0.4 Discussion

For Ken, by far the oldest of the three, tenure was a non-issue. He taught the course online, but he had the opportunity to work with each of his students face-to-face during a week and a half intensive residency at the beginning of the semester. This gave him time to develop relationships with each student, and to help them with any technical difficulties they experienced with the course software. The entire college only had 60 students enrolled, so his classes were very small. The previous semester Ken had taught with the Online Day materials for the first time. The class had 13 students. Because of the small teacher/student ratio, he could afford to spend many hours exploring the online resources and communicating with the students online. Ken found himself quite happily busy from sun-up to sun-down without a schedule. Regarding the Online Day course materials, Ken said that he would warn other instructors that it took quite a while for him to discover all the richness of the online program. He felt that the book was very well structured, but the software was not intuitive to learn. Although Ken had cycled through Super’s career stages, he was new to the profession of teaching. In his new job, like Nancy, he was also moving from Establishment/consolidation to Establishment / advancement, but without the marker of tenure status.

For the Establishment stage instructors, whether or not they were engaged in a tenure effort made a difference in their use of new technology. The tenure-seeking instructors were also less flexible in their teaching styles. This could be at least partly attributed to how heavily they were scheduled with work related activities. Because Ken’s workload was significantly lighter, he was able to spend the greatest amount of time learning and using Online Day.

Maintenance stage

Carrie and Neal were in the Holding phase of the Maintenance stage of Super’s Career Ladder, having taught for 10 to 15 years. Miller was just below them on the ladder in the Transition phase between Establishment and Maintenance . For this course, both Carrie and Miller taught in a hybrid format, using a number of the online components in their teaching. Neal, on the other hand, taught face-to-face employing teaching methods he had developed over the years. The only part of the Online Day he incorporated was the online test bank.

Carrie had used the WebCT course management system for 10 years. Over that time, she had used discussion boards, created online quizzes, and taught classes completely online. Carrie taught a hybrid course which met physically only three weekends, but each of those weekends contained 13 hours of class time. She was able to show them how to set up their online accounts for the Online Day resources in person. The classroom provided each student with a laptop and Internet connections needed to use the course website. Carrie was very invested in her students, and kept close touch with them by email between class meetings. She was persistent in contacting the experts to solve the technical problems the students encountered in using the program, after years of working with the in-house technology expert on campus.