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The Making of a Virtual Professor

by Sloan-C

ABSTRACT
The role of the professor is changing dramatically. Lectures endure despite the fact that they were outmoded as soon as books became readily available to students. This is a case study in the transformation of one traditional professor into a virtual professor. On one level this is only one person’s story. On another level it is a sign of the times. Jorge Klor de Alva’s choice to leave one of the most prestigious universities in the country for the University of Phoenix is a signal event. Traditional academia will change, and it is the quiet transformation of traditional professors into virtual professors that tells the true story behind this revolution.

I. INTRODUCTION

For many of us who have been in academia for more than ten years, the computer revolution has gradually overtaken us. The traditional lecture format had been outmoded for several centuries. Many faculty members are still acting as if information is a scarce resource. Before the advent of moveable type, the lecture format was the most logical means of disseminating information. Large numbers of students gathered in one place and the learned man expounded on a topic, drawing on the monographs and books that very few people could access. Even with moveable type, books remained expensive luxuries and few students could afford their own copies of the necessary texts. Eventually, the cost of books dropped to the point where every student could have his or her own copy. At this point, the logical role of the professor changed from disseminator of the information from the text to explicator of complex concepts. Unfortunately, many faculty members have, through the centuries, maintained the outmoded role of disseminator.

The major impact of technology in many modern classrooms has not progressed beyond that marvelous innovation: the overhead projector. Instead of writing lecture notes on a chalkboard, the professor prepares transparencies ahead of time and then explains them to the class, occasionally soliciting opinions from the students. This procedure has the advantage of alleviating the need for students to read the material ahead of time. For many of today’s students, reading is considered optional. This has gotten to the point where classroom students are often resentful when a professor attempts to generate class discussion without first telling the students what the text says – preferably in a condensed version that includes only the material that will appear on the next exam.

All of this raises two central questions:

1. What is the appropriate role of the professor in a world in which books are readily available at reasonable costs? (Though many would question the reasonableness of current textbook prices.)
2. Has that role changed even further with the advent of the Internet, a very inexpensive and almost universally available source of more information than anyone could possibly absorb in one lifetime?

II. BIOGRAPHICAL DIGRESSION

Before attempting to answer these questions, a chronology of my own experiences with computers in academia should be illustrative. Though a familiar story for most of my contemporaries, it is one that may have become obscured in the rapid advance of technology into academic life. And it should give younger readers a good laugh.

My first experience with a computer was as a college freshman in 1971. I learned to program in Fortran by creating a stack of punched cards. Being a miserable typist, I would often spend three hours waiting to find out that I had misplaced a comma on one of the cards in the program. By the end of the term, we were allowed to transmit programs via punched tape over a Teletype machine – saving hours of waiting in line at the computer center.

As a graduate student in 1975, I continued to use punch cards and program in Fortran as I developed the specialized statistical programs required for processing my research results. By 1977, I had access to a room-sized computer that was hooked up to a Teletype. It allowed me to store my programs on small DEC tapes and (provided I was willing to work between midnight and 6am) I was able to link two of the three available slots together and have exclusive access to a whopping 20K of core memory. I wrote a 20,000-line set of Fortran programs on that machine and also used its primitive text editor to produce my dissertation.

As an assistant professor, I was given access to an Apple II+, which had available a mind-boggling 56K of core memory, ran BASIC, and included a reasonably good word processor. Of course I still had to share it with three or four other faculty members. I converted all of my Fortran programs into Basic and thought that the technological revolution really had come into its own. During the next seven years we progressed through the Osborne (CPM-based) luggable computer to the first few generations of IBM PCs.

A year before I left Arizona on Fulbright and NSF grants to conduct research in Scandinavia and Germany, BITNET became available. At that time I was editor of International Journal of Small Group Research and I immediately began communicating with my authors and reviewers via BITNET, though my co-editor in Germany was not online. (He still is not--a trend that baffles me.) As I traveled around Europe, I established BITNET accounts at several universities and so was in daily contact with one of my doctoral students. In this way I was able to continue to edit the journal at a distance.

In 1987 some young hotshot computer faculty member wanted to take my beloved and reliable BITNET access away from me and replace it with an unknown and untested system called Internet. I resisted initially, but by 1993 I was addicted to the Internet. I remember the day the director of our computer center showed me a program called Mosaic, which made it possible to examine and even print graphic images off the Internet. But that was a small diversion compared to my regular and constant use of the Internet for exchanging text and attached files.

