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6/01 c:/CIRCIDateDue.p65-p.15

CONTRADICTIONS, DISTURBANCES AND TRANSFORMATIONS: AN

ACTIVITY THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF THREE FACULTY MEMBERS‘

EXPERIENCE WITH DESIGNING AND TEACHING ONLINE COURSES
By

Lisa Pcruski

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education

2003

 

ABSTRACT
Contradictions, Disturbances and Transformations: An Activity Theoretical Analysis of
Three Faculty Members’ Experience With Designing and Teaching Onlinc Courses
By

Lisa Peruski

The activities of course design and teaching in higher education settings is a long
established work activity for many faculty members. With the advent of the World Wide
Web and online education, the context for these activities is changing. Many institutions
of higher education are implementing distance education programs and charging faculty
members with the task of developing and teaching online courses for the first time. This
presents a challenge to faculty members’ established ways of thinking about course
design and teaching. It requires new course design procedures to represent and teach
content in new contexts, and it requires the use of new tools as well as the creation and
transformation of artifacts. It also requires new kinds of support and collaboration.

In this study, I used an activity theoretical framework to analyze three faculty
members’ experiences with designing and teaching online courses for the first time. The
analysis is presented in three case studies (one devoted to each faculty member) as well
as a cross case analysis. Although the analyses focused primarily on the faculty members’
experiences and outcomes, activity theory offered a framework to study goal-oriented

individual and group actions that took place within wider contexts or activity systems.

Individuals from different activity systems within the university united in a new activity

system to work collaboratively to achieve a common objective. Thus, the participants
were concurrently members of other systems with distinct developmental histories
emphasizing different goals, tools, divisions of labor and rules. The analysis revealed
contradictions within and between systems that manifested themselves in disturbances
and breakdowns in individuals’ work processes. Some of these disturbances and
breakdowns forced individuals to reflect on the ongoing activity, which led to
innovations, transformations in thinking, work processes and systemic change.

The analysis was also extended to a search for continuities in individuals’
thinking and activity across contexts. It was revealed that continuities, in addition to
contradictions and disturbances, were springboards for reflection, contradictions,

disturbances, transformations, and sometimes, no change at all.

Copyright by
LISA PERUSKI
2003

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the many teachers who have contributed to my education at
Michigan State University and who have provided me with Opportunities for learning and
professional development. To the members of my dissertation committee, Punya Mishra,
Evelyn Oka, Ann Austin, and Doug Campbell, I thank you for your support and scholarly
insights throughout this process. You made my work stronger through your thoughtful
critiques and suggestions and they are greatly appreciated. Of the many educators that I
have had the good fortune to meet during my education, none have been more supportive,
or positive than my dissertation committee co—chairs, Punya Mishra and Evelyn Oka. I
thank you both for your time, support, thoughtful ways, and scholarly insights. I thank
Evelyn for being my advisor throughout the years that I completed my course work and
preliminary research. You displayed unending patience and a gift for motivating your
students. With your support and guidance, I reached the dissertation phase, which is
where I began working with Punya Mishra who acted as the primary dissertation
chairperson. I thank Punya for his never-ending support and time he spent with me in
completing my dissertation. I also thank you for your unending patience, your thoughtful
ways, scholarly insights and your sense of humor. You have provided me with an
opportunity to experience an exceptional mentor-student relationship, one that will be a
model for working with my own students in the future. For the privilege of working with
you, and for your continued support throughout this process, I will be forever grateful.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the faculty members who served as

participants in my research. Thank you for sharing your time and experiences with me.

You were supportive of my work and your dedication to and reflection on your teaching
craft was an inspiration to me. Among the many friends who offered suppon and
encouragement and understood what a long and difficult process a doctorate degree can
be, I want to acknowledge Sheila Roberts, Dawn Hollowsky, and Diane Strong, for being
there for me and for expressing interest in my progress throughout the years. I also
acknowledge Chris Stiller and Linda Roth for their friendship, for sharing their doctoral
experiences with me, and for their words of wisdom and guidance throughout this
process.

Finally, I express my gratitude to my sisters, Kathy and Debra Salvatore who
always offered support and encouragement to continue. To my husband’s family, all of
who are special to me, I thank you for embracing me all these years, offering support,
encouragement, and fim family gatherings that provided a break from my work. Most
importantly, I recognize my husband, Louie, for your love, support, encouragement, and
understanding. I also thank you for teaching me how to let go of the small stuff, and how

to embrace life with appreciation, vigor, and humor even when things get tough.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
Introduction
Importance of the Study
Questions That Prompted This Study
The Context for the Study

CHAPTER 2
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Overview of Activity Theory
Applying Activity Theory to this Study
Contradictions and Disturbances
Definitions of Terms
Activity Systems
Contradictions, Disturbances and Transformations
Summary
Research Questions

CHAPTER 3
METHODOLOGY
Overview of the Study Design
Participants
Data Sources
Data Analysis
Data Presentation

CHAPTER 4
FACULTY MEMBER PROFILES
Crafting a Profile

CHAPTER 5
ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION—JIM
Introduction to the Case
Background on Jim
Description of the Online Course
Collective Activity Systems: The Design Activity
The Online Teaching Activity
Tools
Transformations
Summary of the Case

vii

\OOOC'N—

I4
15
15
16
I7
24
27
28

29
29
30
34
37
39

41
41

44
44
45
45
46
55
60
64
7o

CHAPTER 6

ANALYSIS AND 1NTERPRETAT1()N———MIKALA 72
Introduction to the Case 72
Background on Mikala 73
Description of the Online Course 73
Collective Activity Systems: The Design Activity 74
The Online Teaching Activity 78
Tools 80
Transformations 85
Summary of the Case 89

