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FIRST CONTACT: THE USE OF SCHEMAS
BY STUDENTS TAKING THEIR FIRST ONLINE COURSE

presented by

ANN MARIE PAULUKONIS

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
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PH. D. EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY

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FIRST CONTACT:
THE USE OF SCHEMAS BY STUDENTS TAKING THEIR FIRST ONLINE
COURSE
By

Ann Marie Paulukonis

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
Counseling, Educational Psycholog)’, and Special Education

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ABSTRACT
FIRST CONTACT:
THE USE OF SCHEMAS BY STUDENTS TAKING THEIR FIRST ONLINE
COURSE
By

Ann Marie Paulukonis

Online education is a burgeoning ﬁeld with an ever-increasing number of courses
being offered from Internet basics to master’s degrees in Criminal Justice. Nevertheless,
li__t_tl_e i_s__lgnown about how students learn in online environments. To develop appropriate
interfaces, developers of online courses must be aware of students’ conceptions about
both the new environment and other learning environments. Questions must be asked
about llowﬁeasily people move between learning environments and to what extent they

“grasp the new one.

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To shed some light on this, schema theory and Cogmtlye Flexibility Theory (CF T)
areﬂus’ed to examine how students understand their ﬁrst online course. These theories help
explain how people make sense of the world through their experiences and how they use
that structured knowledge to interact with the world. The foundations of schema theory in
reading comprehension and other ﬁelds are discussed, followed by a discussion of CFT. I
then show how jogs; them to understand interactions withcotnputer software.

The i_r_1_s_tructor,deyelpper, and ﬁve students of one online course were interviewed.
The course was developed and offered through Michigan State University’s (MSU)
Virtual University. The students discussed their expectations of the course, their actual

experiences, and problems and solutions they had with the new environment.

The students brought a wide variety of schemas to the new environment. The schemas
ﬁt into three main categories: classroom experiences, other learning experiences, and
technology experiences. Including a number of affective issues, 17 schemas were found
among the ﬁve students. These included schemas based on experiences with classroom
discussions, interactions with classmates, distanceeducation courses, email, and more. .
These already-developed schemas both helped and hindered the students as they
attempted to understand and develop schemas for the online course. I discuss each
previous experience and the related course experience, and how the two clashed or

-EQEESPQPdEd'
Recommendations for further research and for online course development are given. I

also indicate present work at MSU’s Virtual University to address some of the issues.

I dedicate this...
to my parents, Mary Ann and Jay Paulukonis, who encouraged me to stick it out through
my ﬁrst year of graduate school.

to my ﬁance', Eric J. Johnson, without whom I would not have made it through my last
year.

and to my brother Michael, who reminds me that we all have different arts.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the MSU Virtual University directors, Dr. Carrie I-Ieeter, Dr. Marshall Hestenes,

and Dr. Lori Hudson, for allowing me to use VU as the research site.

 

Li

Ch

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

List of Tables -- - - viii
Chapter 1: Introduction and Background - 1
Distance Education 3
Schemas in Text Comprehension 6
Schemas in Science and Mathematics 8
Classroom Schemas 10
Limitations to Schema Theory 12
Cognitive Flexibility Theory 13
Schema Theory and Educational Software 15
Overview of the Study 20
Chapter 2: Method 23
Overview of the Site 23
Participants 24
Overview of the Course 26
The course online. ............................................................................................................................... 27

The course in the classroom... ............................................................................................................ 29
Data Collection 29
The Student Interview Questions 31
Data Analysis 35
Chapter 3: Results 39
The Participants 39
Cora ..................................................................................................................................................... 39
Karen ................................................................................................................................................... 40
Rosalyn. .............................................................................................................................................. 40
Susan. .................................................................................................................................................. 41
Tanya. ................................................................................................................................................. 42
Classroom Experiences 42
Similarities between the online course and regular classrooms. ......................................................... 44
Differences: locus of control. .............................................................................................................. 46
Differences: nonverbal communication. ............................................................................................. 48
Differences: class discussion. ............................................................................................................. 50
Differences: rapport with the instructor. ............................................................................................. 56
Differences: casual interactions with others. ...................................................................................... 59
Anger over lack of choice. .................................................................................................................. 61

vi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Other Educational Experiences - 62
Two-way interactive television. .......................................................................................................... 62
Television-based video course. ........................................................................................................... 63
Independent study. .............................................................................................................................. 64
New school. ........................................................................................................................................ 67

Technological Experiences 67
Online discussion board. ..................................................................................................................... 68
D08. ................................................................................................................................................... 68
Listservs. ............................................................................................................................................. 71
Email. .................................................................................................................................................. 72
General use of computers .................................................................................................................... 75
Affective issues regarding technology. ............................................................................................... 78

Chapter 4: Discussion and Implications 81

Summary of Results 81
First research question. ....................................................................................................................... 81
Second research question. ................................................................................................................... 82
Limitations to the study. ..................................................................................................................... 86

Implications for Research on Online Courses 88

Implications for Developers of Online Courses 91
Apply schema theory and Cognitive Flexibility Theory. .................................................................... 92
Develop explicit commentary. ............................................................................................................ 92
Give more directions to the students. .................................................................................................. 94
Include a chat room .............................................................. 98
Include time for orientation to the online environment ....................................................................... 98
Present attempts to address issues at VU. ........................................................................................... 99

APPENDICES 102
APPENDIX A Questions for Professor and Project Leader Interviews 103
APPENDIX B Questions for Student Interviews 105

REFERENCES - 107

 

vii

LIST OF TABLES

Table I

Schemas identiﬁed in the data. ..................................................................................... 36
Table 2

Primary schemas discussed.......................................: ................................................... 38
Table 3

Primary schemas discussed. .......................................................................................... 81
Table 4

Number of students evidencing each schema. .............................................................. 84
Table 5

Syllabus chart. ............................................................................................................... 96

viii

Chapter 1: Introduction and Background

Online learning is a newly burgeoning ﬁeld. Courses are offered in everything from
how to use the Internet to master’s degrees in Criminal Justice. In 1997, The Oryx Guide
(Burgess) listed 29 institutions offering Internet programs of study leading to certiﬁcates
or advanced degrees. College Online (Duffy, 1997) listed 83 degree or certiﬁcate
programs at 17 colleges, institutes, or universities. These numbers are steadily increasing
and do not include institutions offering individual online courses within regular programs
of study.

As with any new medium for teaching and learning, successful developers and
instructors of online courses will pay attention to how students experience these courses.
Instructors need to be aware of what students are bringing to the learning environment in
order to create curriculum materials. To develop appropriate interfaces, designers and
developers need to be aware of teachers’ and students’ conceptions about the new
learning environment as well as other learning environments. Questions must be asked
about how easily people move among their different learning environments and to what
extent they grasp new ones. Little is known about what and how students are learning in
online environments. Some of the issues to be addressed include: How do students new to
online education learn how to use the online materials? How do they learn how to learn
with the site? How do they make sense of the situation initially? What the internal picture
does the user have of the course, how to use it, and how to learn with it?

Schema theory provides a conceptual tool to help examine these issues. Schema

theory is a way of explaining how people structure their knowledge of the world

I

(Rumelhart, 1980; Pearson, 1982; Anderson, 1984a). It tells us how people make sense of
the world through their experiences, and use the resulting structured knowledge to

interact with the world. Schemas are general, abstract cognitive structures created over

 

935190“? minds as ways to organize the world. They give us general plans for how
things should be, including connections among people, actions, objects, and abstract
concepts (Pearson, 1982).

Schema theory’s heyday was the early to mid-805. Interest in schema theory seems to
have faded as social views of learning have come to the forefront. Schema theory,
however, provides an explanation for how knowledge of the world—as cognitive
structures within the individual—shape and constrain the individual’s interactions with
the world. That is, it could provide a bridge between representational and social views of
learning. In the last decade, a second-generation schema theory has been developed
called Cognitive Flexibility Theory. This theory shows that people apply not just one
schema but parts of multiple schemas to understand new situations (Spiro, Feltovich,
Jacobson, & Coulson, 1992).

In this research, I use schema theory and Cognitive Flexibility Theory as conceptual
lenses for understanding how students come to understand how to use and learn from an
online masters-level course. First, I explain how this study provides a theoretical
perspective that the distance education literature has not offered. Then, before describing

the details of the study, I provide an overview of schema theory and consider how it can

help us understand learning in electronic environments, including educational software

and online instructional settings. In the study, I use this theory to shed light on how

students understand online courses—«an issue that urgently needs focus and guidance.

Distance Education

Distance education has been around nearly since the beginning of the mail system.
Over the last century, it has moved from print-based correspondence courses to
broadcasting via the mass media of television of radio. It moved into personal media of
audio- and videotapes and most recently into telecommunication systems of the Internet,
video conferencing, and fax machines (Schreiber, 1998; Daniel, 1996; Verduin & Clark,
1991; and others). Distance education, in its simplest deﬁnition, means education where
the student and the instructor are separated in place, and oﬁen, also in time. What was
once fairly uncommon is becoming much more commonplace, experiencing particularly
rapid grth in the last two decades (Mclsaac & Funawardena, 1996).

However, little theoretical attention has been paid to these learning environments
(McIssac & Funawardena, 1996). Many reports simply describe existing distance
education programs (e.g., Connick, 1994; Roberts, Blakeslee, Brown, & Lenk, 1990; and
Schreiber & Berge, 1998). Other studies have focused on comparisons among types of
distance education or between distance and face-to-face classrooms. Other discussions of
distance education and of online education have been just trying to describe what it is.
For example, writers from 1989 (Harasim) through 1997 (Porter) produced chapters or
entire books attempting to describe what online education is. None of these are very

useful for guiding practice and curriculum or interface development.

Mclsaac and F unawardena (1996) noted that “distance education” as a ﬁeld has
tended to be a hodge-podge of ideas and theories. Developers have typically not used
theoretical frameworks but instead simply attempted to transfer a face-to-face course to a
distance education course. Mclsaac and Funawardena called for work on ﬁnding
theoretical frameworks to help guide design of distance education. They also suggested
further research that focuses on how the learner uses the technology to come to “generate
knowledge.”

One attempt to do so has been the call for “user-centered design.” McKnight, Dillon
and Richardson (1996), Verduin and Clark (1991), Duning, Van Kekerix, and
Zaborowski (1993), Mason and Goodenough (1981), Harrison (1999), and Kaye (1981)
all call for the use of user-centered design in the development of educational technologies
(although only McKnight, Dillon & Richardson used this term). However, none of these
authors explain this type of design framework in much detail nor why it is important.

Writing to course developers, Mason and Goodenough (1981) reminded them to
“Keep the Student in Mind” (p. 115). By this, however, they were not speaking of
experiences the student might bring, but only the student’s rate of mastery (need for
multiple passes at the information), that their conﬁdence in the subject matter will grow,
and to divide the material into appropriately sized chunks.

Verduin and Clark (1991) also pointed out that learners come with different past
experiences, expectations, needs, and so forth. While they recommended considering
these individual differences when planning the distance education course, they, too, do

not provide much methodology for determining these. They do recommend a student

 

 

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self-assessment of learning style or a small survey of prior content knowledge at the
beginning of the course. Neither of these are of great use to a designer during the
development phase, unless used for subsequent courses.

Duning, Van Kekerix, and Zaborowski (1993) also said that one guiding assumption
for distance education is to focus on the student: “The future lies with the learner” (p. 30).
Like others, the authors did not provide any guidance to the designer in doing this.
Instead, they focused on organization-level issues, such as a plan for implementing a
distance education program, stafﬁng concerns, and marketing strategies. Chute,
Thompson, and Hancock (1999), Verduin and Clam (1991), and Daniel (1996) also
focused more on the institutional concerns than on how designers can understand their
learners.

Chute, Thompson, and Hancock (1999) did recommend a user needs assessment,
albeit with a very brief discussion. They pointed out that the learning requirements as
well as motivations of the students are very important before designing a delivery system
and courses. Kaye (1981) also recommended—in a lengthier description—ﬁnding out
“Who are the students?” (p. 32). He recommended researching demographic statistics,
whether student groups will be presently served or new to the institution, lifestyle data
(such as amount of study time available), infrastructure availability, and background
education or training. In all the books surveyed, this was the only one with a whole
chapter devoted to ﬁnding out who students will be. Others, while professing to

encourage user-centered design, did not attempt to actually explain it to the reader.

 

 

 

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Harrison (1 999), who wrote directly for new distance education teachers, suggested it
is important to know the user. With no reference to theory or saying why it is important,
he suggested a few questions to ask the users. He also suggested designers could ask the
questions of themselves about their users without ever actually speaking with the users
themselves.

Researchers and writers in the distance education ﬁeld have not provided a theoretical
lens to help developers of online courses. Therefore, we must look outside this ﬁeld for
help. In the rest of this chapter, I explain how the concepts of schema theory and
Cognitive Flexibility Theory can help designers ﬁgure out how to design in a user-

centered way.

Schemas in Text Comprehension

Imagine someone picks up a dictionary to read. This person has never used a
dictionary before but has read numerous novels. She assumes this is just another novel
and attempts to read it in the same way. She starts on page one and reads every line in
sequence, just like she would a novel. We readily would say this person does not
understand how to use a dictionary appropriately. (Not to mention that she will probably
set the book down after reading at most a few pages!) However, people typically learn
either in school or through out-of-school reading experiences about the differences
among dictionaries, romance novels, encyclopedias, fairy tales, textbooks, and science
ﬁction books. We would expect students who have read many of one type of book to be

able to read more texts of that type and to understand their structure. This is called having

 

 

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a schema for that type of text (Mandler, 1984). A person’s schema delineates the overall
structure of the text or of the text’s content.

How does a schema help us when we read? According to Anderson (1984a), there
are, tentatively, six main functions of schemas in reading. A schema “provides ideational
scaffolding for assimilating text information, facilitates selective allocation of attention,
enables inferential elaboration, allows orderly searches of memory, facilitates editing and
summarizing, and permits inferential reconstruction” (p. 248). A schema helps a person
understand the text’s content, attend to speciﬁc pieces of information, ﬁll in missing
information, and later recall the text. That is, the schema enables the reader to
comprehend what she read. “Comprehension is a matter of activating or constructing a
schema that provides a coherent explanation of object and events mentioned in a
discourse. . .. The click of comprehension occurs only when the reader evolves a schema
that explains the whole message” (Anderson, 1984a, p. 247).

Theorists have described a number of different types of schemas. Pearson (1982)
wrote that there are a wide variety of schemas, including schemas for simple objects
(desk, car, dog), abstract entities (hope, peace, love), actions (eat, sell, jump), complex
events (going to a restaurant, attending class), and very complex entities (novel, computer
game, world affairs).

Anderson (1984a, b) classiﬁed schemas into two types, content and structurngontent

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schemas help one understand readings about speciﬁc events. For instance, one might
have a schema about shipmchristenings, washing clothes, or geomitgy. People who already

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than do those unfamiliar with the event (Anderson, 1984b). These content schemas are
helpful both in and out of reading. They help when participating in or observing events as
well when reading about them.

Structure sehemas gntcte‘one in reading speciﬁc types of text such as a short story, a
textbook, or va’research article. They lay out what is called a story grammar, or

, expectations withinthetext: For instance, when reading a classic fairy tale, one expects
(perhaps) a princess in need of rescue. The prince who falls in love with her (at ﬁrst sight,
of course) must pass through a number of tests to free her from the danger. At then end,
the two live happily ever after. When we (or, particularly, a young child) read a fairy tale
that conforms to this schema, we are more likely to understand it than when reading a
story whose pieces do not ﬁt as well (Anderson, 1984a, 1984b). It would seem that these
structures are also readily apparent in reading different texts such as dictionaries, novels,

and scholarly journal articles (Mandler, 1984). Each type of text structure requires a

different schema in order for the reader to best understand the text and how to read it.

Schemas in Science and Mathematics

Schema theory has not been applied only in reading comprehension. Research in
other ﬁelds includes science and mathematics, as well as others.

In science, research on the creation of naive theories, or misconceptions, has often
been the focus of schema-related research. McCloskey (1983), for instance, described
naive theories of motion, which he concluded people extrapolate from everyday
experience. He pointed out that these theories are well-explicated, abstract descriptions

(or schemas) of what should occur concerning the behavior of moving objects. He

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described some of the commonly held misconceptions, but left their development and
implications in the real world for further study. The main difference between
McCloskey’s theory and the reading comprehension version of schema theory is
McCloskey’s focus on misconceptions. In reading comprehension, both a child and a
adult can have equally valid schemas, without either one being an expert or the naive
schema. While a child, or an adult learner, naturally modiﬁes her schema as more
information is gathered, all versions of the schema are workable and usable in the real
world.

