February/March 2007

Volume 47, Number 4

Teaching Online: All About Communication

by Alida Franco, STC RMC member

I recently had the opportunity to teach an undergraduate course in Usability Testing at a local college. More than 10 years ago, as Director of Learning Systems at that same college, I instituted the online program as a cost-effective method of providing college courses to students throughout the state of Colorado. Now, more than a decade later, I was myself tasked to teach an online course as adjunct faculty in the Department of Technical Communication.

As I plunged into designing the online course material, I asked myself how I would communicate information, guide the learning process, and ensure that the students were on track. The mechanisms for posting a syllabus and exams, presenting weekly discussion questions, and providing simple support for daily questions and answers were features of the courseware itself. But how would I be able to develop the new and important concepts that the students had to master, and assist students in integrating these new concepts into existing mental schemas? To me, teaching was essentially about effective communication, so I focused on discovering ways to optimize the communication process throughout the course.

Virtual Lectures

I began by thinking back to the days when I created the online program. I had been convinced that the World Wide Web would provide the essential structure the college needed to enable interactive learning at a distance. I thought back to the research and practical experience I had gathered before instituting the online program. At that time, I actually enrolled as a student in a non-credit online college course in order to observe the communication exchange firsthand and analyze its effectiveness. As I vividly recall, I had enrolled in the right course because the instructor was quick to engage me in the course material.

He began each week’s unit with an online lecture. It was not a PowerPoint presentation of bullet points; it was a simple monologue, presented in a text-based format with no animation, no illustrations, and no special fonts, colors, or design. But what struck me at the time was that it was as if he were speaking directly to me, just as if I were sitting in class face-to-face with him.

So I began to analyze why this was so. The power of his lecture lay in his ability to communicate his ideas through the skillful use of words. First, he employed first and second person to address the class directly. Second, he laid out a plan of attack for that week’s material. He emphasized important points, made distinctions, and encouraged the class to explore the material as they began their readings. Without much effort on my part as a student, the instructor immediately engaged me in the concepts and ideas he was attempting to introduce in that week’s lecture.

So, I decided to implement this technique in my own online class. I would begin each week’s material with an engaging, thought-provoking lecture. I did this by creating a category in the main course menu called “Virtual Classroom,” and each week before a new unit of material was to begin I posted a lecture, appropriately labeled and sequenced. I instructed the class to begin their week of study with a Virtual Classroom lecture, thereby providing each student with a roadmap for the week while setting the tone for the discussion that was to come.

Classroom Discussions

My second communication was to provide the students with interactive, online discussion of the main concepts and points that were introduced in the lectures.

In an ideal world, the students would participate in scheduled, synchronous discussions, but the courseware did not provide this feature. So I settled on interactive asynchronous discussions. Again, each week I posted a series of questions, requiring students to choose and discuss two from the list and to respond to one other student’s posting.

I freely allowed students to manipulate the concepts during discussion, and because of the asynchronous nature of the discussions I decided to participate only after the discussion was closed. At that point, I would review all of the comments and questions, and then post a Discussion Recap for the entire class. In the recap I would reiterate important points, draw distinctions, classify ideas, clarify confusions, and, of course, answer questions that applied to the entire class.

Study Aids

About midway through the online course, as I began preparations for the mid-term exam, it occurred to me that these two tools, the virtual classroom lectures and the discussion recaps, could also serve as a great set of study aids for mid-term and final exam preparation. The lectures and recaps were labeled by unit for easy reference and posted online for easy downloading or printing, and thus they could easily be added to the course notebook I had encouraged students to create.

Conclusions

The online course structure is a great method for alternative course delivery and an excellent means for providing greater access to learning. However, it is not an ideal system for all and can require significant readjustment to the new teaching/learning experience for instructors and students alike. For some, the loss of important paralinguistic features such as gestures, voice intonation, and eye contact, which provide the richness in human communication, makes the online course experience ineffective. Clearly, much more research and innovation needs to be done before the online education experience can equal the effectiveness of face-to-face discussion and learning. For those of you involved in online teaching or computer-based instruction and content development, I invite you all to examine the issues and share your experiences.

Alida Franco is a senior technical writer at Sybase, Inc. and can be reached at alida.franco@sybase.com.