learning experience. America in the Sixties on-line, may not be the same as America in the Sixties in a traditional setting, but it is certainly a valuable and valid educational opportunity for students, and useful model for at least one kind of on-line course for students, especially for those needing flexibility of time and space. After my own fears and anxieties subsided, it was a genuine pleasure to teach.