My next academic opportunity was working to establish an innovative MBA program with students who were mid-career managers, all of whom were working full time. We organized them into 6-person teams for the two years of the program. We required that they have access to computers with a standard set of word processing, spreadsheet, and data base programs. We also required them to check their e-mail accounts daily and to collaborate with each other by exchanging files and returning modified versions. While computer demonstrations were common in the classroom, our basic mode of delivery was still the face-to-face (FTF) classroom, and assignments were generally handed in as paper documents in class. This was, however, the beginning of the present for me, as I encouraged students who missed classes to send in their assignments the next day via e-mail.

After two years away from academia, the prospect of working on the cutting edge of business education lured me back. In the six months that I have been ISIM’s only full-time faculty member, I have worked with sixty students in a dozen countries and have given exactly one FTF lecture.

Technology has brought significant change in the first half of one academic career. We have moved from punch cards to laptop computers with more power than the room-sized computers of 20 years ago. We have gone from being overwhelmed by the thought of 56KB of core sitting on our desktop to expecting laptops to have at least 32MB and weigh less than ten pounds, modem included. Graduate students who are about to enter the academic job market have no possible way of knowing what academia will look like when they reach the midpoint of their careers.

III. THE NEW ROLE OF THE PROFESSOR

While modern technology has greatly reduced the cost of the printed word, with a resulting explosion in the available volume of publications, print remains an expensive medium of communication. Consequently, most writing goes through a rigorous process of evaluation before it appears in print. Scholarly publications generally go through a blind review process. As a result, articles and books can be assumed to bring with them a certain level of authority. While the process may be biased, we can at least rest assured that an author’s work has been judged by a jury of peers as worthy of publication.

With the advent of the Internet, electronic publication has become extremely inexpensive and almost totally uncontrolled. A search of any topic is likely to yield hundreds or thousands of websites. Unfortunately, search engines have no way of evaluating the quality of these sites. Most web surfers look at the titles of the top twenty or thirty, pick the ones that look most relevant and never even see the titles of the vast majority of the entries.

This reality has changed the logical role of the professor. Instead of evaluating the available texts and selecting the best, it is necessary to sift through a huge volume of possibilities and recommend the most legitimate. Even the most diligent scholar is unlikely to be able to read even a small fraction of the available material in his or her specialty. This is one reason that the traditional publication process still exists. The blind review process still serves the purpose of separating the valuable from the useless.

The other side of the coin is that the Internet is a democratic medium. Scholars who, for various reasons, cannot get their ideas into print can still disseminate them on the Web. This has changed the nature of research and of scholarly discourse. The clearest example of this is the discussion list. When reading postings it is often impossible to determine whether the source is a prominent scholar or an unknown student. There is a great advantage to this. For the first time, the quality of thought counts for more than the source. It is possible for a brilliant thinker without credentials to be heard.

All of this places a greater burden on the faculty. Thoughts must be evaluated on their merits. The primary role of the faculty thus becomes selection and evaluation. A responsible faculty member no longer searches for the recognized authorities, but instead searches out the interesting, original, and provocative sources. The ability to quickly evaluate and select sources is a primary skill. It is no longer possible to be familiar with the entire body of work in a specialty. Students no longer need assistance in finding material; they need guidance in separating the legitimate from the illegitimate sources. Faculty facilitates this process in two ways: by selecting and recommending the best sources, and by teaching students how to evaluate the quality of sources on their own.

IV. ISIM UNIVERSITY: STATE OF THE ART ONLINE EDUCATION

ISIM is a virtual university. We have an office in Denver with a full-time staff of sixteen (up from five in the past year.) I am the only full-time faculty member and I teach five or six of the eleven required courses in our MBA program. Two of those courses are cross-listed as required courses in the MSIM (Master of Science in Information Management) program. Adjunct faculty teaches the remaining courses in both programs. These faculty members are either working professionals with advanced degrees or full-time faculty members at traditional universities. In the remainder of this section, I will try to share some of the lessons that we have learned in the course of making the transition from correspondence school to virtual university.

Choosing the right platform is very important. At ISIM, we are on our second platform for the delivery of online courses. Our current platform is TopClass, which has a number of advantages: easy access to both online study guides and classroom discussion, no special software requirements, accessible via any browser, communication among students and faculty in both a class-wide forum and through private messaging. We would still like to see better message threading and an easier means of posting presentations with graphics to the classroom discussion.

Getting the right faculty is very important. As with traditional universities, the first concern is finding knowledgeable, competent faculty. Technology will never make experts out of novices--and online students expect experts.

