Issue Contents

Faculty Changing the Course of Education

Janet C. Moore, Ph.D.
Chief Learning Officer
The Sloan Consortium

"Are there special characteristics you look for in faculty, or, as I'm hoping you'll say, can anyone teach well online?"

This question to the listserv brought mixed responses, some concluding that only faculty who are motivated to learn should attempt to teach online. Others believe that anyone who understands the basics of teaching online can meet or exceed classroom standards for excellence. At Sloan-C, we believe that anyone who is considering teaching online can benefit greatly from the expertise of veteran online faculty. Sloan-C's "Getting Started" workshop beginning September 27 is designed to start turning novices into skilled online teachers.

Learners certainly appreciate learning online, as evidenced by the steadily growing demand for online access to learning. However, in too many places, learner demand exceeds faculty supply. If American higher education is to change course to be more accessible to more learners, faculty will play a pivotal role in the effort when they change their courses and bring them online.

Initially, faculty may find the idea of formal learning without face-to-face presence unimaginable. Research, leadership, and sharing effective practices have done much to attend to faculty concerns, but doing is believing. Among the most effective ways for faculty to change their minds and change their courses are peer-led workshops that enable faculty to experience online learning as online learners, to confer with experienced faculty, and to learn strategies they can adapt for their own courses.

Veteran online faculty have discovered important benefits to share about the how-to of high touch and high tech. They've learned how to create trust online so that learners can adjust to the simultaneously greater responsibility and greater flexibility that today's professions call for. Far from losing personal connections, veteran faculty find that learners gain greater metacognitive skills, closer mind-to-mind community, and more meaningful interaction with faculty, content and classmates-perhaps especially learners who might not participate in face-to-face discussions because they like more time to reflect before sharing diverse reflections. Veteran faculty can share time-and-effort efficient tips for designing courses around relevant "big questions" for critical thinking, active learning and constructive collaboration. Peer-to-peer engagement creates peer-led knowledge building...changing courses so that learners and leaders also become better teachers.

Congratulations and thanks to faculty who have volunteered to share their online courses and knowledge with participants in the Sloan-C workshop, Getting Started: Online Course Development Basics, September 27 - October 20, 2006. With the faculty listed below, Joan McMahon of transformleaders will facilitate the workshop designed as the foundation for faculty to create their own online courses.

Blending: A Quiet Revolution

Tony Picciano , Ph.D.
Hunter College and City University of New York Graduate Center

Changing your face-to-face course to include online components is a kind of quiet revolution. Integrating online with traditional face-to-face class activities in planned, pedagogically valuable ways means rethinking course goals and teaching and learning roles. It is a revolution that is going on throughout higher education, as more and more faculty are experiencing "the evolution of instruction from face-to-face and online learning into blended learning environments. Blended learning has the potential to evolve into the dominant model of instructional delivery in higher education in the not-too-distant future," says Tony Picciano, co-editor with Chuck Dziuban of the new book, Blended Learning: Research Perspectives.

An excerpt below is from one of the book's 13 chapters that examine research, stakeholder perspectives and best practices in blended learning. At the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, Robert Kaleta, Karen Skibba, and Tanya Joosten study "Discovering, Designing, and Delivering Hybrid Courses," and give a glimpse of decisions faculty make about which activities work best online and face-to-face.

Redesigning a traditional course into a hybrid course compelled faculty to think through how best to use two learning spaces instead of just one. "I really just had to reconfigure the class to include, or to sort through, what I was going to do online and what I was going to do face to face." After reflecting on their goals, the faculty used a variety of methods to decide which environment to use for which learning activities.