Additionally in the science ﬁeld, researchers have looked at what they term mental
models of various concepts. Gentner and Gentner (1983) discussed analogy-based models
of electricity. They suggested that such analogies help people structure unfamiliar
domains. We can think of this as an instance of using the structure of one content schema
to help understand the content of another idea. Gentner and Gentner found their
participants had one of two analogies to think about electricity. One analogy involved the
behavior of water while other was about moving objects. Those with the water analogy
performed better on battery questions while those with the moving objects analogy
performed better on resistor questions. This is a good example of how different schemas
have different affordances and constraints. Unlike a schema, the cognitive structure of the
mental model centers around another real-world event or object, not on the object of
present focus.

Marshall (1995) focused on problem solving in mathematics. Using the ideas of

schema theory, she developed two software programs for teaching how to solve

 

 

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arithmetic story problems. Looking at student work in the two different environments,
she developed a mathematical model of schemas. Her previous work identiﬁed four
components of schema knowledge for solving word problems: identiﬁcation, elaboration,
planning, and execution knowledge. There is little difference between her use of schema
theory and that used by Anderson, Pearson, Mandler, and so forth. Her four components

are similar to Anderson’s (1984a) six functions of schemas.

Classroom Schemas

Most research in schemas has focused on speciﬁc bodies of knowledge, such as
reading, physics, or arithmetic problems, as discussed above. However, as indicated
previously, Pearson (1982) described schemas as encompassing the entire realm of a
person’s interactions, not just interactions with a speciﬁc school subject. Since the
present study looks at how students come to understand a new learning environment, a
particular interest is schemas of the classroom. Much research has been done on students
in the classroom and how they interact there. To discuss these experiences, terms other
than schema have been used such as activity segments (Shuell, 1996), rules for classroom
discourse, or classroom routines. An exception is Leinhardt and Putnam (1987) who did
use the concept of schemas during their discussion of a model of the learner.

Someone who has spent time in school most certainly will have a concept of what
happens in the classroom. It might involve the placement of objects such as students,
desks and chairs, a teacher, blackboards, and so forth. It also would include interactions
among the objects, such as how a teacher’s lecture proceeds, including speaking, writing

on the board, eliciting responses from students, and handing out an assignment (Leinhardt

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& Putnam, 1987). Other activities in the classroom—or activity segments—might include
recitation, sharing time, seatwork, small group projects, and others such activities (Shuell,
1996).

Both the general conception of what happens in the classroom as well as the
knowledge of each activity segment can also be called a schema, since it is a structured
knowledge of the objects, people, and actions involved. When a person enters a
classroom for a new course, she will look for these objects and activities and expect them
to be in certain places. A room with no chairs, for instance, would cause some
momentary consternation and confusion. On the other hand, a lecture that proceeds as
expected ﬁts into the schema and is more easily dealt with. As Leinhardt and Putnam
(1987) discussed, “A lack of structure in a lesson or a mismatch between the structure of
an actual lesson and the structure of a leamer’s lesson schema can cause considerable
difﬁculty for the [student]” (p. 567).

Being able to learn in the classroom environment requires familiarity with the
activities happening and/or the subject being taught. That is, the student needs to have
developed a schema as well as be able to use it. Doyle (1978) realized:

It is conceivable that a student would fail to learn from a particular instructional
setting, regardless of its “quality,” because of an inability to recognize and

interpret cues that signal which performances are being taught. (p. 185)

These cues are the signals to what schemas the learner should activate to understand the

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Putnam, 1987; Shuell, 1996). These cues are particularly important to use when a new or
less familiar subject is being taught or when the student is in a new or less familiar

learning environment. If cues are not used by the instructor, understanding by ﬁre $39299}

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is even less likely since the schema is unlikely to be activated (Shuell, 1996). Of course,

if there is no pre-existing schema, or place within a schema, for a particular aspect,_thlre_._~

 

 

,astixisxqrsslzicssthgtIranian {Eightpass the stu.den.t..complete.ly, .aswillbe seenin. the __

present study.

Limitations to Schema Theory

One large drawback to schema theory and its acceptance has been a lack of comment
on how novel events are understood and how new schemas are developed (Bransford,
1984; Marshall, 1995). Although little research has been done on the acquisition of
schemas, it is obvious that after birth we no longer have a blank mind. There is something
there on which to build. For schema theorists, the ﬁrst interactions we have are the
building blocks for future schemas. When we encounter a new situation or object, we
attempt to ﬁt it into an existing schema. If it cannot ﬁt, we adjust an old schema, either
adding or subtracting to it or modifying it into a separate schema (Rumelhart, 1980;
Pearson, 1982; and others). This area is still ripe for research; investigation of developing
schemas is part of the focus of the present research.

Bransford (1984) also brought up the concern that a focus on schema theory could
cause teachers and writers to present or create boring stories to have texts that ﬁt what

children already know. In a similar vein, software producers could recycle the same ideas

12

 

 

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over and over again. Teachers and parents could only select similar software for their
classrooms and homes. To some extent this does happen and is commercially successful.
For instance, the Math Blaster! Series (Davidson, 1986) has been produced for over a
decade and continues to have new additions in the same vein as the original. Course
developers could stick with just one type of course or recycle structure over all types of
courses.1 I believe it is a misinterpretation of schema theory to use only material with
which someone is familiar. The popularity of the computer game Myst (Red Orb
Entertainment, 1993), which had a unique structure among computer games when it was

ﬁrst introduced, shows that people can develop new schemas for new software structures.

Cognitive Flexibility Theory

Schema theory typically focuses on the application of a single schema to an event.
For instance, someone has a restaurant schema or a classroom schema. Life is more
complex than this, however. There are many different varieties of restaurants. A
classroom is made of many different activities. New experiences may draw upon more
than just one sort of experience. As researchers realized this limitation to schema theory,
Cognitive Flexibility Theory was developed. This is an extension of schema theory
dealing with the use of multiple schemas (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson, & Coulson, 1992;
Spiro, Feltovich, Coulson, & Anderson, 1989). Cognitive Flexibility Theory describes
how a person applies multiple schemas to understand a current situation. To some extent,

this theory also answers Bransford’s (1984) and Marshall’s (1995) problem of the

 

' There is an argument for all courses within a program of study having a similar structure
to facilitate students’ organization and use of schemas. I would argue against using this

13

 

development of new schemas: New schemas are developed out of the appropriate parts of
other schemas or by transforming old schemas to ﬁt new experiences and circumstances.

Take the situation of a person using an online course. She might apply part of a
schema for graduate course classrooms, part of a schema for how the Internet works, part
of a schema for online discussions, part of a schema for in—class discussions, part of a

schema for taking a distance education course, and so forth. The parts are (hopefully) the

best and most appropriate parts of each schema at that moment for that interaction.

Cognitive ﬂexibility means “the ability to spontaneously restructure one’s knowledge, in
MM ‘5" '_ ,~ . . «7 ' " ' _'~ I T ) - ........-.._,...,.. H"- ""‘ *‘4--\—_...,._,‘_____.__- “k .a
I

many ways, in adaptive response to radically changing situational demands...” (Spiro &

__ -—M-——-H_~ .._‘,,L N _- w ~

 

w.»- .7... «at... .

Jehng, 1990, p. 165). CFT goes beyond schema theory in supposing that people do not
just draw on concrete, already created knowledge structures. Rather, we can draw upon a
plurality of previous knowledge and reassemble it to ﬁt the current situation (Spiro &
Jehng, 1990; Spiro et al., 1987). Spiro et al. (1987) describe the process:

Rigid, monolothic, prepackaged knowledge representations [of schema theory]
are replaced [in CFT] by ﬂexible representations in which fragments of
knowledge are moved about and assembled to ﬁt the needs of a given context of
application. Instead of prepackaged schemata, purpose-sensitive situational
schemata are constructed, thus allowing knowledge to be used in different
occasions for different purposes. The emphasis is shifted from prepackaged
schemata to the ingredients for many potential schemata; schema selection is
devalued in favor of schema assembly; storage of ﬁxed knowledge is devalued in
favor of the mobilization of potential knowledge. One cannot have a prepackaged
schema for everything. (p. 181)

 

structure across all courses in different programs or disciplines, however.
14

Schema Theory and Educational Software

The theories of text comprehension discussed above can also be used to think about
educational software, including online courses. It will be easier at this point to speak
about educational software in general for a few reasons. First, my previous research has
involved educational software programs speciﬁcally. Second, little research has been
done on online courses. Third, I believe this theoretical lens can help us understand users
across all types of programs, not just online courses. I will later focus speciﬁcally on
online courses.

We all have spent years attempting to understand a wide variety of texts and have a
general idea what it means to be able to understand the written words. What does it mean
to understand a software program? Understanding a program is in many ways analogous
to a reader’s understanding of a particular written text. An author writes a text, with
certain goals, audience, message, and medium. Likewise, content writers, graphic
designers, project directors, animators, developers, and others write educational computer
programs. This group collectively is the author of the software. The software team has a
particular goal such as helping the user learn to speak conversational French or develop
mathematical thinking skills; a particular message or content which forms the events of
the program; and a particular audience such as grades 2—6, health care professionals, or
people facing breast cancer.

Recall Anderson’s (I984a) six functions of schemas in reading comprehension
discussed above. We can apply Anderson’s functions of schemas almost directly to

software. Just as a reader must assimilate text information, a user must assimilate

15

information from the screen. On the computer, however, this information may involve
text, pictures, animation, movies, and sound (words, music, or sound effects). With many
different things on the screen at one time, there is a lot to which a user could attend. A
schema allows the user to selectively attend to pieces of the presentation. For instance,
one schema might indicate that an animation is most important, while another schema
indicates that text information should be attended to at this point. Inferential elaboration
will enable a user to draw conclusions about icons and other symbols, such as that a
question mark means a help section. With a schema, the user can search her memory for
similar occurrences in other circumstances to help her determine functions of these
symbols. When summarizing a text, the reader bases the summary on a schema, editing
out unimportant information; presumably, the same occurs when describing a software
program. A reader may add information from a schema that was not in the text
(inferential reconstruction) when referring back to the reading. Again, this seems quite
likely to occur with software as well. I did see these latter two occur during a study of
children using educational software games (Paulukonis, 1998).

Just as a reader brings various content and structure schemas to bear in
comprehending a text, a computer user can bring such schemas to her interaction with
software. Just as there are different types of texts, so too are there different types of
software programs. Educational software, for example, can include exploratory
microworlds, drill and practice programs, video-games, strategy/planning activities,
interactive books, productivity tools (such as word processing programs), and tutorials or

courses, among others, as well as combinations thereof. Just as each type of text requires

16

reading in a slightly different way, each type of software requires interacting with the
computer and thinking in a slightly different way.

For instance, Math Blaster! (Davidson & Associates, 1986) is a typical drill and
practice program. A user faces a number of numerical math problems; upon typing in
correct numerical answers, he is rewarded with a short video game involving shooting
aliens or collecting space garbage. To succeed with the program, he mainly needs
structural schemas for drill and practice and for video games.

SimPark (Maxis Kids, 1996), on the other hand, is an exploratory microworld that
simulates the ecological environment of the nature park created by the user. She must
maintain biological diversity through placement of plants, animals, and items for people.
To succeed at the game, she mainly needs a structural schema for microworld
simulations. When students ﬁrst encounter a particular piece of educational software,
including various components of an online course, they likely bring a variety of such
structural schemas to their efforts to make sense of the program.

With educational software, we need to deal with two types of content schemas. First,
there is the subject matter content, such as ecology, geometry, or social work. These
content schemas would be the ones discussed above used in reading. In addition to
educational content, many programs set the material in a speciﬁc situation or story line. I
suggest using the terms educational and situational to distinguish these two types of
content schemas.

For example, the educational content of SimPark is ecology; the situational content of

the program is a park. What a learner knows about both things—her schemas for ecology

17

and for parka have an important inﬂuence on how she makes sense of, interacts
with, and learns from SimPark. As I found in previous research (Paulukonis, 1998), two
users can have a similar schema about ecological diversity but apply it differently with
different schemas of a park. One child thought of parks as places for people; that is, her
park schema had people as a main component. She focused on creating a place with
camping areas, fountains, and benches. She placed few plants or animals, to the point of
removing some that wondered in through the simulation’s internal programming.
However, she did place a variety of species, not just one plant or animal. She barely
glanced at other sections of the program that included a species identiﬁcation game and a
ﬁeld guide. Another child focused on placing plants and animals, that is, his park schema
focused on nature. He carefully selected animals that could be used as food for larger
animals. He placed trees and ﬂowers that were part of that food chain as well. Along with
relying on prior knowledge, he frequently checked the ﬁeld guide for further advice. Both
children appeared to have within their ecology schemas information about bio-diversity.
However, their schema of a park was very different. These different park schemas led to
very different interactions with the software and hence different conceptions of what the
software was about and how to use it.

Although there are similarities, software is different from text. For starters, most
recent software programs are not text-based. The best programs are those combining
multiple media (hence, the name multimedia) such as graphics, text, sounds, and speech.

Thus, the user is not just processing text, as she is when reading. The software user has

18

multiple demands on her attention (although, as noted previously, a schema would help
her select where to focus this attention).

Software also has a more complex structure than many texts. Few programs are
linear. Some software tutorials and some games may be but the vast majority of programs
are not. Nonlinearity is one of the selling points of multimedia/hypermedia. Most texts,
on the other hand, can be described in a linear fashion: x then y then 2 occurs and will
occur on every reading. One software user’s one interaction can be described
linearly. . .but the next interaction probably will not follow that same path. Even
interactive books are rarely strictly linear; most allow (or perhaps encourage) the reader
to easily move to different parts of the book, play games within various pages, or to read
it from “beginning to end.” For other programs, such as a word processing program or
database software, linearity and nonlinearity are not applicable terms. They are tools that
have a structure, but do not have a story line.

Online courses may have more or less linearity. Some allow students to tackle course
objectives in any order; others have set lectures to be viewed or read on particular weeks.
However, few, if any, courses have a strict sequence that all students must follow upon
each study time. If a student arrives at a classroom, he will participate in roughly the
same sequence of activities as all other students in the class. When the same students take
an online course, one may begin in the discussion room, move on to a help page, then go
to a lecture page. Another student might begin with the guest professor’s audio lecture,

then proceed to the main lecture pages, and not get into the discussion room for a few

19

more days. Although any one section, such as a lecture page, might have a linear format
within itself, the course as a whole does not have a particular linear arrangement.

With texts and with software, being familiar with the content or with the structure
facilitates understanding. A user is more likely to understand, effectively use, and learn
from programs where they are already familiar with something. For instance, being
familiar with ecological simulation software (having a structure schema) makes it easier
to understand simulation software in another ﬁeld. Knowing a lot about ecology (an
educational content schema) makes it easier to understand the simulation software when

it is ﬁrst used.

Overview of the Study

The concept of schemas based on past experience provides a framework usable by

W—W .m—w— —-———.— 0-...rn-- -

designers of online courses. Designers want their interface to be easily accessible. They

Wv—Mﬂw.

 

 

want people to use the course and learn from it and be able to be effective with it.
Knowing how people come to learn how to use a new interface can provide insight on
how to design interfaces that are more easily understood. It can also give insight on how
to advise people about using the interface, without changing the design. With this insight,
designers could develop ways of activating appropriate schemas, through help sections,
audio cues, or graphical layouts. Being aware of various schemas brought by their users
could also help designers create additional ways of using the software, such as through
providing different navigation structures.

Instructors developing online courses can also beneﬁt from thinking about schemas

for the same reasons. Although they may not be focused on graphics and layout, they

20

should be concerned with how their students are approaching their courses. Such
information can guide them in selecting modes of delivery, exercises, and activities, and
types of content.

A host of questions can be asked about schemas and online learning. What happens
when a person encounters this new learning situation? How does she adapt other schemas
and create a new schema? What does he bring from outside the interaction to help him
understand? Does he relate the experience to other learning experiences? If so, is it to
other online learning? To in-class learning? To other distance learning, such as video via
TV or two-way TV linkups? Or does she bring Internet surﬁng experience? What is her
expectation before starting the course? How do these expectations change? How does he
envision the course and his learning taking place? How does this vision change over the
ﬁrst month or two of the course? What are people expecting when they come to an online
course? How does this perception change over the ﬁrst months of the course? What is
their initial schema of the course? In what ways does the schema change and develop
over time?

From this array of questions, I have focused on two research questions to guide this
study:

1. How do students new to online education learn how to learn in the new situation?

0 What prior experiences are used to help make sense of the online course?

2. What is the initial schema of the course and how does it change?

0 How does the student’s schema compare to that of the professor and the

project leader?

