0.3 Findings  (Page 9/22)

Ken understood how distance education worked from his own experience. He received a master’s degree and a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Fielding Institute, an early accredited distance learning university headquartered in California. The Fielding model uses the mentoring system along with a low residency program, which sounded similar to Ken’s teaching environment. The low residency program required that the students travel some distance to meet with professors and fellow students at least once a semester.

How he taught

Ken taught the course completely online, apart from the orientation time he spent with the students in their residency at the college at the beginning of the term. He used a wide range of the components included in Online Day. He assigned online chapter quizzes, use of the discussion board, watching the course videos, and submitting online essays directly to the instructor. He was very pleased with how the students interacted in the discussion board, learning different perspectives from one another and commenting on each other’s postings.

Attitude toward technology

Ken was eager to use technology in his teaching, and he clearly had the time to learn it. He was the first instructor on campus to make use of the college’s course management system, First Class. Ken was using it for three of the classes he was teaching at the time. He described the system as “a web-based interface with discussion boards and spaces for students to upload their work.” He activated the discussion board, and included an area where students could upload their work for other students to read. He especially wanted the students to see how people process information differently.

Colleagues’ and students’ reactions

Ken had to contend with the negative reactions of his colleagues to adopting Online Day. They were concerned that teaching a course like the Online Day could change the way all courses might be taught in the future. However, the students’ reaction to the offering of Online Day was overwhelmingly positive. Thirteen students enrolled in Ken’s course when he advertised it in advance. This was unheard of in a college with a student body of sixty, and classes frequently had only one or two students. It was the structure provided by the Online Day course that attracted them. Ken described the usual process he went though with students to set up their courses:

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! They love to have the students to be far more empowered, something that I agree with. But quite frankly, the students taking the Day course absolutely love it! They like to have what they call a break, you know, from the traditional Goddard method, which means we not only negotiate the contract, but we require a lot out of them in terms of what’s their passion and in a particular field of psychology, and to pursue their passion. So they like to have a break from that.