Faculty tended to use the online environment for work that students could do "on their own," such as assessments, tutorials, readings, and quizzes. Some of the faculty who were new to hybrid teaching felt that it would be a "waste of face to face class time" to do these things in the classroom. Other faculty saved activities for the in-person class that required "interaction" and to address "issues or misconceptions that popped up in the online discussion." For example, one instructor used the face to face environment to introduce a complex essay critique assignment. Then she followed up online by reading the students' essays, answering critical reading questions, and drafting a summary. Face to face was also used to present visual information like film clips, provide demonstrations, conduct hands-on activities like labs, conduct group activities and student presentations, give lectures, answer questions, and give exams. Findings indicate that the majority of faculty used the face to face environment to present information needing context and interpretations to facilitate better student understanding. In contrast, the online environment was used for information that was independent in nature or was clearly conveyed and easily facilitated in the online environment.

However, the more experienced hybrid faculty, and those who had taught online previously, included more critical reflection and interactive discussions online, and then they continued those discussions in class. These experienced faculty said that online discussions provide more time for "deeper thinking than face to face where shy people don't talk or give just the initial knee-jerk responses." Others indicated that the online component of hybrid courses provides opportunities for accommodating different "learning styles." Findings suggested that as faculty become more experienced, they are better able to integrate and extend student learning in both environments.

The full UWM study follows faculty as they move through the stages of innovation in developing blended courses.

Join Tony Picciano and select authors of the book Blended Learning: Research Perspectives in an online webinar on October 13, 2006 at 2pm, as they discuss several topics related to blended learning. This session is provided at no charge and is open to free and premium Sloan-C members.

The China Trade: An Online Education Strategy at Stevens Institute

John R. Bourne, Ph.D.
Executive Director
The Sloan Consortium

Stevens Institute of Technology is "on the move," according to its president, Harold Raveché. A relatively small engineering, science, arts and technology management college located in Hoboken, N.J., Stevens has moved from being a "sleepy" college to becoming a vigorous entrepreneurial institution, engaged in many new forms of education, including online education and the offshore education trade. WebCampus, the Stevens online program, has been a success story; built from nothing a few years ago, it is now a robust program. WebCampus, headed by Dean of Professional Education Robert Ubell, was a winner of the 2003 Sloan Consortium Teaching and Learning Award. An offshoot of the WebCampus program is the China program which delivers a blended/hybrid degree to students in China.

The strategies and methods that make Stevens' China program viable are particularly interesting. Ubell speaks of the "formula"-that is, graduate education delivered one-third online by Stevens' faculty, another third on-ground delivered by Stevens faculty visiting China, and another third delivered by US-trained Chinese faculty at the host institution. The specialty technology programs offered by Stevens are provided to classes of 20 to 30 students who take a program of classes lasting 18 months and pay about $12,000 in tuition. Tuition income is split between the host Chinese institution and Stevens. The host provides the infrastructure while Stevens provides the American faculty and curriculum. This arrangement seems to be ideal for both partners-the Chinese host institution is able to collect tuition several times in excess of a comparable Chinese MS degree and Stevens is able to more than break-even after travel and living expenses.

About a dozen Stevens faculty have been active in the three-year-old program, with one or two faculty on ground in China at any given time. The days are long, however, for such faculty who often teach five or six hours a day. Faculty provide intensive education for a period of several weeks and then return to the US. Additional salary beyond standard compensation, travel and housing is not provided.

What is Stevens' strategic strength? In a word, the potential for scale. Stevens is an early entrant to the online education race in China. With more than 150 US institutions beginning to provide education to China's large populations, there is bound to be competition in the upcoming years. Stevens' strategy is to become well-known by working with elite Chinese partner institutions and then leverage that visibility to mine the corporate education sector in China. This strategy will help Stevens scale up by setting the stage for greater numbers of students in the program. Ubell indicates that raising tuition and increasing class size will permit more significant margins to be achieved. In addition, the China strategy can help Stevens attract additional Hoboken-based US students to take semesters abroad in China, a strategy which can augment tuition income at the school's New Jersey campus.

Stevens' strategy is basically an opportunistic "far geo-localness"-that is, at a long distance, creating local pockets of brand awareness in a previously untapped market. In contrast to Babson's strategy of establishing free-standing beachheads at remote geographic locations, Stevens plans to use partnerships as the method of choice for remote sites.

