0.3 Findings

At the time of this study, Ken was in his seventh year of his new teaching career. All of his courses were online, and he enjoyed the freedom and flexibility of schedule it afforded him. But moving from the south to the north and the change to the slower pace of teaching had been quite a big adjustment for him.

I’d spent my entire life working, working hard, so to actually have free time, at first it was very unsettling. But it’s like any sort of thing that you do; you grow into it if you don’t panic. So I’m growing into it. Quite frankly, I love getting up in the morning not having a set schedule. Going to bed and not having a spare minute in the day. It’s funny how your day just fills up kind of doing things.

Teaching environment

The structure of Ken’s college was quite different from the others. The program had only 60 students enrolled, and most were mid-career adults who lived in the region. The basic philosophy of the college was progressive education, in which the students played an active role in designing their own learning through creating individual learning contracts with their instructors for each course. The instructor played a mentor role, frequently communicating in a one-to-one relationship with the student. It was not unusual to have a class with only one student. Distance education courses allowed the students to continue working at their current jobs in their communities and living with their families while obtaining advanced degrees.

We have a low residency program. The students and I all meet at the college at the beginning of each semester. It’s very intense what we do in that week and a half. For all of the courses I’m going to be teaching, I sit down and negotiate the contracts for that course, and we determine what we’re going to do to improve their competency in that particular area. Then for the rest of the semester, we communicate via phone and email. The college is progressive education. They are really against syllabi and things like that. So the fact that I adopted the Day course has really gone against the grain of the college.

In his first semester of teaching with the Online Day materials, soon after he sent out an email to all the potential students announcing it, 13 students enrolled, which was quite a large class by the college’s standards. The students were eager to try the online course in which the goals had been determined, the textbook selected, and a structure had been designed for them. Ken felt it was a relief for them not to have to do so much work planning the course.

Using online day

Ken admitted that one of the challenges he faced in putting together the course was the amount of time it took. He had to work “a little harder” with the Online Day course than courses he had put up on the college’s online course management system, First Class. “From the instructors’ perspective, the menu was hard to follow.” Ken said that he had to keep playing with the software to discover the depth of what it offered. “I found some minor problems setting up the course with the menu items figuring out exactly how I could get what I needed…. In fact, I had to consult with tech support quite often.” The menu items didn’t help direct the user to all of the program’s components. However, he felt it was worth the time he had invested in learning it. “I have to say that I enjoy it so much more because of the increased interaction between the students and myself.”