21

o What features of the course itself or of the Internet seem to have the greatest
inﬂuence?
In the next chapter, I present the methodology used and a description of my data
analysis procedures. In Chapter 3, we meet the participants and hear the stories of their
past experiences and their course experience. I provide concluding remarks and

recommendations for further research and for producers of online courses in Chapter 4.

22

Chapter 2: Method

This study examined the experiences of students taking their ﬁrst online course,
Social Work 891: Special Topics in Graduate Social Work: Children with Special Needs
(SW891), offered at Michigan State University (MSU) in Spring 1999. Five students,
their instructor, and the course developer were interviewed over the course of one
semester. The instructor and developer interviews focused on the development process.
The student interviews focused on their expectations for and experiences with the course,
how these expectations and experiences changed over the semester, and how past

experiences inﬂuenced their interaction with the online learning setting.

Overview of the Site

MSU offers online courses through its Virtual University (VU). VU refers both to the
development lab that creates the courses2 and to the courses themselves. Rather than
being a separate unit of the university to which students apply, VU supports the
development and administration of courses offered by regular academic departments in
the university. VU courses are offered in many subject areas and at all levels of
instruction, including undergraduate, graduate, training, certiﬁcate programs, and
continuing education. VU began with one online course in 1996. In the 1998-99 school
year, VU offered approximately 22 Fall courses, 31 Spring courses, and 28 Summer

courses (some were offered more than one semester).

 

2 The term course may also designate seminars, training workshops, and conference
proceedings produced by or offered through VU.
23

The VU staff includes directors, project leaders, developers, graphic artists,
programmers, and support staff. Each project leader works with the course faculty and
their staff to develop a Web site for an individual course. The resulting course site may
include content pages, help pages, discussion areas for synchronous and asynchronous
conversations, grade books, attendance records, evaluation forms, and online tests and
quizzes. Additional features are frequently added to the VU suite to meet the needs of
particular courses. The pages may contain text, graphics, videos, animation sequences,
audio passages, downloadable, ﬁles, or anything else that can be found on the Web. VU
courses may be entirely self-contained or may have external links to other online
resources and Web sites. Most courses follow a typical semester format similar to an in-
class timeline, having units arranged by weeks and with speciﬁc due dates for readings
and projects. The occasional course speciﬁes only start and end dates, with individual
students determining the pace and timing of study.

For a year and a half, I worked at VU on the development of six courses and served
as the project leader on ﬁve of those. I was not involved in the development of the course
used in this study, although I knew the project leader and had met the professor prior to

the study.

Participants

Study participants were all associated with one online course (described in the next
section) offered by VU in Spring 1999. The course was selected by asking VU staff and
instructors if they would be willing to participate in this project. Initially, another course

was selected because of ease of access to the professor. Unfortunately, this course failed

24

to have enough willing and qualiﬁed student participants. At that time, almost a month
into the semester, a second course was solicited, resulting in enough qualiﬁed participants
to conduct the study.

Student participants were recruited through email messages sent to the entire class,
requesting participation from those who had never before taken an online course. All ﬁve
respondents who were qualiﬁed and had the time to participate were included in the
study. They were all female, ranging in age from 26 to 46. Four were in the MSU Social
Work Master’s program; one already had her Master’s degree. Four were taking the
course to receive School Social Work approval (required to work as a school social
worker in Michigan); the ﬁfth student was taking the course as an elective.3 One student
dropped the class about two months through the semester due to health reasons. She
requested to remain in the study as two of the three interviews had occurred and she had
further insights to share.

The instructor, James,4 had taught this course and related courses for MSU for the
previous ﬁve years. His degrees include a Master’s degree in Social Work and an
Educational Specialist degree in School Psychology. In addition to being an instructor at
MSU,5 he is a school psychologist and social worker. He has worked in schools for about
nine years and has about 13 years of practical work experience. This spring was James’s
third experience teaching SW891. He had taught the course once with another instructor

and once on his own. By his own admission, James is not a teacher by training. He had

 

3 The ﬁfth student in these two cases was not the same person.
4 All names used in this report are pseudonyms.

25

never developed an online course before although he was an assistant teacher for another
online course in the School Social Work series the previous fall. He bought his ﬁrst
computer shortly before the previous fall semester. He had never taken an online course
or any other distance education classes.

The project leader, Joan, had been employed as a graduate assistant at VU since the
previous summer. This course was one of her ﬁrst assignments. She had both a
Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree in Computer Science and was pursuing a Master’s
degree in Digital Media Arts. She had used the Web since 1993 or 1994 and had created
numerous Web pages. Although she had been a teaching assistant, she had not been
responsible for the creation of the instructional materials or lectures. She had never taken
an online course or any other distance education classes. Joan had no background in

social work and was not familiar with the content on the site.

Overview of the Course

Special Topics in Graduate Social Work: Children with Special Needs is one of three
courses in a series taught at MSU by the Social Work Department. A social worker who
takes these three courses is approved by the State of Michigan to be a school social
worker. Such approval, which also may be obtained in other ways through other colleges,
is necessary to work as a school social worker in Michigan. According to the course
description on the VU Web site:

This course will focus on identifying and working with children who present
special needs. Children’s learning and behavioral difﬁculties will be examined and

 

5 Technically, James is an instructor. However, the students referred to him as the
“professor” and these terms are used interchangeably in this report.
26

treatment needs deﬁned according to an ecological, multi-systems, developmental
framework. The course will address special needs within a broad range continuum
from situational problems like family violence and parental divorce to speciﬁc
disorders like Autism and Learning Disabilities.

Methods of addressing the special needs of children, their families’ [sic] and
educators’ [sic] within the complex interactions and relationships of home, school and
community contexts will be offered. This is a required course for those who wish to
pursue approval as a School Social Worker in the State of Michigan. (VU, 1999)
All three courses in the sequence were offered online by of Summer 1999. Another

instructor previously developed one course. Joan and James developed this course in
Summer and Fall 1998 and the third course in Spring 1999. As of Spring 1999, James

would be teaching all three classes. At the time of the study, there were no plans to offer

these courses in the classroom in the future.

The course online.

The online course was divided into ﬁve content areas:6 (a) Course Syllabus and
Introduction, (b) Conditions Affecting Children’s Needs, (c) Speciﬁc Clinical Disorders,
((1) Major Life Difﬁculties, and (e) Course Conclusion/Wrap—Up. Each content area was
represented as a single Web page (i.e., all content was contained within one URL or ﬁle).
For the middle three—the main content of the course—each page included (in order) a
syllabus chart, a list of the topics on the page as internal links, the journal entry
assignment, assigned readings and Web links for each subtopic, and narrative lectures for
each subtopic. Some parts of the lectures were outlines taken directly from PowerPoint

slides James had used previously in the classroom. Others were written from notes used

 

6 Information about the course is taken from the developer and professor interviews as

well as the course Web site. URLs for the course pages are not provided because the

course is password protected. Passwords are required for all cost-bearing VU courses to

limit use of the content to students, course instructors, VU employees, and invited guests.
27

in lectures. According to James, these text-based lectures closely approximated what he
would say in a regular classroom. However, he realized during the interview they did not
include as many stories of personal experience as he would be bring up in a classroom.

The main course content was entirely online when the semester began. Every link,
lecture, and assignment was detailed. The only part of the course that was not provided
was the actual case studies for three assignments. These were neither written nor put
online until closer to the due date for each assignment.

In addition to the content area of the course, the Web site also included a grade book,
a technical help page, WebTalk, and a class directory. The ﬁrst two are self-explanatory.
The latter two are described more fully below.

WebTalk is VU’s proprietary program for asynchronous (at different times)
communication within a class via the Web. It allows the posting of messages by the
instructor and students in various conversations within any number of topics. With the
project leader’s assistance, the instructor is responsible for setting up topics and
conversations before or during the course. In some instances, although not in the course,
students are also allowed to create new topics or conversations. The program displays
information about the sender of the message along with whatever text she has typed in.
Files may be attached for downloading by classmates or the instructor for purposes of
turning in assignments or sharing work with classmates.

Associated with WebTalk and the class directory is a system of proﬁles. These are
created automatically for each class member but may be updated by each individual.

Here, information such as preferred name, address, interests, and a photograph may be

28

posted. The photo and preferred name are used in Web Talk to identify a message’s poster.
These and other information are used to create the class directory, through which a
student may email another student or view her entire proﬁle. The proﬁles are meant to

provide a way for students to get to know their unseen classmates.

The course in the classroom.

In the classroom, the course was typically taught on two four-day weekends, eight .
hours each day. Students attended at on-campus classrooms and at other places all

connected via two-way interactive television, which is used extensively in the Social

 

Work program. Classroom time included lectures, small group discussion and activities,
and presentation of research projects. While the entire course was mapped out ahead of
time, James changed speciﬁc topics and commentary to ﬁt the particular needs and

questions of the students, something he did not do in the virtual course.

Data Collection

Interviews provided the primary data for this study. The professor and project leader
were each interviewed once, shortly after midterm. Each student was interviewed three
times, at approximately one-month intervals.

The professor and project leader interviews focused on their organization of and
expectations for use of the course (see Appendix A for the protocol). The main focus of
these interviews was to see the course from their point of view. We can think of them as
the authors. As discussed in Chapter 1, readers more readily understand text when they

hold and apply schemas like those drawn upon by the author. I hoped these interviews

29

would provide such information about the course developer’s schemas. These interviews
also provided information for describing the course.

The students were interviewed three times during the semester. Most of the
participants lived over two hours drive from the MSU campus, had families, and worked
full time. In addition, most were taking at least one other course in the master’s degree
program. Because they had all taken the course online to reduce driving time, some were
hesitant to come to campus for the interviews. Due to the distance and weather, it was 1
also difﬁcult for me to go to all of them. Thus, some interviews took place in person and

some via electronic communication. I conducted most of the interviews online using AOL

 

Instant Messenger (AIM), a text-based chat program. Only one entire set of interviews
(Susan’s) were conducted in person. Two participants (Cora and Karen) had only online
interviews. Two participants (Tonya and Rosalyn) had a combination of in-person and
online interviews. One interview (Tanya’s third) was conducted via email due to
scheduling difﬁculty and an inability to use a chat program with which at least one of us
was familiar.

The decision to conduct interviews online came when Karen was willing to
participate in the study only if the interviews could be done online or through other
distant means. The other participants either offered it as a possibility or readily agreed to
my suggestion. Some had used AIM or other chat software previously. A couple were
new to it, but did not indicate any difﬁculty in using it the ﬁrst time. I provided them with
links to download the appropriate ﬁle along with instructions to get started with the

program. They all appreciated the freedom this mode of interviewing gave them. For

30

instance, one woman was able to keep an eye on sick family members during the
interview. During another interview, she took a 15-minute break to get her children to
bed. These activities would have been awkward or impossible in other interview
situations.

Using online chat was preferable to telephone interviews because it provided a record
of both sides of the conversation saved as a text ﬁle. This ﬁle was used in place of a
transcription. To minimize the participants’ concern over typing and spelling, I corrected
spelling and punctuation errors in all quotations I used in this report.

The in-person interviews were audiotaped while I took notes. Transcriptions of
sections were made when needed for detailed analysis or direct quotations.

The interviews, which lasted approximately two hours, consisted of a series of open-
ended questions (see Appendix B). Rather than rigidly following this list of questions, I
asked additional questions to follow up on remarks from previous interviews as well as
adapted or removed questions to solicit responses more easily. These changes are
indicated in the protocol. I had planned to conduct the ﬁrst interview before the course
began to discover their expectations of and initial schemas for the course. Unfortunately,

a course and participants were not found before a month of the term had passed.

The Student Interview Questions

The ﬁrst interview began with an assessment of the student’s background with
computers and the Internet through questions such as:
o What is your previous experience with computers? How comfortable do you feel

with them?

31

o What types of software are you familiar with?

0 Tell me about your experience with the Internet and the World Wide Web.

I also asked out about various educational experiences participants had before taking
this course. As discussed in Chapter 1, such things as experience with the subject matter
may affect their ability to apply an appropriate schema and to adapt to a new learning
situation:

0 What, if any, other nonclassroom classes have you taken (such as distance

education courses)?

0 What other courses in this or a similar topic have you taken?

 

0 Have you taken other courses with this professor?
o What would you expect a course on this subject matter to be like? (This might

include what books, topics, class format, professor-student interaction, and so

forth.)

0 Why did you choose to take this course virtually?

Questions about online courses were included because students’ opinions about them
may have affected how they approached the course:

0 What have you heard about online courses in general?

0 What do you think it means to take a “virtual” or online course?

Questions about information students had before the semester began included:

0 What do you know about this course?

0 What materials have you received about the course (including email, brochures,

preview pages on the Web, course orientation, and so forth)?

32

The interviews also included questions about prior experiences students might bring
to the online interaction. In the ﬁrst interview, these questions were asked ﬁrst in terms of
expectations. Then the questions were repeated in terms of what was presently
happening:

0 Please describe this course. What other experiences is it similar to in your life? In

what ways it is like and not like these?

0 How is your course like taking a regular classroom-based course?

0 How is your course not like taking a regular classroom-based course?

0 Would you prefer this course be in a classroom? Why or why not?

I also examined the organization of the speciﬁc schema being used for this course
through the following questions:

0 How is this course organized?

o How do you get around in the course? How do you navigate it? How did you

ﬁgure out the navigation? What would make this easier for you?

0 What do you do to attend class? How do you study for this class? How did you

develop this “plan for studying”?

- What materials do you need for this course?

0 What advantages are there to having this course virtual? What disadvantages are

there to having this course virtual?

Asking a student about their likes and dislikes of the course can gave insight on their

perceptions and expectations:

33

o In general, how comfortable are you with this course? ...with the content? ...with

the technical aspect?

o In general, how much do you like this course? the content? the technical

aspect?

0 What do you like best about the course? What is the worst aspect of the course?

0 How would you improve this course?

0 If you could change any one thing, what would it be?

0 What advantages are there to having this course virtual?

- What disadvantages are there to having this course virtual?

o If you could, would you take another virtual course? Why or why not?

I also gave them a chance to add any further comments about their experiences that
might help me to understand their experience.

I initially planned to have participants ﬁnish each interview by drawing a graphical
representation, or concept map, of the course’s organization. Since so few interviews
took place in person, this was abandoned after the ﬁrst two interviews. Because I did not
collect these from all participants, I did not use them in the data analysis. I had also
planned to have each student Show me the course online during each interview. Again,
since few interviews were done in person, this kind of data was not collected for all
participants. However, some information from this period was deemed useful with some
of the participants and was used in the data analysis. Unlike the drawings, their comments

during this period were part of the interview.

34

Data Analysis

Data consisted of my notes, transcriptions, and AIM text ﬁles of the interviews.
Supplementary documents included the Web site for the online course. Information from
the professor’s and project leader’s interviews was used to describe the course and to
provide comparisons to the classroom version. A general description of the course was
gleaned from this data as well as from the Web site.

The ﬁrst step in my data analysis was to look through each interview transcript or set
of notes for direct references to past experiences. I put these comments or my paraphrases
of them into a table sorted by participant. I organized them ﬁrst by a few general
categories based on interview questions. Thus, comments about expectations were in one
row and all comments about how class discussions worked were in another row. This
organization led to seeing similar experiences across multiple participants. I also noticed
when a participant mentioned the same experience during different interviews. From this
data, I wrote descriptions of each participant and the main experiences she drew upon for
the course.

The second step was to organize related experiences. For each one discussed in
the descriptions, I listed the various reports from the participants. Some were about
previous experience. Some of these discussed how this previous experience inﬂuenced a
particular aspect of the course. I made assumptions from other comments at this point.
For example, the participants talked about instances where things did not work. They
discussed frustrations with the interface or contents and misunderstandings about aspects

of the course. Some talked about portions of the course in ways that indicated they

35

C0?

ex;

Ex

C31

Ta

 

 

misunderstood something. Students also discussed failures to access course materials.

From these comments, I attempted to infer what past experience they were applying that

caused the difﬁculty in understanding.

During this process, I identiﬁed four main areas of experiences related to (a)

classroom-based education, (b) other education, (c) technology, and (d) features of the

course. Within each area, I identiﬁed ﬁve distinct experiences7 (see Table 1). These were

experiences that multiple participants shared or that were very strong for one participant.

Experiences that did not ﬁt these ﬁve categories were ﬁled into a miscellaneous Other

category for each area.

Table 1

Schemas identified in the data.