The Sloan-C five pillars (learning effectiveness, cost effectiveness, faculty and student satisfaction and access) are useful for measuring the Stevens' offshore model. Data from the first graduating classes shows that Stevens' Chinese graduates are all securing jobs, in contrast to a national average of 60% hiring. Cost effectiveness is probably the most important pillar measure-Stevens is able to capture half of the tuition while paying out only travel, faculty offset time, subsistence and some overhead. Findings from the program may also be transportable to other venues-for example, Stevens will be initiating programs in Ecuador and in Bulgaria. Students are said to be very satisfied with the experience, as are faculty.

Can this model work for Stevens in the long term? Given the large demand for higher education in technology in China, the demand for US degrees and the late entrance of competitors, there is the possibility that the Hoboken-based US institution can achieve success in China. Stevens has carved out a niche market in a country with a huge potential demand for technology education and US degrees. Would competitors reduce Stevens' advantage? Sure-that is one reason that Stevens will need to stay agile and entrepreneurial.

Additional reading on the Stevens story may be found at:

• The Wild, Wild East: Foreign universities flock to china, but are there riches tobe made, or just fool's gold?
  Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 2006
• Stevens Institute of Technology Forms Partnerships with Four Chinese Institutions to Offer Hybrid Graduate Degree Programs
  Educational Pathways, September 2005
• Management American Style: A U.S. University Teaches Western Business Ways to Chinese Students (PDF)
  IEEE Spectrum, June 2005
• Stevens-China accord allows candidates to work on master's degree from home
  The Star Ledger, October 5, 2003

Learn From the Experts - The Sloan-C 2006 Workshop Series

Community Colleges: Partnering for Accessible, Affordable Curriculum - September 20 - 29

Community colleges boast a rich history of providing courses mirroring the needs of the local community, as well as promoting both accessibility and affordability for students. With the advent of online learning, supported by high-end learning management systems and other forms of collaborative technology, how do these institutions "walk the talk" by providing accessible and affordable curriculum? Join leading community college educators as they discuss innovative approaches toward creating non-prohibitive online programs of study, such as converting overenrolled programs to Asynchronous Learning Networks, partnering with larger institutions to acquire much-needed resources, knowledge, support, instructional design and developing online workforce programs.

Details and registration.

Getting Started: Online Course Development Basics - September 27 - October 20

Based on research and the Sloan-C effective practices, this workshop provides the foundation for delivering online programs. Faculty gain enhanced pedagogical knowledge and learn effective strategies for creative, online classroom facilitation. The workshop is designed as an 'active' learning experience, enabling faculty to explore actual online courses from several disciplines and institutions, as well as build a syllabus leading to the major outcome of the workshop: building a complete online course module relevant to their own educational interests.

Details and registration.

Blended Learning - What the Research Says... (Webinar) October 13, 2pm (ET)

In anticipation of an upcoming book release focused on blended learning that will include research from over 15 institutions, 5 authors from the book (Anthony Picciano, Hunter College and City University of New York Graduate Center; Chuck Dziuban, University of Central Florida; Gary Brown, Washington State University; Charles Graham, Brigham Young University; and Karen Vignare, Michigan State University) will sit on a panel, present on their research, and take questions from the attendees. Registration is free, but only open to Free Level and Premium Sloan-C Members (both institutional and individual).

Details and registration.

Copyright Compliance for Online Educators - October 18 - 27

Based on research and the Sloan-C effective practices, this workshop provides the foundation for delivering online programs. Faculty gain enhanced pedagogical knowledge and learn effective strategies for creative, online classroom facilitation. The workshop is designed as an 'active' learning experience, enabling faculty to explore actual online courses from several disciplines and institutions, as well as build a syllabus leading to the major outcome of the workshop: building a complete online course module relevant to their own educational interests.

Details and registration.

The Sloan Consortium (Sloan-C), sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is composed of institutions and organizations dedicated to continually improving the quality, scale, and breadth of their online programs, according to their own distinctive missions, so that education becomes a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines.

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