On the other hand, a good classroom professor is not necessarily a good online professor. The virtual classroom requires a different set of interpersonal skills than does the FTF classroom. Professors who think that they can teach online by posting their lectures to the web are in for a rude awakening. Virtual professors are not merely providers of information. Their role is to select and filter information for student consideration, to provide thought-provoking questions, and to facilitate well-considered discussion.

The primary concerns of students who choose distance learning are flexibility, convenience, and relevance. They need to be able to work when they have the time, not when the class is arbitrarily scheduled. That available time may vary from week to week. They expect to be able to work wherever they are, home, work, or on the road. They expect the courses to allow them to apply their learning to their work directly and immediately.

V. MAKING THE TRANSITION FROM LIVE TO VIRTUAL PROFESSING

I was a full-time faculty member in traditional business schools for fifteen years. While I had many good experiences in the classroom, I was consistently disappointed by the quality of student participation. It always seemed to me that you could either expect a great deal of enthusiasm and participation at a surface level, or limited responses at a deep level. I have come to the conclusion that the traditional classroom is simply not a good forum for the sort of discussion that I always hoped to have in class. I have also come to the conclusion that this is the fault of neither the faculty nor the student body.

If all goes well in a traditional class, students come in having already read the material and ready to discuss it. In undergraduate classes this is rarely the reality. In graduate classes, probably half of the students will have seriously considered the readings. Of those, perhaps half are comfortable expressing their opinions in class. These are not necessarily the students who are most capable of dealing with the material on a complex level. I have often had the experience of leading a disappointing classroom discussion only to have a couple of very bright students (who remained silent throughout the class discussion) stop me after class and engage me in exactly the sort of dialogue that I had tried so hard to pull from them half an hour earlier in the classroom. The reason for this is simple. While the less thoughtful students were talking, the more thoughtful ones were still thinking about the question and formulating interesting and relevant responses. Their responses were ready long after the class discussion had moved on.

In contrast, the virtual classroom is asynchronous. Students log on and read the discussion question. They go away and, over the course of the next few hours or the next couple of days, they think about the question and formulate a response. When they log back in, they are ready to give a well-considered response. In my six months at ISIM, I have routinely led the level of discussion that I only dreamed of leading as a traditional professor.

One of the joys of teaching adult graduate students is that they bring a wide range of experience to the classroom. In the traditional classroom the range of organizations on which we draw in the local community limits this experience. The diversity is limited by the diversity of the surrounding community.

At ISIM, we recruit internationally. While a large number of our students currently come from a few major corporations, any online class is likely to have students spread around the country and the world. My first class of six students at ISIM included a Ukrainian working at the American Embassy in Kiev, an employee working for a bank in his native United Arab Emirates, an expatriate Dutch physical therapist working in Florida, a Chinese student working in New Jersey, and employees of colleges, insurance companies, and high tech firms.

As a classroom professor, much of the job involves entertainment. Student attention spans have continued to drop and their threshold of boredom gets lower every year. It is unrealistic to think that a live professor can compete with 200 channels of television and the web. Still, we keep trying and the line between education and entertainment continues to erode, at the expense of education.

The virtual classroom can be experienced in small doses. View it for a few minutes, read a few postings, and go do something else while the ideas sink in. I still find myself working hard to come up with the most interesting and provocative topics, questions, and observations that I can. But the temptation to entertain without educating is gone.

VI. A FEW NOTES ON DISTANCE

A major concern of both students and faculty when considering distance education is, understandably, distance. A traditional classroom brings students and faculty together in the same place at the same time. The virtual classroom separates students and faculty both geographically and temporally.

The key issue here is the nature of the relationships between the instructor and the students and among the students. We have all experienced traditional classroom professors who create a huge distance between themselves and their students and who fail to foster communication among students. The traditional lecture format is a one-way communication. Seminars and discussion-oriented classes foster the development of closer interpersonal relationships, but economic pressures are making it harder and harder for traditional universities to justify the small classes required for such formats.

Online courses, while geographically and temporally separating the participants may actually foster closer interpersonal relationships than FTF classes. First, there is no real barrier to keeping classes small. In the FTF settings, smaller classes mean either larger faculties or heavier course loads for the existing faculty. Splitting an online class in two does not substantially increase the faculty workload. The instructor has the same number of assignments to grade and the same number of postings to respond to. Teaching two online sections instead of one simply means attending to two simultaneous discussion streams. In some ways, having two sections may even make the job easier as the instructor can draw on ideas raised in one section when making comments in the other section’s discussion. This raises an important additional benefit that online teaching brings to the professor. If we consider our primary job to be life-long learning, the ideas generated in online discussion are simply better and more compelling than those generated in the classroom. Having experienced both I can say unequivocally that I have always learned from my students, but I have learned much more from my online students than I ever learned in the traditional classroom.