 

Previously existing schemas

New schemas

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Education— Education—Other Technology Features of the
Classroom Course
Two-way Two-way Chat rooms WebTalk
interactive interactive
television a television a
Social work Independent study Email Syllabus/syllabus
classrooms chart
Professor Video-based course DOS Navigation
interaction
Student interaction Other online World Wide Web Professor
courses
Syllabus Correspondence Listserv Student
course via mail interaction
Other educational experiences Other technology Other features
experience

 

 

Two-way mteractrve televrsron IS listed In two cells because the Social Work Master’s program uses two-
way interactive television in many of its courses. Some experiences were related more to factors
concerning the classroom environment while others were more closely aligned with distance education

factors.

 

7 It was purely coincidental that all four areas ended up with ﬁve sub-areas.

36

 

 

I assigned a two- or three-letter code to each the cell in Table 1. I also used a
numerical code to indicate whether the event was a prior experience, an expectation for
the course, or a present course-based experience. I used these codes to label each
comment I listed in the second step. I also returned to the rich descriptions I had written
in the ﬁrst step and coded these as well.

Having assigned experiences to speciﬁc categories, I revisited the raw data of the
transcripts and my notes. I pulled out additional comments and experiences at this time to
add to the previously developed lists and tables. These also were coded.

The numerical coding led to my seeing that each past experience led into a present
experience, which would be expected from the discussion of schema theory. I developed
a new set of tables that set up each person’s past experience next to the related course
experience. At this point, I began to look at these as more than just experiences. I was
looking at multiple experiences and their inﬂuence on a new experience. I was looking at
more than just the facts and opinions about the experiences but also at how the student
used this knowledge to interpret and understand the course. Thus, I began to refer to
schemas, or organized structures of knowledge. I grouped these tables by schemas rather
than by individual person. Now I began to see how past schemas shaped the course
experience and led to adaptations of the existing schema or led to newly developed
schemas.

As the language changed from “experience” to “schema” so did the actual entries in
the table. Some experiences were not discussed enough in the interviews or were related

to such a minor incident or course piece they did not warrant separate discussion. I

37

dropped these from discussion or merged them with other experiences to form a schema.
Other experience areas I realized should be subdivided into more speciﬁc parts. In
addition, the fourth column of course experiences was dropped since these experiences
were viewed through the previously existing schemas. Therefore, they did not stand on
their own as individual schemas, but were rather a part of the other schemas. See Table 2
for the ﬁnal list of schemas seen in these ﬁve participants.

Table 2

Primary schemas discussed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Classroom schemas Other educational Technological schemas
schemas
Classrooms (similarities) Two-way interactive Online discussion board
television
Locus of control Television—based video DOS
course
Nonverbal communication Independent study Listservs
Class discussions New school Email
Rapport with the instructor General computer
experiences
Casual conversations Affective issues regarding
technology
Anger over lack of choice

 

 

 

 

38

Chapter 3: Results

The evidence suggested that students invoked three broad types of schemas:
classroom schemas, other educational schemas, and technological schemas. Within each
area, different students have experienced different events. Hence, the ﬁve students as a
whole brought little in common. However, their experiences are common enough to other
people that the experience can teach us about how students approach an online course. I
This chapter describes some of their past experiences and how these inﬂuenced their

perceptions of and interactions with SW89] online. , -

 

Because we are looking at what individuals bring to the online experience, let us

begin with learning more about the ﬁve participants in the study.

The Participants

Cora.
Cora was a 41-year old female who took this course as an elective in her Social Work

Master’s program, which she started in May 1998. She was pursuing the School Social
Work approval. Although Cora was a computer novice like some of the other
participants, she was more excited than they were about learning more about the
computer and the Internet. This positive attitude colored her interactions and made it
easier for her to adapt to the course.

The independent study aspects of the virtual course also helped Cora understand the
new learning environment. She particularly appreciated the control this type of leaming

environment gave her over what and when she learned, studied, and read.

39

Karen.
Karen was a 32-year-old female social worker. She was the only participant who

already had a Master’s in Social Work; she took this course to receive the School Social
Work approval. Also unlike the others, Karen was not a regular MSU student. Not having
taken other courses in the Social Work program, she did not know any of her classmates
before this course. Although she had used computers for a number of years, she
considered herself a novice user.

Karen had two major roadblocks at the beginning of the course. First, she interpreted
a letter from MSU as indicating the course took place via email. It took a week of
telephone calls with MSU until she ﬁnally got to the Web site. There, she faced an
unfamiliar graphical interface. In her present job, she uses a DOS program on a daily
basis, but is not familiar with other programs. She was unfamiliar with Windows and
found it difﬁcult to get accustomed to the graphical interface (using the mouse, clicking

on things, and so forth).

Rosalyn.
Rosalyn was a 43-year-old female who took this course as an elective in her Social

Work Master’s program, which she started in May 1998. Although she considered herself
a computer novice, she appeared to be more in the middle of the scale, particularly in
comparison to her classmates. She had used computers for about 10 years, including at
work, home, and a home-based business. She used computers primarily for word
processing and email. During the past year, she had also begun talking online with her

family with chat programs.

40

 

Although she had heard rather favorable reviews of online courses from classmates,
Rosalyn had strong technical fears going into the course. Her only previous experience
with distance education was an attempt at a psychology video course via TV while she
was an undergraduate student. She had such a bad experience she dropped the course
after only a few weeks. She was worried this course would require the same type of strict

time requirement. l

Susan.
Susan was a 25-year-old female who took this course as an elective in her Social

Work Master’s program. She was pursuing the School Social Work approval. Susan *-

 

considered herself a computer novice and had deep-seated fears of computer technology.
She had used computers for about 10 years and email for about ﬁve, which was more
than most other participants. However, Susan said she avoided email during the summers
when she was not required to use it for classes.

While the other participants were happy to have the ability to take a course from
home, Susan was extremely displeased about having to take this course online. As an on-
campus student, she felt like she had been forced into the online course when she did not
have a choice to take the course in a classroom. The other participants all lived away
from the MSU campus and most of them had taken Social Work courses via two-way
interactive television. These others were also used to two-hour drives to and from class, a
strong point in favor of the online course they could take in their living room. Susan

found none of these advantages to the online course.

41

Tanya.
Tanya was a 46-year-old female who took this course as an elective in her Social

Work Master’s program, started in May 1998. She assumed she was the most computer
literate of the entire class, and she at least was the most literate in this study. Tanya was
an expert computer user, having used them in her workplace for over 10 years on a daily
basis. She used the Internet on a daily basis at work as well. This put her at the top among
the participants in both Internet and computer use and expertise.

She expected a simple interface and site because she ﬁgured most other students
would be Internet novices. While the site was more extensive than she expected, Tanya
was the only student who found the course easy to understand and navigate. She also
experienced no technical difﬁculties, unlike the other participants.

A self-paced learner, Tanya highly appreciated the independent aspects of the course.
At the same time, the thing she missed most from a regular classroom was a sense of
rapport with the instructor. Tanya was ﬂexible in adjusting between independent aspects
and those that were closer to the classroom. However, she found it difﬁcult when one or
the other schema seemed appropriate, but then certain expectations based on the activated

schema were not met.

Classroom Experiences

Since the environment under study was a course, it makes sense that the students
brought classroom experiences to bear upon their understanding. All of the participants
were working on or already had a Master’s in Social Work. They had taken psychology

or Social Work courses in college and at least some graduate level Social Work courses.

42

These other classroom experiences shaped schemas of courses in general and of Social
Work courses speciﬁcally for each student. Throughout the course, these prior schemas
both helped and hindered the participants in understanding the new environment. Their
previOusly developed schemas particularly helped the students’ understand when the
online course matched situations with a classroom-based course. Differences led to
greater difﬁculty in developing a schema for the course, particularly for those who
focused on these differences. The lack of choice between an online and a classroom
environment also led to difﬁculty for one student.

The typical Master’s level Social Work classroom, according to the students, includes
such features as lectures, class discussion, small group discussion, papers, a ﬁnal research
paper, and presentations. Classes meet in a room at a speciﬁc time on speciﬁc days of the
week. The professor and a group of students are all present in the room.8 They chat with
each other before and after class, or even during class, about their lives outside of social
work. Students connect to the professor by virtue of seeing him in front of the class every
day. He receives feedback on his lectures through questions, comments, nods, frowns,
and other nonverbal communication. During discussions, the students receive similar
feedback from both the professor and their classmates. This feedback helps them to
establish where they stand in the course, such as how well they grasp the course concepts,
whether they are more or less knowledgeable than other students, and so forth. The

typical Social Work classroom is the typical college classroom.

 

8 The exception to this is the two-way video classroom discussed below in Other

Educational Experiences: T wo-way interactive television.
43

 

This online course also had lectures, class discussions, assignments, and a ﬁnal
research paper. However, the class never met in a room. The “meeting place” was instead
a Web site containing content pages, a discussion area, and other resources. Each person
attended whenever she9 wanted or needed to on any day of the week at any time of the
day, for however much time she chose. Students rarely saw each other during the
semester unless they ran into each other in town or in another class. There was no time
before or after class to chat with each other about life. They never saw the instructor,
outside of a picture on the site. There was no opportunity for nonverbal communication.
Class discussion happened via students posting messages to a classroom message board.
When another student read the message, she could respond to it, but this could be
anywhere from minutes to weeks after the original posting. Thus, responses usually were
not immediate.

There are both similarities as well as differences in the above descriptions, which
capture only a small portion of what classroom or virtual course schemas might contain.
All the participants used their “classroom” schemas to understand the online course and
navigate the uncertainties their experienced. At times, these classroom schemas aided this

understanding; other times, they hindered understanding.

Similarities between the online course and regular classrooms.

All ﬁve students identiﬁed ways in which the online course was similar to a regular
classroom-based course. These similarities made the course comprehensible to an extent

because it followed classroom norms. That is, these students applied their previously

 

9 Although there were men in the course, all participants were women. Therefore, I use
44

created classroom schemas to this course to help them understand the new environment.
Aspects of the typical Social Work classroom which were the same in the virtual course
include the presence of lectures, class discussion, papers, and a ﬁnal research paper. As
Rosalyn put it, some things exist in both classrooms; just in the virtual course, they are
text-based instead of vocalized. These similarities helped each student begin to
understand what she would be doing or would be expected to do although the
environment of the course was different from what was familiar.

In general, these similarities were not very salient for the participants. Lectures, class
discussion, papers, and research papers could be found in virtually any type of learning
situation with some modiﬁcation. The papers might be replaced with a project. The
lectures might be by a teacher, an expert, or other classmates or read from a book. Class
discussion might be within small groups or only within the class as a whole. Therefore,
further explication of these similarities will not be developed. The students themselves
said these were not terribly important to their understanding or misunderstanding of the
learning environment on line. The differences are what made the greater impact on their
schema development for the virtual course.

Individual students also identiﬁed other similarities. These will be pointed out in the
following discussion of differences, as a point of reference for aspects that were still
similar to the regular classroom environment but for which the difference was more

important.

 

“she” when referring to the class’s students.
45

While these parallels helped all the students adjust to the new course, the differences
between a regular course and the virtual course were both helpful and hindering to
different people at different places. Differences were regarded as helpful when students
found the online feature an improvement over the comparable feature in a regular course.
Differences were considered a hindrance when the online feature induced clash. The
major differences included locus of control, nonverbal communication, features of class

discussion, rapport with the instructor, and casual interactions with each other.

Diﬂkrences: locus of control.

In a regular classroom, much of the control is in the professor’s hands. She sets the
dates and times for class meetings and determines what happens when during class time.
Typically, all students participate in all activities in the same order, at the same time. The
most say a student has is to refuse to Show up for class. Atypical classrooms may put
more control in the students’ hands, but this is not the norm.

In this virtual course, each student chose whatever times and days she wanted to
attend class.10 She could choose ﬁve minutes Monday morning and 10 hours Friday or an
hour every day of the week. It could have been over a lunch hour or late at night after the
children were in bed. Once “at class,” each student chose whether lecture, discussion, or
reading would happen ﬁrst, second, or at all. Lectures could be repeated as often as

necessary, since they were permanent pieces of the course. A student could easily skip

 

’0 Some online courses have a different structure with selected meeting times in a chat
room. These may be the only online aspect of the course or may be only occasional full-
class online meetings.

46

 

OVL’I

till:

R05

1;!
lth

Gui

and

did

hax

COT

for

 

If

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‘3.

 

 

over any information she regarded as familiar. The control was in the student’s hands in
this virtual classroom.

All ﬁve students recognized and appreciated this difference in locus of control.
Rosalyn said that because of this, she can “turn off” the course when she wants to. “I feel
like I am in control. I was afraid of [not having] that before I started taking the class.”
Going into the class, she worried she would have to apply her schema of regular
classrooms with strict meetings times. After the class began, she quickly discovered the
time was in her hands, and she no longer worried about using this part of the classroom
schema. She easily was able to adjust the class attendance portion of her schema.

For Cora, this sense of control manifested itself in another way. “I didn’t have to sit
and pretend to listen to hours of lectures that I felt were not an asset to the class.. .. No, I
didn’t skip the lectures, but I didn’t feel there was a lot of information in them. I didn’t
have to listen to someone drone on, just to hear themselves talk.” Cora was able to
control the course in her way—“attending” the parts of the course that she most needed
for her learning and skimming those less important parts. She focused on the sections she
was unfamiliar with and the discussion area where others contributed their experiences.

James would have been happy to hear that Cora did this. He said he had hoped that
more-knowledgeable students would focus on the parts applicable to them while skipping
the parts they already knew. He had thought about this speciﬁcally when creating the
course: He knew it would be taken by Master’s students during their two-year program as
well as people who had been social workers for many years. James said,

I did not, and have never, really placed a lot of critical importance on knowing that
information. Both when I’ve taught in the classroom as well as when I taught on the

47

Internet. Especially in a class like this where the range of experiences and exposure
to some of this stuff varies so much. There are some students who’ve been exposed to
a lot of this stuff and they are going to spend very little time on it [because they are]
trying to get this credential. Then there are other students who have never heard any
of this stuff and want to spend tons of time learning all this information. And it’s
probably more than they will ever be able to learn in one semester’s time.
The online course certainly provided for this ﬂexibility, in a way a regular classroom
could not have. However, James did not explicitly point this out to the students.
Cora and Rosalyn, at least, easily adapted to this difference; they even felt it provided
a better environment for learning. Other students might not have adapted their schemas as
easily. Someone who had stuck with her classroom attendance schema might have had
one of two approaches. One would have been to create her own class schedule and
always stick to it. This might include setting speciﬁc times for “going to class”,
organizing the sequence of events for that time, reading all the content, and participating
in all discussions. Another approach would have been to become hopelessly lost without
the guidance of a professor. According to James, some students in fact did call him
almost weekly to check on their progress and on what they should focus on that week.

None of the ﬁve study participants indicates they contacted James very frequently for

these types of questions.

Dijﬂrences: nonverbal communication.

Another difference between a regular classroom and a virtual one is the complete lack
of nonverbal communication in the latter. In a classroom, all the accoutrements of live
communications—gestures, facial expressions, head movement, and other nonverbal
signs—are an integral part of the classroom interaction. These signals help students to

understand the lecture or discussion comments better. They show reactions to what a
48

student has said—whether it is the professor’s indication of approval or a classmate’s
dislike of their opinion.

Since people never saw each other face-to-face when online, these ordinary verbal
and nonverbal cues were not available. Several participants commented on this
difference. Rosalyn spoke for them when she said, “Body language has a lot of meaning
and with the computer you miss all that.” Another time she said “No face to face contact
takes away the personalness.” She said it particularly made it a lot harder to get her
point across in WebTalk than it would in a classroom. Susan agreed, saying she found it
more difﬁcult to understand others without the nonverbal additions.

On the positive side, Rosalyn said the lack of nonverbal additions to the conversation
forced her to work on her written communication skills. She carefully had to think out
what she was saying and how she was writing it to be certain it would not be
misunderstood. She also did not have immediate negative feedback on her comments that
she might have gotten in a classroom. This made her feel freer in her writing at times
(discussed further in the next section).

While nonverbal communication is generally accepted as an important facet of
communication, these students knew it was more than just important to their future (or
present) careers—it was vital. Rosalyn recognized, “In social work you need to ‘read’
body language. Without that, misconceptions can occur.” At another time, she reiterated
this, saying “The subtle ways a social worker knows what this person needs or if they
are telling the truth or if they are lying—these things need practice in the class room.”

She thought it was a bad idea not to have this skill reinforced in the classroom.

49

 

Differences: class discussion.

All the students had participated in classroom discussions in other Social Work
classes. In-class discussions are synchronous—everyone who contributes is present and
contributing at the same time. The conversation is vocal and immediate, and is not
permanent. While students might be expected to participate in the classroom for a
participation grade, there typically is no speciﬁc criteria for the minimum number of
times a student must speak to get a high grade. Discussions might occur as a whole class
or in smaller split-off groups. The students generally acknowledged that certain people
tended to dominate large group discussions while they themselves made greater
contributions to small group discussion. They all knew what to expect in this situation;
that is, they all had a class discussion schema.

