0.3 Findings  (Page 12/22)

Carrie’s lack of an efficient way to manage and assess online discussions caused her to abandon their use.

Technology training

Of all the participants in this study, Carrie had received the most consistent training in technology over her 10-year teaching career. Because her graduate school was in a sparsely-populated region, outreach through online teaching was an important focus of the institution, as was off-campus teaching. The instructors were introduced to the WebCT program in formal classes at the beginning, followed by frequent, less formal updates.

We have an in-house trainer at the graduate college. She’s certified in WebCT and Vista, and a couple of people on faculty are as well. Whenever a new version comes out, we’re trained on that new version. We have on our WebCT site various downloads that we might need or software that we might need for our classes, like Flash, Shockwave, and other things.

In addition to the formal training sessions, Carrie described other ways that teaching online was supported. The first was a monetary reward. “When we develop a course online, we have a review committee that reviews the course. Once it passes that, then we’re paid a $3,000 stipend.” The second type of support was a users’ group made up of colleagues in her department:

We have what’s called a users’ group [sic] comprised of people who have online courses. The users’ group meets once a month, and it’s been doing that now probably for the last eight, nine years. While we’re working in that environment setting up our classes, if we need something, we just call Fran, 643-1091. I know it by heart! She’s always at our disposal. She made materials available both in print and online.

Attitude toward technology

Despite Carrie’s years of experience teaching online, recently she decided to forego teaching online in favor of hybrid or face-to-face courses. She cited the turning point as the moment WebCT changed its name to Vista, and the whole look and feel of the software changed significantly. She became frustrated with keeping up with the frequent changes which disrupted the automaticity she had acquired with using the earlier program.

Miller, the late adopter

Miller had taught at the graduate level and served a few years in an administrative role during her 12-year tenure at a state university in the northeast. Although she had used the Day textbook before, at that time the online version of the course did not exist. Miller claimed that before adopting the Online Day, she probably did less with technology in teaching than most of her colleagues. Instead, she provided photocopied course packs for the students rather than posting articles online.

It’s not that I really had disdain for it, but by the time I got to the point where I really wanted to use technology, I was involved in too many administrative duties. I am a person who does a lot of hands-on activities, so it’s not real natural for me to integrate technology in a big way with my classes.

She taught the theories course with the Online Day materials using a hybrid format. After the first few face-to-face meetings, the class met only every other week in person.