In the traditional classroom, verbose students can easily dominate class discussion. A skillful professor learns how to cut this off without alienating the over-talker, but time is still lost in the process. In the asynchronous online course, each participant can decide how much time to give to a posting. Verbose postings can be skimmed or ignored. Particularly good postings can be reread and annotated. In addition, long and complicated postings can provide background information that could never be shared verbally in the traditional classroom. I am currently teaching business ethics online. One of my students is from Hong Kong and has posted five or six long discussions of the economic and political forces affecting the East in general and China in particular. Another student in that course works for a bank in the United Arab Emirates and recently posted an article that he wrote describing Islamic economics. These ideas could only be briefly summarized in the traditional classroom, but can be made available in full detail on the web. It is then up to the individual participant to decide how much time to spend on each posting.

One final comment on distance. I have never enjoyed lecturing. To me the process creates a distance with which I am not comfortable. As a result, I have always conducted all classes as seminars, regardless of size or level. In my last classroom experience, I had one graduate student comment that this was the only course he had ever had which was actually taught via the Socratic method. (I never quite figured out whether that was a compliment or a complaint, but he seemed pleased with the experience.) Often, particularly in large classes, the experience has not been so positive. In contrast, the online environment almost forces a Socratic method of instruction. The instructor who tries to convey his or her views as authoritative simply looks foolish. To me, one comment from a student in my first online course sums up the potential that the medium allows for reducing student-faculty distance. In his course evaluation he commented that the instructor made him feel as if they were old friends within the first two weeks of class. For the instructor who is comfortable with treating students as friends and colleagues, this medium offers opportunities for establishing relationships that are unparalleled in the traditional classroom setting.

VII. THE FUTURE OF DISTANCE EDUCATION

ISIM University will never be satisfied with the status quo. New technologies are constantly becoming available and we intend to implement any new options that will improve the quality of the product or our ability to deliver it. The first step was establishing access to the Internet. This dramatically increased the level of communication with students over the traditional media of letters, faxes, and phone calls. It also provided a valuable resource for student research. For a university without a campus, and thus without a library, this resource is invaluable.

As indicated above, we are on our second virtual classroom platform. We believe TopClass to be clearly superior to our previous platform. It is more user friendly and, most importantly, it requires no special software and can be accessed via any web browser. Current limitations include two-tier message threading and difficulty of posting graphic presentations. We are confident that these concerns will be addressed in a future release of the platform.

We continue to experiment with new options in the presentation of course work. We recently acquired hardware and software that allows us to include audio/video clips on our web pages. We had resisted the urge to use a product such as RealVideo because it requires the users to have plugins installed on their browsers. The new software creates executable files that can be run on any computer without downloading additional programs or plugins.

The biggest single challenge that we face at ISIM University is persuading our students to take their classes online. We currently offer two options: Online and Guided Self Study (GSS). Online students are given access to the virtual classroom, which includes online study guides, supplementary material, classroom discussion pages, and private messaging. The GSS option is traditional correspondence format. Students receive books and study guides, and submit assignments via mail, fax, or e-mail. They have six months to complete a course. At the present, more than half of our students take the GSS option. For some, this is the only option, as they do not have access to the Internet. That problem should take care of itself, as Internet access becomes more and more universal. For others, the primary concern is timing. Online courses run for eight weeks while GSS students can take up to six months to complete a course. Virtually all of our students are busy full-time professionals. They have very reasonable concerns about their ability to complete the course material in eight weeks. We are working on two fronts to help them make the transition. First, even for GSS students, we are encouraging e-mail submission of assignments. This greatly speeds the turnaround time for feedback and it encourages faculty members to give more complete and personalized feedback. Second, we are encouraging students to try out the online course. If they find that they cannot keep up with the pace, we will allow them to switch to the GSS option midway through the course.

We have several reasons for encouraging our students to make the switch from GSS to the online option. First, we firmly believe that the educational experience is better online. GSS students interact with the professor, but not with each other. Much of the learning comes from student interaction. Using the example of the ethics class discussed above, I could never provide the insights into Chinese ethics or Islamic economics that were provided by my students. The discussion in the virtual classroom is a tremendous resource and we would like to see all of our students take full advantage of it.