The virtual course also included class discussion. The conversations took place in
WebTalk, an asynchronous, text-based discussion board (see Chapter 2 for a description
of WebTalk functionality). Students never saw each other while they participated in the
discussion, unless they were together in another course. Each participated at her own
time, by typing in a message for the class to read later. The message was posted to a Web
page, one of a potentially long list of posts. The WebTalk page was a permanent
repository of the discussion until the end of the course. In addition, in this course, a
speciﬁc number of posts to WebTaIk were required for the participation grade. Except for
the last point, these are similarities shared by other online discussion boards.

For this class, the discussion forum consisted of seven topics: (a) Introductions, (b)

Selecting a Topic for Your Research Paper, (c) Section I: Case Study Discussion, ((1)

50

Section 11: Case Study Discussion, (e) Section III: Case Study Discussion, (f) Posting a
Summary of Your Research, and (g) General Issues, Questions & Discussion. From
comments made during the interviews, I gathered that the students posted on a variety of
topics. These included issues such as introductory statements about themselves, answers
to the case study assignments, comments and questions on the course content, and
discussion of other subjects that came up, such as local or national news events that were
relevant to the course.

While each topic can have any number of subtopics, called conversations, this course
had only one conversation in each topic. Under each conversation, all messages were
displayed in chronological order. ” While this might seem similar to the regular
classroom, a post is not necessarily in response to the immediately preceding message. A
person may post a message in response to any other message, or start on an entirely new
vein at any time. There is no distinction as to which message any other message relates,
unless indicated in the body of the message.

The differences between regular classroom and virtual classroom discussions caused
patterns of contribution to change. On the negative side, students experienced repetition,
intimidation, lengthy waits for responses, and fewer contributions. Positive beneﬁts of the
change included ﬁnding the discussions easier, less anxiety invoking, and more personal;
having more personal control’ and having greater access to different conversations.

Susan found the differences in the virtual discussion area a deﬁnite hindrance to her

learning. For instance, discussions were repetitious. “It’s easily redundant. I don’t think it

51

would be that redundant in an actual classroom because if you say something I was
already going to say, I’m not going to repeat what you said. What would be the point?
But in WebTalk, you’re getting graded on whether or not you say something. And
there’s a lot of redundancy, a lot of repeating. Simply because everyone’s got to get their
participation points.” Karen also agreed that the discussions were repetitious in ways
classroom discussions would not be. This repetition may well have stemmed from the
procedure students used to compose their responses to the case studies. If each of them
composed offline (in a word processing program) in direct response to the case, as
Opposed to responding online to a peer’s response, redundancy was more likely to arise.
Combined, these made the discussion more of an assignment area than a true discussion
area on the issues. However, due to the explanations of Web Talk on the site and some of
the topics set up it in, Susan was expecting to be able to use her schema for classroom
discussions.

While in-class discussions are rarely recorded (if so, only for personal private use),
the WebTalk posts are a permanent collection for the duration of the course. Any student
easily can return to a post and re-read it at any time. For Susan, this meant she had to
have perfectly thought-out posts. She felt intimated by this and so only posted the
minimum required until a discussion about a national school tragedy at the end of the
semester. She said she is rather quiet in the classroom as well. However, she felt more

hampered in this environment than in the classroom. So she only posted when she had to,

 

” For those familiar with other online discussion boards, this one was not a threaded
discussion. This is discussed further later in the chapter.
52

rather than participating because she felt like adding to the discussion as she would in the
classroom.

In class, any publicly asked question has an immediate response, even if the professor
just indicates he will answer the question later or after class. The answers come publicly
and vocally, in the same manner as the question. WebTalk, on the other hand, is not
immediate; responses can come days or weeks later. Because the course is accessed via
the Internet, it is also easy to respond to a question privately in email rather than via a
WebTalk post. If this is done, there is no indication in WebTalk that the question has been
answered.

Susan saw several questions posted that she had as well and awaited the answers. For
some questions, answers never came. She hypothesized that James answered them in
private email, but she had no way of actually knowing. In a classroom, she could have
joined the student and John after class for the answer or said, “I’d like to hear the answer
to that, too.” Online, she was left alone, waiting to hear it publicly. She did not want to
echo the question and be repetitious, which she hated seeing others do. At least one
participant, Tanya, did use email to respond to her classmates at times instead of posting
to the discussion. It is not known if the professor or other students did so.

Although she tends to be quiet in a classroom, Susan said her number of posts,
between 6 and 10, did not seem like enough. It was hard for her to compare directly to
how much she contributes in a classroom. It was certainly less when taking into account
her participation in small group discussions in the classroom. Cora also recognized she

talked less with the professor and other students in the virtual classroom. She ﬁgures she

53

posted to WebTalk about eight times—the minimum required. Since the discussions were
not synchronous and immediately in front of her, Susan did not feel they were as
necessary as in-class discussions are. That is, the professor was not standing in front of
the room waiting for a response to a question so it was easy to talk less.

For at least three students, differences between classroom discussions and WebTalk
were a positive beneﬁt. One of the three pointed out that in-class discussions have
immediate responses to her comments while there is a delay in the virtual course.
Rosalyn said the greater distance in time in the virtual course made her more relaxed
about making comments. “I ﬁnd that I am more free with my comments and not as
reserved. There isn’t the instant nonverbal clues that you receive in a regular classroom
from your peers or an instructor. You don’t know if your comments are being frowned
upon or cheered, but that makes it easier for me to speak—because I don’t have the fear
of immediate rejection. And I can rewrite to my heart’s content.” This extended time also
helped Karen. She said, “You can formulate your thoughts more clearly and edit them
before posting. You don’t have the anxiety of public speaking either. I generally don’t do
a whole lot of talking in a regular class and actually felt more comfortable commenting in
this format.”

For all three students, WebTaIk discussions were similar to in-class discussions. They
were able to apply a portion of their discussion schema to Web Talk. However, being
cognitively ﬂexible, they adjusted the schema to ﬁt the asynchronous method as the

situation demanded. Their adaptations included giving themselves more time to think

54

about what they would say and worrying less about responses. It is probable they “spoke”
more often in the online course.

In class, students can not easily avoid listening to others, even if those people seem to
be the only ones ever talking. Karen felt the online situation allowed her more easily to
avoid those she did not want to hear. “. . .I don’t have to hang on every word of fellow
classmates so I can decide which reading online I consider more productive.” Online, she
no longer had to spend time where she felt it would be wasted. Someone else might have
felt obligated, or not able to change her schema, to accommodate this aspect. Karen,
however, was easily able to adapt her schema of how to function in a course discussion
and create a new one (or a modiﬁed one) for online discussions. This one involved
focusing on those people and topics she desired.

Although she did not post as much as she may have talked in a classroom, Cora
thought WebTalk was a more personal form of communication than the typical class
discussion. In a way, the Web-based discussions were like writing to herself: “It is not
face to face. It is almost like writing your feelings and thoughts in a journal. It is easier to
be more open when you don’t have people looking at you. You don’t feel that they are
judging by your looks. They are seeing you for your feelings and thoughts.” As Cora saw
it, this made it easier for her as well as others to speak freely and to express personal
opinions or experiences. This is an example of using another schema—journal writing—
in addition to a class discussion schema. Thinking of WebTalk in both senses helped Cora
use it effectively. From her comments, it appears other students also spoke more freely in

the online course than they may have in a classroom. This further points to the acquisition

55

of a new schema or adaptation of an existing discussion schema among the class
members.

As an asynchronous communication mode, Web Talk allows many conversational
topics to take place at the same time. For some people, this could get confusing when
multiple topics occur simultaneously within the same conversation area. For Rosalyn, this
was little different from in-class conversations. She noted that in Web Talk “a discussion
may start about a couple topics and then carry on by different people. It could be
confusing, but it happens in a classroom: This side of the class could be discussing drug-
addicted teens and the other side about housing. On the computer, it is just a little
quieter.” She also pointed out that unlike in a classroom, a student could join in as many
of the small group discussions as they are interested. Rosalyn was able to more easily use
WebTalk because of her recognition of this aspect already present in her discussion
schema. Unfortunately, her take on these multiple discussions came out in the last
interview of the study; I did not have the chance to discover if any of the others found

WebTalk confusing in this manner or recognized the same similarity.

Diﬁ’erences: rapport with the instructor.

In a regular classroom, students and the professor see each other every time they go to
class. They occasionally talk privately together before or after class. They exchange
glances during class to indicate understanding. They chat over coffee during a break.
Students stop by for ofﬁce hours. All of these are common occurrences for regular Social
Work graduate course. Taken as a whole, these minor happenings help establish a sense

of rapport between the students and their instructor.

56

None of these were possible during the online course. Since the VU course took place
only online, the students did not meet the professor in person.12 Although email could be
used for private conversation, there was no class time to catch the instructor and know
you would get an immediate response. There certainly were no opportunities to exchange
glances or chat over coffee. There were no office hours—and most students lived too far
from campus to come in even if there were. These differences made it much more
difﬁcult to establish rapport in the online course, as at least two students found to their
frustration.

Tanya initially expected little contact and writing from the professor because she
assumed the course would be like an independent study. Then the course started and she
realized James had a presence. She said she then did expect to have a strong rapport with
him because she always had a strong connection with the instructor in her courses. In
other words, she attempted to apply a schema she had developed and used in her
previously. Since she could not talk with James before or after class nor connect through
in-class comments, Tanya attempted to establish this rapport in other ways. This
adaptation to her schema included contacting him frequently via email—asking
questions, offering advice, and requesting more input from him online. Unfortunately for
her, she said, James did not often respond to her messages. She really missed this
personal contact and connection; it diminished the experience for her. She did recognize

there probably were too many students for James to connect with all of them. However,

 

‘2 The one exception to this is Susan, who knew James from taking a previous course
from him. She lived near the campus but did not see James during the course.
57

 

she had been able to establish rapport with all of her previous professors, regardless of
the number of students.

Since Tanya effectively used her independent study schema for this course, this desire
for rapport clashes somewhat with her application of that schema (discussed in Other
Educational Experiences). This is another example that Cognitive Flexibility is an
appropriate theory: Tanya did not apply only one schema to the course. Rather, she
adaptively responded to the situation at hand. She did not think, “This is an independent
study so I will not have contact with others.” Where appropriate, she applied her schema
of independent work. Where independence became the wrong schema for her to learn
well, she attempted to apply her classroom schema. Unfortunately, this attempt was not
met in exchange by the instructor.

Karen had the same regret. “I think I would feel [greater rapport with James] if there
was eye contact and small talk before class, etc. It helped having a picture of him.” Like
Tanya, Karen did ﬁnd some rapport with James but not enough to satisfy her. This
disconnection with the instructor made the course overall more difficult.

In his interview, James acknowledged this problem as well. Since this was his ﬁrst
time teaching online, he realized he did not always do the right thing.

There are students, myself included, who feel pretty secure about how they are doing

in a class when they go to class every week, and they interact, and they get feedback

and whatever. And they’re, you know, feeling good about that based on those
interchanges. Um, I know that’s been a particular weakness of the class as I’ve
done it so far is that I haven’t been able to do that so far as to the degree that some
people need more than others.

He also said he was committed to changing and improving his communication with

students for his second online course.

58

Dijj’erences: casual interactions with others.

When we think about what goes on in a classroom, we usually consider such aspects
as lectures, group discussions, textbooks, students, a teacher, and so forth. One aspect not
often considered is the “down time”—time before and after class, and occasionally
during class. This time is used for students (and teachers) to talk informally. They might
share frustrations over buying the textbook or writing a journal entry. They talk about
their son being sick, their spouse getting a promotion, and their daughter’s soccer game.
These casual conversations serve a purpose in making a connection among the students.

Since the online course did not have speciﬁc times or places for people to be, there
was no “down time.” Casual conversations tended not to occur because there was no
nonofficial class time or space. Some online courses provide a synchronous chat room for
students to access at speciﬁc times or whenever they are online. Here, students and the
teacher can chat informally. This class, like most VU courses, did not have any live chat
area.

For four of the participants, this lack was a major detriment. They felt they had no
sense of their standing in the course because of this deﬁciency. They did not know if
everyone else was a computer wizard (unlike they were) or if everyone else was
struggling to ﬁgure out the navigation (like they were). They did not gain any personal
stake in their classmates; they did not particularly care what their opinions were. Some of
the students did know some classmates from previous classes, but it was a minority. One

knew no one else.

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Take Susan, for instance, one of the novice computer users. During the ﬁrst days and
weeks, she frequently found herself lost “in a maze,” as she put it. One particular thing
she could not ﬁnd was the ﬁrst case study, on which they had a major assignment.
Although she searched the site repeatedly, She simply could not ﬁgure it out on her own.
Then one day in the grocery store, she ran into a classmate she knew from a previous
class. Susan shared her frustrations over the course. Shortly thereafter, this classmate sent
her an email with the exact URL of the case study. Understandably, Susan was
exceedingly relieved. She said that if this had been in a classroom, she easily could have
asked a ﬁend during a break where to ﬁnd something as soon as she had trouble.
However, with the course online, she did not have breaks with others. . .and so wandered
the maze alone. This made it very difﬁcult for her to develop a conception of the course
since she was not sure where everything was online.

For Karen, this lack made her wonder where she stood in comparison to others. As
she put it, “That’s another thing about online course—you can’t tell where you stand in
relation to other classmates. As we touched on, I don’t have a good grasp as to if I am
the only one in class behind, or if everyone else has their term papers done already.” She
keenly missed this sort of knowledge. It made it more difﬁcult for her to connect to and
understand the course. Since comparison of herself to others was a part of all of her other
coursework, she was left with quite a hole in her classroom schema when she was trying
to apply it.

It might be easy to say the students could have found out the answers to their

confusion through emailing others in the course. In the case of Susan, this might have

60

worked since she knew others. However, her online course schema did not license such a
behavior. Contact amongst classmates took place in-person for her. Email simply did not
replace this in her cognitive structures. In this situation, Susan was not cognitively
ﬂexible and it hurt her learning. As far as Karen is concerned, she did not know any of
her classmates before the course. Speaking with them privately through email might have
been an invasion of privacy—much as one would not talk about these issues with a
stranger in the classroom. It is much easier to ask for help from someone you know—a
previous friend or someone met through previous casual interactions. In the virtual
classroom, it can be very awkward to contact someone else, because you are contacting a

complete stranger.

Anger over lack of choice.

Spring 1999 was the ﬁrst time MSU offered this course. While the university did
offer some courses concurrently in the classroom, this one was not offered in both modes
at the same time. There were no plans to offer it again in the classroom. When the
participants began the Social Work degree, not all were aware of the upcoming change in
this set of courses. While the course is an elective to the general degree, it is required for
those seeking to work as a school social worker in Michigan. These circumstances did
not particularly affect most of the participants. . .except for Susan.

Susan said she felt “forced” into the online course. She wanted the School Social
Worker approval; this was the last semester she could take the course and still meet her
goal of graduating at the end of the summer. It did not seem unusual to take this course at

the end of her schoolwork; that is, she had not put off taking it. Therefore, we cannot say

61

it was her fault for not taking the course until the last minute. Although she never
admitted as much, She appeared very angry about this lack of choice. Unlike the other
four participants, she always said she would not take another online course, if she had the
choice. She was not looking forward to taking the last course of the sequence online that
summer, which again was offered only online. As she put it, “It’s a necessary evil.” She
recognized that some of her overall resistance to the course stemmed from the lack of
choice.

While not a schema, this anger deﬁnitely hindered Susan’s ability to be ﬂexible and
adapt to the new learning environment. That is, this affective response made it difﬁcult
for her to apply previous schemas or to develop new ones. More than any other
participant, Susan focused on the differences between a classroom-based and an online

course. She railed against these differences, using few of them to her advantage.

Other Educational Experiences

In addition to experiences revolving around typical classroom schemas, students also
brought other educational schemas, including the use of two-way interactive television,

televised courses, and independent studies.

T wo-way interactive television.

Many of the regular Social Work classes at Michigan State use two-way interactive
television to connect students and instructors at two or more sites. Usually, one site is on
the MSU campus while the others are located around Michigan. Students take all of their

classes at one site, but their instructors may be at other sites. All sites are considered the

62

same class, and hear the same lecture and participate in the same class discussion. The
two sites would have separate small group discussions.

Although during class discussions students at all sites participate, often the camera
does not show the speaker or shows her in poor light. Rosalyn compared this to not being
able to see her classmates as they “talk,” or post messages, in the virtual course. In the
classroom, she can hear what a student on the other end is saying. However, the quality
of the video may not good enough to be able to see that person clearly or the camera may
not be on the speaking student. When Rosalyn noticed she did not have a feel for who
was saying what in the online conversations, she accommodated by considering this
similarity. She felt less bothered by her lack of connection with other students because
she had previously experienced this in another setting. Others who did not recognize this

similarity expressed more concern over the lack of connection to their virtual classmates.

T elevision-based video course.

About four or ﬁve years ago, Rosalyn signed up for a distance education course in
psychology. The course was delivered over the local public television station, requiring
Rosalyn and the other students to watch TV at certain times of the week for speciﬁc
amounts of time. Rosalyn found this strict schedule to be difficult to follow and very
restrictive. She quit the class after only a few weeks. Nevertheless, these few weeks left a
lasting impression. As she waited for this virtual course to begin—and not having any
information on how it would take place—she worried that it would require the same type
of restrictive time commitment. While she wondered about and slightly expected this, she

certainly did not hope for it.

63

Her fears were allayed during the ﬁrst days of the semester. The course did not
require students to be online at any speciﬁc times or for any speciﬁc duration. She and
her classmates could attend class at any time of day and any days of the week and stay for
ﬁve minutes or ﬁve hours. To Rosalyn, this meant she could turn the course on and off
whenever she wanted to, not when someone else wanted her to. This was a vast
improvement over the unﬁnished video-based course. She had been given control over
the course. This feature was very important to her, as well as to others who did not have

other distance education experiences, as was discussed above under Locus of Control.

Independent study.

While only some students ever take an independent study, most students have at least
heard of them. Thus, even if they have not had the experience of studying independently,
they are familiar with the concept and have formed a simple schema of what it involves.
An independent study is usually undertaken alone, with only one student. There may be
little or no contact with the instructor, particularly if it is taken as a correspondence
course. The student has to set her own schedule for readings, assignments, and activities,
meeting few, if any, deadlines. There are no lectures or classes to attend. Study materials
are books or other written material. Assignments are typically papers. The student can
work at her own pace and own time getting through the material. There are of course
varieties on this theme, such as setting up deadlines that need to be met throughout the
semester. Sometimes instead of just one student, a very small group will work with a

professor, but meet rarely. The student and teacher may actually meet very frequently, if

64

the subject is quite complex to the student. However, the generalities are still there and
are what most people would think of as an independent study.

Many of the above examples could be present in a virtual course. In particular, the
student is usually alone when taking the course. Few, if any, activities take place with
other students. With this course, students were not completely alone, as others were also
taking the course although were not present. In addition, the instructor did set a schedule
for assignments with strict deadlines.

Cora and Tanya recognized some of these aspects of an independent study in this
course. The similarities helped them understand and deal with some aspects that
distinguished it from a regular classroom course.

When asked to imagine describing this course to a friend, Cora said, “You are sort of
on your own. What you learn and what you get out of it depends entirely up to you. . ..
Where my perceptions and the readings are my teachers.” After only a few weeks of the
course, she found “that I am more apt to do the readings for this class and not do the ones
for my other classes. Because I feel that it is up to me what I learn [in this class] and I
do not have someone lecturing me on the readings. I cannot do the assignments without
the readings. I feel that more of it is up to me and I cannot rely on other students and the
prof.” Tanya, who particularly enjoyed these same aspects, echoed this sentiment.

Both she and Cora appreciated being able to work at their own pace and convenience,
as they would with a true independent study. Their independent study schemas gave them
a way to think about approaching the course, which helped them get the work

accomplished. For instance, it made it easier to do the readings and assignments. They

65

realized how important these were to their learning in this class: these were the main
points of contact between them and the instructor. In a regular classroom, Cora might be
able to skip the readings since the professor’s lecture would cover the same topics. In an
independent study, however, the lecture does not exist. Similarly, in the online course the
“lecture” was part of the readings (there were also assigned readings in several
textbooks).

Cora thought the course was a good blend of independence and deadlines. While the
day-to-day and week-to-week activities were only generally outlined, assignments such
as journals and case studies had speciﬁc deadlines throughout the semester. However,
since the deadlines were rarely absolute, it was much easier to procrastinate on readings
and discussion in this setting than in a regular classroom.

For Tanya, the independent aspects were the biggest draw of the course. She said she
always found the typical lS-week college course about ﬁve weeks too long. In this
course, she was able to work at her own pace, completing a majority of the readings
within the ﬁrst three weeks. An independent, fast-paced, and self-paced learner, she was
highly disappointed not all assignments were posted from the beginning so she could
ﬁnish everything on her own schedule. The one improvement she would have made to
the course would be to “have all the assignments out there at the beginning of the class. I
felt I was ‘held up’ from progressing through the coursework because we had to wait so
long for some of the assignment instructions to show up.”

These two students combined portions from their classroom schemas and from their

independent study schemas when attempting to understand the virtual course. It appears

66

from this and other situations within the course that Tanya and Cora can be considered to
be cognitively ﬂexible learners. That is, they applied appropriate pieces of different
existing schemas to understand their new learning environment and to create new

schemas.

New school.

Karen remembered what it was like when she went from college to graduate school.
Having spent four years at the former, she knew what college classes were like. She
ﬁgured graduate courses would be similar, but she did not know exactly what to expect.
While some things would be the same, others would be different. ...But which things
would be which? She thought about going from the classroom to the virtual course in the
same way. While using this comparison may not have given her knowledge of exactly
what to expect, it did provide a schema for approaching the new situation. While she did
not delve further into this comparison, we can imagine that it gave her the ability to
approach with an open mind and to take time to ﬁgure out what the new learning

environment would be like.

Technological Experiences

The ﬁnal set of schemas I found the students had brought to bear upon this virtual
course is that relating to technology as a whole. The students used schemas based on
discussion boards, DOS, listservs, email, and general computer experience to develop
interaction modes with the virtual course. These schemas, like the educational ones, were
both a help and a hindrance to the students. I also brieﬂy discuss how their feelings about

the course and technology affected two students’ schema development.
67

Online discussion board.

Many Web sites feature discussion boards for their users. At the time of the class,
Rosalyn had been a participant on one such board at WebMD. The WebMD site focuses
on medical issues and includes threaded discussion boards on many of the same topics.
When someone posts a message, he can choose to post a new message or to reply to
someone else’s message. Replies are marked as part of a thread, or set of posts, indicating
which posts are follow-ups to which other posts. This enables users to see quickly what
topics are being discussed in a particular area. The reader can easily choose to read or to
skip an entire conversation. Many online boards are threaded discussions.

Rosalyn noted the similarities between WebMD’s discussion boards and this course’s
discussion area. This recognition from a past experience helped her understand how
WebTalk worked. On the other hand, one major difference caused her difﬁculty: WebTalk
does not thread discussions. Instead, messages are listed in chronological order. Rosalyn
found this particularly difﬁcult to deal with, making it much harder to follow
conversations within the discussion. She expressed a desire to implement threaded

discussions if she were redesigning the course.

DOS.

Most of the study participants were regular Windows or Macintosh users. One student
was not. Before this class, Karen had been primarily using DOS and the keyboard, not
Windows and the mouse. For quite a few years, her job required her to submit daily

progress reports through a DOS-based program. Until this course, that was her main

68

interaction with computers. This DOS application was text-based, with no hyperlinks,
images or other graphical interfaces, or use for a mouse.

While the Web can be accessed from DOS through text-only browsers, this course
was not designed for such access. This is also not a very easy way to use the Internet.
Karen did use the Windows interface and a recent browser for the course. So, after years
of DOS, she now faced daily interaction with a graphical user interface. This was not
Karen’s ﬁrst use of Windows or of the Internet, but it was the ﬁrst time she used it for
something other than recreation.

Karen initially had trouble thinking about scrolling down the page with the mouse
and the scrollbars and with clicking on things. For example, she did not realize the
WebTalk page had additional topics besides the ﬁrst Introductions topic for some time.
She does not quite know how she discovered there were more: she said found it rather
“by accident.” Because of the page layout, I would presume only that topic appeared on
the ﬁrst screen of the page. Without paying attention to the scroll bar on the right side of
the browser window, there is no way to know there is additional information on that Web
page.

She also pointed out, “When I realized I could click on some of these things, I
thought I should click on everything. The logo, title, etc. I thought I was missing things I
was supposed to be doing. In fact I didn’t realize I was supposed to be going to case
study discussions” until she had spent a number of sessions online. Instructions on the
homepage might have helped, she said. “I know people that know more about computers

had no problem. I realized, too, I was used to doing paperwork on DOS program and

69

clicking was new to me.” While she did not think of it in terms of schemas, she
recognized her prior experiences had inﬂuenced how she interacted with the computer.
They had shaped her expectations towards a text-based interface and so she was not
easily paying attention to graphical cues. This is similar to the discussion of a teacher’s
cue during a classroom lesson discussed in Chapter 1. When cues are presented by the
teacher but not recognized by the student, understanding is unlikely to occur (Doyle,
1978; Shuell, 1996). Similarly, the interface provided clues about the length of the Web
page, but Karen did not recognize them and so miss portions of the class until she came
to recognize them.

Since she was not completely unfamiliar with Windows and the Web, Karen did click
on things from the beginning. Otherwise, she would never have gotten past the ﬁrst Web
page, which she did since one of her problems was with WebTalk. At some point, after
realizing that something she did not expect to take her somewhere did, she tried “clicking
everything.” While this is obviously an exaggeration, I expect she tried various images on
the pages and everything underlined, even if she was not sure she really needed to follow
a link. Some images were not links, such as colored bars separating subsections on the
lecture pages. All underlined text was a link, although it was not always clear (to me, and,
as I discuss in the last chapter, to the students) where the links would go.

The evidence shows Karen was trying to understand her environment but had no clear
schema to guide her. This could also be an example of schema over-generalization
(Pearson, 1982). We see this commonly in the everyday life of a child. When a child’s

only experience with animals is with a cat, she will call all furry animals cats. Gradually,

7O

she recognizes she needs different, specialized schema for cats, dogs, hamsters, and so
forth. This is not limited to children, of course. Adults frequently do this when learning,
be it about a new environment, program, or people. It appears that Karen over-
generalized as she began to build an understanding of how the links were set up in the
course.

Karen was familiar with the Web. She had been online for about four months before
this course. She used the Internet for shopping, talking with ﬁ'iends, and ﬁnding
information. Chatting via AIM was her primary use; this involves little clicking and
scrolling. None of these activities was school-related. When browsing for personal
reasons on the Web, she was not worried about missing a section of a Web site—if she
did not notice it, it was of no consequence. However, missing something in the course did
have consequences.

By mid-semester, these technical difﬁculties had faded and she was excited to take
another course. As she commented, “Yes, I would take another class over the Internet
without a doubt. [The] next one would be easier as all my technical difficulties would be
worked out already.” Thus, we see one example of the development of a schema over the
semester. To understand exactly how this new schema regarding links and scrolling
developed we would need to have studied many of her online sessions. Therefore, I

cannot comment further about the development process.

Listservs.

In a class the previous semester, Susan and her classmates participated in a listserv to

keep communication lines open between classes. A listserv is a way to send email to

71

many people at once (the list) by using just one email address. Outside of class, students
would post email messages to their list address. The service would then send the message
to everyone on the list, which was everyone in the course. This medium was used to
discuss course issues beyond the walls of the classroom.

Susan saw immediate parallels between this listserv and the online discussion form
when she began to use Web Talk. In both instances, the entire class including the professor
were involved in (or at least privy to) all conversation. In the listserv, messages are sent
back and forth via email. In Web Talk, the messages are on a Web page instead of in each
student’s mailbox. These similarities helped her understand WebTalk as a discussion
forum.

Tanya also noted this similarity between the two electronic forums, as she had

participated in non-class-related lists.

Email.

Karen was the only participant who was not a regular MSU student. She took the
course as part of the Life Long Education program, a way to take MSU courses without
being a full- or part-time student. After registering, she received a packet in the mail from
MSU about her assigned student number. This information also stated she would use this
number to access an email account from the university. Since this was the only
communication she received from MSU after registering, the letter led her to believe that
the course was email-based. As she said, “I had no idea how to attend the course. I’ve

even [recently] looked over the stuff I got in mail and don’t see any mention of going to

72

www.vu.msu.edul3 to attend class. It seems I got so much material in the mail about this
Pilot email that that was how course was going to be taught.” So she waited, and waited,
and waited, checking her email each day. The semester began and a few days passed, and
she still had not heard from her professor. At this point, she began calling various on-
campus places for help, including the VU Help Desk, the Social Work Department, and
VU. The people she spoke with assumed she was attempting to access the course online
and had difﬁculty giving her help because they each were talking about two different
things. Approximately one week into the semester, someone at the help desk ﬁgured out
that Karen did not know the course was on the Web. He gave her assistance in getting to
the Web site.

A number of factors conspired against Karen. Information about the course lacked
speciﬁcity. The MSU packet she received is automated for all Lifelong Education
students. She registered incorrectly. Moreover, mail-based correspondence courses are
familiar to her.

Karen did receive information about the course before registering—that is how she
found out about it. As far as she recalls, it was a brochure from the Social Work
Department heralding the ability to receive the School Social Work approval through
online work only. However, since server locations (URLs) are not determined until a
course goes into production, the URL was not included in this advertisement. Apparently,

it did not include the VU home page either. It may have, but Karen does not remember

 

’3 This URL is to the VU home page. Deeper in the VU site, students can follow a link to
their course. Students can also use the direct URL to their course. However, the VU home

73

much about the advertisement and did not refer to it after registering. The MSU
registration program does not Show the URL for a course either. It simply indicates that a
course is offered through VU.

Unfortunately, the MSU packet mentioned above is a computer-generated letter
automatically sent to all new students, whether in a VU course or another course. It does
not make sense to add information describing the VU home page and course attendance
when the vast majority who receive the letter are not VU students. On the other hand,
there is no other ofﬁcial notiﬁcation mailing of course location for virtual courses.

Karen also registered improperly for the course, probably as a regular student or for
no credit instead of the Lifelong Education designation. This mistake was discovered
shortly before the course began. During the process of changing her registration, she was
not registered for the class for some period of time. Apparently during this exact time, the
instructor sent an email message to all the students giving them the URL and other
information on the course. Karen, since she was not on the ofﬁcial list at this time, did
not receive this message. The instructor did not send out any subsequent messages.

Thus, we have Karen, faced with a letter describing her email account and no other
information from MSU. Although she did not say this explicitly, she has surely heard of
correspondence courses offered through the US Mail. It was not a far stretch for her to

imagine this course taking place completely on email.

 

page is often given out initially, since students can view a preview and setup pages prior
to the opening of the course.
74

General use of computers.

None of the ﬁve students was a complete novice computer or Internet user. All had
spent at least the previous semester using a computer and being online. Only one student,
however, had an extensive background with technology. For the most part, the other four
spent considerably less time with the computer, less time online, and less time using the
computer for school- or work-related projects. It appears that the extensive background
made the course a different experience.

Tanya was the one expert computer user, having over 10 years of experience using
computers at both home and work on a daily basis. Familiar with some of her fellow
students, she knew in advance they were considerably less experienced than she with
computers and the Web. Tanya reasoned that their professor would assume the majority
of students were computer novices. Therefore, when looking forward to the course,
Tanya expected to ﬁnd very little information online. She predicted there might be one
Web page with a syllabus of readings and assignments. Perhaps the class would receive
weekly'emails from the instructor with instructions just for that week. There would be
little interaction with others even via email. Certainly there would not be lectures or large
amounts of information online. All of this would ﬁt with her expectations about the
ability level of most students in the class.

From descriptions of the course in this and the previous chapter, it should be apparent
that Tanya’s initial schema of the course was quite different from how the course turned
out to be. For some people, this mismatch of schemas could cause difﬁculties in

understanding. However, Tanya had few troubles with the course. She was easily able to

75

pass by the initial schema she brought and apply different schemas that were appropriate.
Although I cannot claim a direct correlation, it seems likely that her extensive computer
experience played a major part in her ﬂexibility. She had used so many other programs
and Web sites, she was used to shifting around from one schema to another to ﬁt the
situation.

For instance, Tanya was the only student to have no difﬁculty with the interface from
the ﬁrst day. After the course ﬁnished, she said, “I really felt as though I had it ﬁgured
out within the ﬁrst week of the class. The design of the course was user-friendly and it
was simple to get from one section to the others.” I believe, as did she, that her
background with the Internet facilitated her entrée into the course. She had no difﬁculty
understanding the syllabus chart even though the other students experience great
confusion (discussed further in Chapter 4). She found the site extremely easy to navigate.
She found the links in the banner image, links that no other student found without my
guidance. ’4 She was conﬁdent even at the ﬁrst interview that she was aware of the entire
course site and had not missed any sections. She compared ﬁguring out this interface to
ﬁguring out a new piece of computer software, something she has done dozens of times.
She also pointed out that when she got a computer 10 years ago, she taught herself how to
use it with manuals and other books. Since she has done it many times before, it was not
difﬁcult to do it again on the Internet.