Second, the feedback in the virtual classroom is much faster. We encourage GSS students to send no more than two assignments at a time so that we can give feedback and guidance along the way. This is impractical for foreign students who do not have access to e-mail. If the mail takes a week or more each way, there is just too long a lag time between assignments and it can become difficult to complete the course in six months. The temptation is to send a large number of assignments at once. One foreign GSS student recently sent me the entire set of course work for Strategic Management (47 assignments) in one package. By the time I had read the 6th assignment, I knew that she was on the wrong track and would be very unlikely to pass the course. I spent four hours grading the remaining 41 assignments and her average for the course was 69%, well below the 80% required for passing the course. This was a waste of both my time and hers. Had she been submitting assignments online, one at a time, I would have been able to give her feedback within the first week that would have helped her get back on track and

Third, as an instructor, I can be both more efficient and more effective in the online environment. I am responsible for teaching five of the eleven online MBA courses, one at a time, in eight-week terms, with two week breaks between courses. When I am teaching one of the online courses, I am focused on the material and the discussions and can give each issue and each student serious attention. I am also responsible for teaching six of the eleven GSS MBA courses. Students can sign up whenever they wish and submit assignments any time during the following six months. This means that I have to be constantly prepared to deal with any of the eight modules in each of the six courses. Every time an assignment arrives, I have to shift my focus and deal with a different module of a different course. Imagine how effective a traditional classroom professor would be who never knew which topic or even which course was expected until walking into the classroom.

Finally, the revenue stream is clearly better for online students than for GSS students. Online students complete at least five courses per year while GSS students rarely progress that quickly. We feel that the increased pace is also in the best interests of the students. If we can help them get through the MBA degree in two years, they can use the knowledge and credentials to more quickly improve their on the job performance and to accelerate their career advancement.

VIII. FINAL COMMENTS ON BECOMING VIRTUAL

Since I have never really enjoyed lecturing, becoming a virtual professor has been a positive experience. Interacting with students one on one and establishing strong individual relationships with my students is what I do best. The students also tend to be more open minded. I find less stereotyping and judgement in the virtual classroom than in the traditional classroom. Finally, the quality of the feedback from the students is dramatically better than it was in the traditional classroom. I have never received such consistently positive teaching evaluations. I am not doing anything substantially different in this setting than what I did in the classroom: the virtual classroom is simply a better medium to get across complex ideas. In addition, I find that I do not get gratuitous negative feedback from students in the virtual classroom. Students make suggestions for improvement, both during the course and in the final evaluations, but I find that they are consistently constructive and helpful.

It has been clear for some time that traditional universities are in crisis. The most visible crises involve budgets and tenure. Almost all colleges and universities have used a short-term fix for the budget crunch. Full-time and tenure-track positions give way to part-time and adjunct positions. This is hardly surprising. I recently compared adjunct to full-time salaries at several institutions and concluded that the teaching responsibilities of one faculty member can be replaced at least six times over by the equivalent expenditure on adjunct faculty. This may not be a problem if the adjunct faculty are working professionals who simply want to teach on the side. Increasingly, however, adjunct faculty are Ph.D.s who desperately want full-time teaching jobs but are working part time at two or three institutions teaching twice the course load for half the money. This growing inequity between the tenure track faculty and the marginalized adjuncts is bound to eventually damage the quality of education.

In contrast, an analysis of salaries at ISIM indicates that the University realized a cost savings by hiring me as a full-time professor over covering the same courses with adjunct faculty. Clearly, the economics of traditional and virtual Universities are very different.

The present state of ISIM University reflects many of the realities that traditional universities will be forced to confront in the near future. ISIM is a for-profit university and so we are, of necessity, fiscally responsible. No one is going to make up our deficits if revenues fall short of expenditures. Increasingly, taxpayers are questioning the cost effectiveness of state universities. It is not uncommon for faculty to make six figure salaries for teaching six hours per week, nine months per year. It is also not uncommon for faculty members to become unproductive and unresponsive to student complaints upon receipt of tenure. In Colorado, public recognition of these problems has reached a level where time audits and post tenure reviews of faculty members are being mandated. It is clear that the rules of the game are changing. Only the shortsighted are attempting to pretend that the old rules still apply. The bad news is that America’s academic aristocracy, the Professorate, is under attack. The good news is that the result of the revolution will be better quality education at more reasonable costs.