Her prior use also helped her understand when her ﬁ'ustration with the course was due

to online aspects or to things that would have existed in any format. For example, she told

76

me about how difficult one set of assignments, the journals, were. She pointed out that
the assignment was probably James’ teaching style, not because of the online aspect. She
did not think the assignments would have been easier in a classroom context. Other
students did think the journals would have been easier in the classroom.

Other students, while not as sophisticated as Tanya, also appeared to use “computer
use” schemas. Speciﬁc instances (DOS, email, and so forth.) have been discussed earlier
in this chapter. One other student recognized a more general application as well. Towards
the end of the semester, Susan suddenly realized she had been applying a previous
experience with computers to help her with this course. Although angry and fearful about
the technology aspects, she had previously had to get through frustrating times with a
computer. The prior fall, Susan had started a new job for which she had to use a computer
for various activities. Therefore, she had to learn to use it and could not just ignore it. She
said, “I never, ever would have thought I would work [on a computer]! ...When I ﬁrst
started working there last September, I was totally overwhelmed. I was like ‘How am I
ever going to remember all these [menu] numbers?’ Now it’s like it’s not an issue at all
anymore” (emphasis hers). She had to keep trying when things did not work out—so she
did. One particular thing she learned to do was to just shut down the program or even the
computer and restart what she was working on when things got too discombobulated.

She compared this to ﬁguring out the online course. In the course, she “just started
clicking things” when she was not sure what went where or what was a link. When she

would get stuck within the site and not know how to get to the page she wanted, she

 

’4 One interview question was about the navigation banner. When I asked the question,

77

would close the browser, reopen it, and start at the home page. “Since that happened to
me [at work], I’m not as intimidated by being caught some place. ...Now it’s like ‘I’m
caught in a loop, it’s not a big deal, I can get out of it.’ ...You just have to ﬁgure out how
to get out of it. Now that’s a similar thing” to what happened to her online at times. She
was out of her comfort level with the new computer at work but she ﬁgured it out and
became comfortable. She recognized she used the same sort of self-talk and some of the
same solutions to problems when she was again out of her comfort zone with another

new interface for the course.

Affective issues regarding technology.

In addition to the schemas described above, affective issues also appeared to have an
effect on two students’ development of an understanding of the new learning
environment. Each anchored a different end of the affective spectrum: one was angry and
fearful about a virtual course while the other was excited to learn more about technology.
The anger and fear appeared to make it harder for one student to adapt to the new
learning environment. The excitement and enthusiasm appeared to make it much easier
for another student to adapt her schemas and create new ones.

While Susan did not fail to understand the VU course, she did come to it with an
extreme amount of antagonism. She owned up to her fears and resistance right from the
beginning, telling me she almost did not participate in this study because she disliked the

course so much. However, she thought it was important that the experiences of someone

 

the other students indicated they did not know the image was for navigation.
78

who did not like the technology were a part of the study. I certainly agree as she is not the
only person in this situation with these fears.

Susan’s fears can be seen in a number of instances. She said she avoided email when
it was not required for school, such as during a summer without classes. At the beginning
of the semester, she considered herself an extreme novice in terms of computer
knowledge and use. She expressed severe apprehension about the technical side of the
course. She also stated that she simply did not like computers.

Throughout this chapter have been a number of examples of Susan’s resistance to the
course. For example, she focused on the differences between WebTalk and in-class
discussions. She strongly missed in-person casual conversations. She was angry about
having to take the course online in the ﬁrst place. In the interviews, she focused more on
the differences than the similarities between the classroom environment and the virtual
environment. She did, as has been discussed previously, ﬁnd similarities between other
experiences and this course, but she seemed resistant to doing so. They had to be drawn
out. When asked for similarities between this course and other classes, she once said,
“Only that [James’] style is the same. There isn’t much for me that’s similar. Because
so much of it seems to be, to me, kind of stripped away from this. It just seems cold. Cold
and dry... It’s sterile, dry, cold.”

Susan was the only participant to have this antagonism and was the only one to focus
on differences to such a great degree. She also had the greatest difﬁculty understanding
and adapting to the online course. I believe Susan’s antagonism contributed to her

resistance to adapting to the new environment.

79

On the other end of the spectrum was Cora. Like Susan, Cora was one of the
computer novices. However, she found an honest enjoyment and excitement to learning
new technology. Cora said, “Maybe at ﬁrst I did [wish the class were in a classroom]. But
I really enjoy this new technology. I ﬁnd it interesting and fun. Now I am glad for this
new opportunity to learn in a different setting. Classrooms can become stagnant and
boring.” She repeatedly said during the interviews how much she was enjoying learning
about the Internet. During the ﬁrst interview she commented, “I was computer illiterate
and I enjoyed it that way. But learning how to use a computer has opened different
avenues in my life.” At least twice, she also said she enjoyed having the research
interviews via AIM, which was also a new technology to her. Her attitude is summed up
with this light-hearted comment from the ﬁrst interview, “I still have a few difﬁculties,
but I am learning how to work through them. Mostly by trial and error. Really mostly by
error.” This attitude seemed to help her when she did not understand the virtual course
components. She tended to not get frustrated nor give up. She looked forward to ﬁguring

out the new environment.

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Chapter 4: Discussion and Implications

Summary of Results

First research question.

My ﬁrst research question was: “How do students new to online education learn how

to learn in the new situation? What prior experiences are used to help make sense of the

online course?” The short answer is that students gradually learn how to learn by being

cognitively ﬂexible and developing new schemas for the learning environment. As we

saw in the last chapter, the schemas and experiences can easily be divided into the three

areas of classroom schemas, other educational schemas, and technology schemas. Table 3

is a complete listing of the 17 primary schemas and affective issues I saw applied by

these ﬁve students.
Table 3

Primary schemas discussed.

 

Classroom schemas

Other educational
schemas

Technological schemas

 

Classrooms (similarities)

Two-way interactive
television

Online discussion board

 

 

 

 

Locus of control Television-based video DOS
course
Nonverbal communication Independent study Listservs
Class discussions New school Email
Rapport with the instructor General computer
experiences

 

Casual conversations

Affective issues regarding
technology

 

 

Anger over lack of choice

 

 

 

81

 

Like the schemas applied in reading texts, these schemas both helped and hindered as the
students assimilated information on the screen, selectively attended to pieces of the site,
elaborated and summarized in the interviews, and inferentially reconstructed the site
when talking about it (Anderson, 1984a). All of the functions for which schemas are
useful were seen in the last chapter.

These 17 are certainly not an exhaustive list, nor would they necessarily be found in
all online courses. A two-way interactive television schema, for instance, would be
applied only by students familiar with this mode of distance education. The average
college student probably would not be likely to have experienced it. An online course
without a discussion area would not activate class discussion schemas. Similarly, for a
course with additional types of interaction or modes of delivery, we would expect other
associated schemas to be activated. Other affective issues could also come up.
Additionally, as the use of computers and the Internet becomes more prevalent in society,

students will bring different and likely more technological schemas.

Second research question.

My second research question was: “What is the initial schema of the course and how
does it change? How does the student’s schema compare to that of the professor and the
project leader? What features of the course itself or of the Internet seem to have the
greatest inﬂuence?”

The ﬁrst part of this question was difficult to answer because of the delay in getting
participants. Although I did ask questions about their expectations, the initial

expectations did not have a large inﬂuence on the course experience. Karen’s experience

82

with the packet from MSU that led her to believe the course was email based is one
notable exception. Once she was directed to the appropriate place on the Web, she
dropped the email schema. The students seemed to have such a lack of information about
the course that they did not have expectations developed enough to come out in the
interviews.

Change of the initial schema was essentially not answerable either. All schemas for
the course were more developed by the end of the semester, as would be predicted by any
of the schema-based theories. Even if we take “initial schema” to be those that developed
throughout the ﬁrst part of the semester, I still did not gather enough data to examine the
development of any one schema in depth.

At the phase of developing research questions, I thought I would be able to say that
each student approached and used the class in a deﬁned, speciﬁc way such as “like an
independent study” or “like surﬁng the Web for pleasure.” Throughout the data analysis
phase, I came to realize that Cognitive Flexibility Theory rather than a simple application
of schema theory provided a better explanation of my ﬁndings. No student employed
only one schema of how the course functioned. To give some sense of this, see Table 4
for a list of the 17 schemas and the number of students showing evidence of drawing on
or adapting each one. All told, the ﬁve students drew on 37 schemas, an average of 7.4
schemas per person. Certainly, no student tried to understand the new environment

through one exclusive schema.

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Table 4

Number of students evidencing each schema.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Classroom schemas # Other educational Technological
schemas schemas
Classrooms 5 Two-way interactive Online discussion
(similarities) television board
Locus of control 5 Television-based video DOS
course
Nonverbal 2 Independent study Listservs
communication
Class discussions 4 New school Email
Rapport with the 2 General computer
instructor experiences
Casual conversations 4 Affective issues
regarding technology

 

Anger over lack of
choice

 

 

 

 

 

 

Similarly, I was not able to produce on “author schema” for the professor and project
leader. There are instances where we can pick out similarities and differences between
the professor and project leader and the students however. Some of these were indicated
in Chapter 3. One other difference between the students’ and the course developer’s
schemas was that the developer expected more technologically-experienced students.
This seems to have caused some of the difﬁculties students had in understanding the

interface at the beginning of the course. This is addressed more below in Implications for

Developers of Online Courses.

The instructor, unaccustomed to creating online courses, attempted mainly to

replicate his classroom-based course on the Web. Since the students primarily used

Social Work classroom schemas to understand this course, this was in general a good

84

 

 

match. Lectures, assignments, a research paper, and place for group discussion were
provided. As discussed in Chapter 3, these were the main similarities between the two
classes. The mismatch came in other areas, such as students expecting a greater rapport
with the instructor. Some of this seems less of a schema differential than a problem
inherent in online courses, or at least a problem only overcome with great difﬁculty.

To some extent, the instructor’s schema of a classroom course was the only one he
consciously used during development. He had little previous knowledge of the Web, and
even less of online courses. The project developer, on a similar note, had no previous
knowledge of social work—neither of the ﬁeld nor of courses in the subject. She also had
little experience with online courses. Thus, rather than attempting to develop the course
in a speciﬁc manner, she mainly worked out technical details of the course. I think it fair
to say there was little developed on the “author” side of this course beyond transferring a
classroom-based course to the Web. Therefore, beyond a few minor incidents, there was
little to compare between the students’ schemas and the instructor’s and project leader’s.

The most salient features of the course or the Internet were discussed in the preceding
chapter. When I wrote the question, I wondered if speciﬁc technical aspects would have a
great effect on the schema development. Later in this chapter, I discuss a few features of
the course that caused great difficulty. I do not feel these were particularly related to
schema development however. In addition, I did ﬁnd that experiences with the computer
affected the student’s schema application. The student who had had the most Internet and
general computer experience most easily adapted to the new learning experience. Tanya

did not think anything about the course layout was confusing, unlike all the other

85

participants. Similarly, the student most excited about the new technology also found it

easier to adapt her existing schemas. The student who resisted the online aspect and most
feared technology had the opposite affective response—resisting adaptation to the course.
Therefore, it appears that rather than any particular feature, general experience in the new

environment most affected schema development.

Limitations to the study.

There are two sets of limitations to this work. First, there are limitations in the
generalizability because of the participants. Second, there are limitations due to changes
made in the methodology.

This study had a nonrandom, self-selected group of participants. The sample size was
also very small, with only ﬁve students in one course. They were all women. None were
the typical college age student, although they appeared fairly representative of the adult
learner returning to school for a master’s degree. I do not claim these students are
representative of all online students.

However, what these ﬁve students do point to is that a wide variety of experiences are
brought to online courses. Students were anywhere from very novice to highly expert
computer users. They spanned a 20-year age range. Some were quite experienced in the
subject matter and some much less experienced. Some students had used listservs or
online discussion boards; others had used neither. It shows that students like these are
taking online courses and designers need to think about them. There is no one type of

“online student.”

86

Also, the three broad categories of schemas emerging from the study seem
sufficiently general and transparent to merit ﬁrrther application and investigation. As
pointed out above, a different course with different online features would likely active
additional and different speciﬁc schemas.

Secondly, due to circumstances beyond my control the methodology changed or did
not provide all of the answers for which I was looking. As mentioned brieﬂy in the
second chapter, the initial interviews did not occur when expected. I had planned to
interview the students before they had seen the course online, or within days of their ﬁrst
visit to the Site. The ﬁrst course selected for study did not have enough willing
participants who had not previously taken an online course. Even if I had gathered
students from this course, 1 was not able to make initial contact with them until about two
days before the start of the semester. Even if students had responded immediately, it
would have been difﬁcult to meet with them immediately. When I switched courses and
ﬁnally found participants, the students had been working on the course for up to a month.

I expect that if I had been able to interview students before they saw the course, they
would have been able to explicate their expectations more clearly. Instead, after a month
of exposure, I asked them to remember the time when they did not know much about the
course. This is difficult in any circumstance. Many of their responses were colored by
their experience with the course. Their responses to my questions were frequently
interspersed by comments about the course as it was, rather than separating the
experience from their expectation. Thus, it was very difﬁcult, as I noted earlier in this

chapter, to determine initial schemas.

87

Another drawback occurred because most of the interviews took place online. In the
original plan for the interviews, I intended to have the student show me the course online.
I had no pre-planned questions for this period. It was intended as another way for them to
describe the course and how they used it. This was impossible to do with the online
interviews. This data, particularly if I was able to structure the time as an actual course-
time interaction, may have given deeper data on how they used and reacted to the
interface. Direct observation of an event can often give greater understanding than self-
reporting of behavior. In particular, insights may have been very valuable if I had been
able to watch the student during her ﬁrst interaction with the course.

Thirdly, I was not able to explicate the instructor’s and project leader’s schemas as
deeply as I had originally expected. This is partially due to my change in time to a greater
understanding of Cognitive Flexibility Theory. I came to realize that there could not be
one schema for the course. I also simply did not gather enough data through the
interviews to determine the variety of schemas used by the instructor and the developer.
A longer interview or a series of interviews during the development stage would be able
to get at this issue in greater depth. Or, as I indicated in the previous section, there may

not have been much to the schemas in the course development stage.

Implications for Research on Online Courses

This study is only one small part of the beginning of online education research. There
are many directions that still have been inadequately studied. The present study suggests

a few that seem particularly fruitful to pursue in the near future.

88

We do need to continue in-depth studies students in online courses. Many of these
students’ experiences emerged only as the semester progressed and we revisited the same
issue. The insights they shared and I inferred could not come from Likert-scale surveys or
one-time interviews. More information on the development of schemas would come from
observing students during their online time.

Two speciﬁc groups of students to study are undergraduate students and students
starting an entire program online, such as an online Master’s Degree or a series of courses
leading to certiﬁcation. The former I recommend because they are not represented in the
present study. This group would be rather younger than the present group of students as
well. If the study had been done on an undergraduate course with typical college students
living in dorms, I would expect different results and experiences to have been inﬂuential.
Whether this would change their outlook is unknown. They probably would have fewer
experiences to draw upon. For instance, they would have had fewer college-level courses
from which to form a classroom schema. Their experience with coursework in the subject
would be less as well. Since undergraduates take more courses outside their major, we
might have many students who have no background in the topic. Undergraduate courses
typically have a different structure than graduate courses as well, such as focusing more
on lectures than on discussion.

Students beginning an online degree program could have a different outlook because
they are embarking on taking an entire series of courses rather than just one or two online
course. They sign up for the courses knowing they will be studying online. They may be

more technologically experienced since they self-selected to take such a program.

89

It would be very valuable to study students taking a second or third online course. In
such a study, we should look speciﬁcally at how the ﬁrst course inﬂuenced their
expectations and adaptations to the new course. This study could follow the same
students through the series of courses, and compare schema use and development. This
would be valuable both across a series of courses, such as this course and its two
companion courses, or across courses in different subjects or with different instructors.
Courses with the same instructor are more likely to be similarly structured, facilitating
schema activation—once students have ﬁgured out the structure in the ﬁrst course, the
second would be understood from the beginning. However, as James planned to do,
subsequent course structures are often modiﬁed to some degree. Thus, the students would
still need to adjust their schemas to understand the environment.

Studying students in courses in different ﬁelds and with different instructors would be
an interesting study as well. One would be able to look at how well structured the
schemas for online courses became with the ﬁrst course and how easily adaptable the
students were to the second and third courses.

As I interviewed the instructor, James, I thought for a while that it would have been
more valuable to interview the instructors during their ﬁrst and subsequent online
courses. His insights were fascinating to me as a developer. Such a direction did not ﬁt
the scope of the current study but would ﬁt a future study. Some pertinent questions
include: What are their schemas for a classroom-based course? What are the professor’s
schemas for an online course—prior to beginning development, during the work, during

the actual course, and subsequent to the course experience? How do they adapt their

90

course for subsequent semesters? This study could develop suggestions or even a
program to assist instructors in their ﬁrst-time development.

It would also be worthy to study the developers of online courses. Who are the people
designing online education? What do they know and believe about the differences and
similarities between regular classrooms and virtual classrooms? How do they implement
these? What are their schemas for online education? How do they address student
differences and experiences? How do they direct professors who have never worked with
students online to develop an understanding of the unique qualities of online education?

All of these questions’ answers could help the development of courses.

Implications for Developers of Online Courses

We have seen that students bring a variety of schemas relating to classroom
experiences, other learning experiences, and technology experience to bear upon an
online course. In retrospect, these three categories of experience appear to be obvious.
These issues, however, were not obvious to me when I began this study and had already
worked on three online courses. They were not obvious to the project leader, who did not
expect computer novices to take the course. They were not obvious to the course
professor who had not considered comparing aspects of the course to classroom
activities.

The point of this project has been two-fold. First, I have developed a way to think
about the experiences students bring. In a way, I have developed a schema for thinking
about student experiences—a framework based schema theory and Cognitive Flexibility

Theory. Second, I have brought these issues into focus at an opportune moment—just

91

when online courses are burgeoning but little research has been done on them. As part of
this focus, course developers need to become aware of the beneﬁts of using the
framework emerging from this study in their own work. I suggest several beneﬁts, in the

form of speciﬁc, concrete suggestions for developers.

Apply schema theory and Cognitive Flexibility Theory.

Schema theory and Cognitive Flexibility Theory will only help if developers actually
use them to think about the experiences students will bring to the course. We must think
about who the students will be as we develop online courses. Once we have an idea who
the students will be, we can hypothesize about the experiences they may bring. Then, we
can use those expected schemas to guide the development of the course structure.
Technologically familiar students may breed a highly complex course with many plug-ins
and varieties of navigation. Expectations of very little computer experience may lead to
having just text-based lectures and a simple discussion area. If we expect students to
come with a wide range of knowledge in the subject area, we might create divergent
streams of course content. And so on. Recognizing that students can adaptively modify

previous schemas leads developers to assisting students in doing so.

Develop explicit commentary.

Students with all types of schemas would be served by explicit commentary about
similarities and differences between the online course and other possible experiences.
This is a way to directly apply the results of the ﬁrst suggestion. We developers have
taken classroom-based courses. We are familiar with other distance education methods.

We have participated in listservs and online discussion boards. We are intimately familiar

92

with the programs and methods used in our development lab. We Should be able to
helpfully describe them to the students.

The students who were able to compare positively an aspect of the course with
another experience found it easier to use. Recall that Rosalyn found WebTalk similar to
her experience with a discussion board elsewhere. She additionally favorably compared
WebTalk to in-class discussions. Except for Tanya, Rosalyn was the most comfortable
with the course discussions at the end of the semester. She connected outside experiences
quickly to the course experiences and thus was able to apply a schema and revise as
necessary. She had to put the work in to make these comparisons; they were not provided
by the course developers or instructor. Those who did not notice these similarities found
WebTalk more difﬁcult to use.

Developers and professors who recognize these same similarities should make these
explicit to students. For instance, WebTalk can be described as a place for class
discussion. We could note how it is similar, with give and take among participants, the
same types of topics, and the possibility for both large and small group discussion. We
could also point out its differences, such as being asynchronous, having a multitude Of
conversations at once, and having a greater potential for repetition. Web Talk could also
be compared to a listserve and other online discussion boards. The same can be done for
any online discussion forum. We have talked at VU about how Web Talk simulates
classroom discussions. We know it is like other discussion boards—and we know what is
different among them as well. Within this course as well as in my experience as a

developer, these similarities and differences have not been communicated to the students.

93

Comparisons among all the experiences described in Chapter 3 would have been of
great beneﬁt to these students. Other possible connections can also be explicated to the
students; it does not require a semester’s study to think of possible experiences and
comparisons students will bring.

Yes, it would be difﬁcult for a ﬁrst-time professor to ﬁgure out all possible
comparisons. However, with help from the project leader, many of these examples and
ideas can be developed. Resources for professors working without the beneﬁt of a lab
like Virtual University would include other professors who have developed and taught an
online course and other Web developers or users. Each comparison or contrast we can

describe means an additional cu to the students to activate a schema.

Give more directions to the students.

An important suggestion for course improvement came from the students themselves.
They wished for more direction on what to do with the course. This involved both
technical issues as well as navigation and structural issues.

First, these students wished for more technical directions. Some students were not
aware that links could be within images, for instance. Others were not familiar with
underlining indicating a link. A few statements on the opening page can indicate types of
links. Experienced users can skip these instructions.

For example, the top banner image on every page contained links to sections of the
course, including Web Talk, the gradebook, technical requirements and help information,
and the class directory. These links were within an image. They were not blue and

underlined as text links are. For someone with Javascript enabled (which was expected of

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all students, but never stated explicitly), when the mouse rolled over one of the four links,
a descriptive tag and a check mark appeared. For about two months, Susan did not use
this navigation feature. Of note is that she was the one student to use lab computers for
access rather than a home computer. It appeared from her comments that J avascript was
not enabled on the ﬁrst computers she used, as she never saw a change in the image when
the mouse rolled over it. Around midterm, she was certain the developers had changed
the design of the image to include the check mark for an active link, which she was
suddenly now seeing. However, Joan afﬁrmed that the design had not been revised
during the semester. It is likely Susan never would have seen the checkmarks, except for
the interview question about using the banner for navigation. After being asked about it,
she began to pay more attention to the banner. Even Tanya, the acknowledged computer
expert of the group, did not realize the image contained links until she accidentally
clicked the mouse on the gradebook link and was suddenly accessing a new page.

Others had no idea images could be links, so they had no reason to move the mouse
cursor over the image or to pay any attention if they happened to cross over it while
moving the cursor for another purpose. This is an example of having no prior knowledge
with which to have formed a schema. The student certainly was not applying an incorrect
schema; she was not applying anything.

A similar suggestion is to explain the overall site more clearly. For this course
speciﬁcally, students had a lot of difﬁculty with two aspects. First, they were not sure
they had found the entire course. It appears the professor and developer did explain the

course sections at the beginning of the course on the syllabus page. However, this

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explanation was not enough for the majority of the students. They found it difﬁcult to
know just what all was going on in the course and lacked direction in ﬁnding out if they
were missing anything.

Another technical problem the students had was confusion over the syllabus chart,
which was meant to function as the main navigation system for the course. All four more
novice participants found the syllabus chart conﬁrsing or downright incomprehensible for

at least a while (see Table 5, which is taken from the original appearing on most pages of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the course).
Table 5
Syllabus chart.
Course Conditions Speciﬁc Clinical I Major Life I Course
Syllabus and f Affecting Disorders Difficulties Conclusion/
Introduction i Children’s 2 I Wrap-Up
' Needs 5 7 ‘I
§ Course § Diversity § Behavior j § Truancy,
Introduction Issues ; Disorders School Failure
I Dropping Out
§ § Issues of § Social & § Substance
Multisystems : Violence & Emotional Abuse
Perspective Abuse Disorders I
§ Modes of I § Health and § Learning § Sexual
Practice Medical ‘E Disorders Activitv/ Teen-
I Problems Pregpancy
§Developmental ,
Disorders ’

 

r
L

 

 

Online, each column was a different color. The ﬁrst row of each column was a slightly
darker color than the rest of the column. The content of every cell was a link, shown by
the underlining. There was no division between cells other than the color differentials. As

with this reproduction, the text of some links did run into the following link.

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Take Susan’s experience with this chart. At ﬁrst, she would click the top item on each
column and read everything on the page that came up. Then she returned to the chart and
clicked the ﬁrst subtopic, expecting a new page with new information. She was quite
confused because what she was now reading looked familiar. This second link was an
internal link, pointing to a subsection of the same page. Susan, however, thought each
link in the table was to a different page. Rather, as she came to ﬁgure out, each column
was a separate page. Each link in the column was to subsections on that page. The
developer used the symbol “§” to indicate this, but the symbol was not explained
anywhere in the site. While I recognized the symbol from past experience, none of the
ﬁve participants seemed to understand it.

Karen was even more unfamiliar with links. She did not realize for quite some time
that the syllabus chart was links to the topics. She simply saw it as an informational chart
on each page.

At least one student thought each cell indicated one week’s topic. Although the cells
were not labeled by weeks, they had no other labels. She was likely familiar with
classroom courses that had a new topic each week of the course. She later realized each
cell was simply a subtopic to the main course topic. As she read the pages, she saw that
subtopics were not inherently divided by weeks. One could choose to separate them in
that way by structuring reading to correspond since each subtopic had a separate lecture
section on the page. It however appeared that in general the students read all the lecture
material for each topic all at once. This was not necessarily in one setting but also not

waiting for a new week of the calendar.

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Students suggested revisions to the chart. A paragraph describing the functionality of
the chart would have helped most. One student wished sections, such as Intro, Section 1,
Section 2, and so forth., had labeled the columns. Then, she would label the subsections
as in an outline (a., b., and so forth), so that it would be obvious the lower rows were

subsections not additional topics. I recommend both suggestions.

Include a chat room.

Because Karen knew from experience that talk and discussion are primary features of
a Social Work classroom, she expected the virtual course to be a chat room. In this
setting, talk and discussion would necessarily be the primary feature. Although others
were not explicitly expecting a chat room feature, most of them later expressed the wish
that there had been this type of environment in the course. A chat room would have
provided immediate feedback, for instance. It would also have given them a greater

connection to their classmates.

Include time for orientation to the online environment.

In a regular classroom, a professor will usually spend at least the ﬁrst day discussing
the course with his students. He might introduce himself, pass around a syllabus and
ofﬁce hours, go over each textbook, and have students introduce themselves. If the course
is offered in an unfamiliar location, such a laboratory, he will give a tour, pointing out
important features and locations of necessary items. Students are then given time to
familiarize themselves with their surroundings.

The same care should be taken with an online course. If the ﬁrst class or ﬁrst week

would be devoted to introducing the course in the classroom, at least as much time should

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be devoted to this online. Students need time to understand the syllabus—both how to
locate it as well as what is in it. They need time to ﬁnd their way around the course site—
an unfamiliar location. The professor should certainly detail carefully where everything is
located at the least. Other VU professors have found making an assignment of looking at
each course piece to be helpful.

This introductory time also allows space for students who have difﬁculty ﬁnding the
course, as Karen did. Having had a stressful time ﬁnding the new environment, they
would now have a little less stress, knowing they still had time to familiarize themselves

with the space instead of being behind in course content.

Present attempts to address issues at VU.

During Spring and Summer 1999, VU began addressing at least one of the above
issues. Concurrently with this research, another project leader, Marcia Witt, was
developing what has become known as How2 VU made up of series of VUnits. The
VUnits are a modular set of help units covering technical issues of VU: activating the
system ID/email account, accessing the course, downloading and using speciﬁc plug-ins,
using WebTalk, and ﬁnding help for other potential technical issues. As a whole, these
units make up the general How2VUthat may be used by any student interested in VU
who has either not signed up for a speciﬁc course or who has not received a system ID. In
addition, each course producer uses the applicable VUnits to create setup pages. These
pages include only those units the course needs. Thus, SW89] would include the section

on using WebTalk but would not include the VUnit on using chat software.

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The students who were novice Internet users would have greatly beneﬁted from the
VUnits. For those who did get to the Web site (everyone except Karen), these would have
clearly explained the technical details. For instance, they would have been aware of how
WebTalk worked as a discussion forum. These units would have eased some of the
technical fears as well as giving the students clear directions for getting started in an
unfamiliar experience.

For Karen, who did not know the course was on the Web, this would have been of no
beneﬁt prior to the course. However, it is easy for developers to add VUnits at the
beginning of the course or at least a pointer to them in the Help section. Then, whenever
a student does get to the Web site, this setup information is available to them and pointed
out immediately. They are also available during the course when a technical difﬁculty
shows up or a new plug-in or other software is added to the course.

VUnits presently do not address the other side of explicitness—that of explaining
how aspects of the course are similar to and different from other experiences students
may have had. The VUnits are designed as technical help sections only. There are
occasional comparisons, but these are not the focus of the units. Based on the present
work, I would recommend such additions to each VUnit as appropriate.

In addition to the VUnits, VU also requires a description of the course navigation on
the setup pages. At a minimum, a copy of the main course navigation image is included
with a description of each button’s function. If there are different navigation structures in
sections of the course, such as within the lecture pages, these navigational aids may be

pictured and described as well. For this class, the navigation banner on the top of each

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page would deﬁnitely be described. In addition, the syllabus chart might be included.
Producers are also including these descriptions within the course, either in the help
section or in introductory pages, or both.

As previously noted, I was a project leader at VU. As my research progressed through
the spring and summer, I continued to work on a number of courses. I consciously
attempted to apply the ideas and suggestions to these courses. At times, I introduced the
ideas to the instructors I worked with as well. I hope the different choices we made are
rewarding to the students who take these courses. I have also shared these
recommendations with my fellow producers; I hope that further advances in helping new
students continue.

I am now employed at another university; while I work on virtual courses, it is not
with the beneﬁt of a development lab such as VU. I hope that this work will continue to

affect the courses offered by both universities.

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APPENDICES

102

APPENDIX A

Questions for Professor and Project Leader Interviews

This protocol was meant to serve as a guide. Questions were adapted for the time,
setting, and participant as appropriate. Since the interviews took place aﬁer some
interviews with students, I adjusted the planned protocol as follows:

* indicates question added.

# indicates question removed.

* Please briefly describe your course for me.

* How is this course taught in a classroom? May I have a copy of that syllabus?

How is your course like a regular classroom-based course?

How is your course not like a regular classroom-based course?

* What are you goals for this course (content, program, technology)?

How is your course organized?

How was the course designed?

What materials do the students need for this course?

How do you think students should study for this class?

How much time did you expect to spend online? How much time do you spend online for

this course?

103

# What does it mean to have a “virtual” course?
What advantages are there to having this course virtual?
What disadvantages are there to having this course virtual?
"‘ What motivated you to make this course virtual?
* What types of students did you expect to have in this course? What type of
technological expertise did you expect? What level of knowledge did you expect?
* What information did you provide to students prior to the course start and during the
ﬁrst week of class?
* How would you improve this course?
* Have you ever taken a virtual course or other distance education courses? Have you
taught either before?
"‘ What is your background or expertise relating to teaching or designing this course?
# Draw a concept map of what your course is about, how it is set up, what you expect

students to see and do.

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APPENDIX B

Questions for Student Interviews

This protocol was meant to serve as a guide. Questions were adapted for the time,
setting, and participant as appropriate. Throughout the study, some questions were added
and some were removed. These are noted as follows:

* indicates a question added during the ﬁrst interviews (some students were asked

these during the ﬁrst interview, others not until the second interview).

** indicates a question added during the second interviews (some students were

asked these during the second interview, others not until the third interview).

*** indicates a question added only for the third interview.

# indicates a question removed. Some participants may have been asked the

question, but the answers were fruitless or they found it too confusing to answer.

What is your previous experience with computers? How comfortable do you feel with
them?

What are the World Wide Web and the Internet?

# What does it mean to take a “virtual” course?

How is your course like taking a regular classroom-based course?

How is your course not like taking a regular classroom-based course?

Would you prefer this course be in a classroom?

105

How is your course organized?

How do you get around in the course? How do you navigate it? What would make this
easier for you?

How do you study for this class?

What materials do you need for this course?

In general, how comfortable are you with this course? * . . .with the content? * . . .with the
technical aspect?

In general, how much do you like this course? * . . .the content? * . . .the technical aspect?

** What do you like best about this course? What do you like least?

How would you improve this course?

If you could change any one thing, what would it be?

What advantages are there to having this course virtual?

What disadvantages are there to having this course virtual?

* *"' Looking back over the semester, when did you ﬁrst feel completely comfortable with
this as an online course?

*** What other experiences do you think most helped you ﬁgure out the online aspect of
this class?

If you could, would you take another virtual course? Why or why not?

Is there anything else you can tell me that would help me to understand your experience
with this class?

# Draw a concept map of what your course is about, how it is set up, what you expect to

see and do.

106

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107

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