CHAPTER 7

ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION—JULIET 91
Introduction to the Case 91
Background on Juliet 92
Description of the Online Course 92
Collective Activity Systems: The Design Activity 93
The Online Teaching Activity 101
Tools 103
Transformations 1 04
Summary of the Case 1 10

CHAPTER 8

CROSS CASE ANALYSIS 1 12
Introduction 1 12
A New Context for Teaching 1 I3
Collective Activity Systems 116
The Online Teaching Activity 131
Tools 133
Transformations l 3 8
Summary and Original Research Questions 142
Continuities 147

CHAPTER 9

DISCUSSION 150
Summary of the Study 150
Implications 15 1
Limitations 1 6 1
Suggestions for Future Research 165
Conclusion 166

APPENDIX APARTICIPANT INFORMED CONSENT 168

APPENDIX B INTERVIEW PROTOCOLS 177

viii

APPENDIX CFACULTY MEMBER PROFILES I91
191

Jim
Mikala 229
Juhet 263

LIST OF REFERENCES 298

Chapter I
Introduction

Course planning and teaching in higher education involves balancing multiple
objectives. Through years of experience in this work, faculty members have generated a
great deal of knowledge and skill in this area. Most of their experience and skill,
however, is in the context of conventional face-to-face classrooms. The advent of the
World Wide Web and the growing online education industry is transforming this context.
Increasingly, courses are being offered online. This has many higher education
institutions rushing to develop and offer such courses and faculty members often are
assigned these tasks.

Course design and teaching in a face-to-face environment is a long established
work activity for most faculty members. Firmly established work activities are often
characterized by automatic routines and tacit knowledge and practices. The introduction
of a new context for course design and teaching, such as the World Wide Web, presents a
challenge to established ways of thinking about these activities. It requires new course
design procedures to represent and teach content in new contexts, it requires the use of
new tools, the creation and transformation of different pedagogical artifacts, and it poses
new problems. Old conceptual tools may be inadequate for solving them (Bruce, 1993).
These changes may force participants to bring to a conscious level their ofien tacit
thinking about larger issues of course design and teaching.

Shulrnan (1986) coined the phrase “pedagogical content knowledge” to
characterize the complex ways in which teachers think about the subjects they teach.

These include representation and formulation of concepts, pedagogical techniques,

knowledge ofwhat makes concepts difficult or easy to learn, knowledge of students’
prior knowledge, and theories of epistemology. Researchers (Foshay & Bergeron, 2000;
Harasim, Hiltz, Teles & Turoff, 1995; Kimball, 1998) have argued that the differences
between face-to-face and online courses may force faculty members to fundamentally
rethink such knowledge as courses are moved to an online environment. For example,
faculty members may need to rethink (a) the nature of the content to be taught and how to
represent it (Koehler, Mishra, Hershey, Peruski, in press) (b) their role as teachers
(Gibson, 1998; Picciano, 2001); and (c) the needs and requirements of students (Ben-
Jacob, Levin & Ben-Jacob, 2000; Daniel, 1998; Keating and Hargitai, 1999).

Teaching online courses also requires a level of familiarity and comfort with
technology that many faculty members may lack. Although they often are the “content
experts,” they may not be experts in technology who know how to design courses for an
online environment. Their lack of experience with online courses may lead individual
faculty members to entertain overly optimistic or na'I've ideas of what is possible with the
available technology or they may not be aware of the technological tools available today.
Consequently, developing and teaching an online course usually requires collaboration
with individuals who are experts in technology. This implies that the activity of designing
and teaching an online course is situated within a larger web of institutional, individual
and technological contexts that may be different from those required to design and teach
face-to-face courses. These new stakeholders and participants may entertain different
goals, intentions and motivations for the online course than those held by faculty

members designing and teaching the course.

h)

Collaboration to achieve the new object usually requires individuals from
different contexts or activity systems within an institution to unite and form new activity
systems to achieve a common object. This means that the individuals are concurrently
members of multiple communities that may have unique, historically formed tools,
divisions of labor and rules. There may be differences in how objects are seen as well as
differences in responsibilities and accountabilities. Consequently, collaborative work
between people from different contexts or systems within an institution may reveal
conflicts or contradictions within or between systems. Contradictions may lead to
tensions, disturbances or breakdowns in work processes, which may force individuals to
adopt a more deliberative stance toward their work or to create innovations to reduce
tensions. They may also lead to changes in work practice, transformations in individuals’
thinking and transformations in systems. Thus, contradictions are opportunities for
change and growth within both individuals and systems (Engestrom, 2000a, 2000b).

In this study, 1 followed three faculty members who were designing and teaching
online courses for the first time. I interviewed the faculty members as well as some of
their technical assistants during both the course design and online teaching activities. 1
was particularly interested in understanding the activity of designing and teaching an
online class from the faculty members' perspectives as well as their interactions with
others during their activities. This focus was derived in part from my previous work on a
similar study (Mishra, Koehler, Hershey & Peruski, 2001). In that research, I interviewed
six faculty members who were in the process of developing an online course for the first

time. I used this work to get a perspective on faculty thinking as they designed online

courses, to pilot test interview questions, and to identify unanticipated issues for future
research.

The findings of the previous study helped me to design the current research
project. For example, the interviews revealed that the activities of course design and
teaching appeared to be reciprocally related in interesting and complex ways. I found that
during course design activities, faculty members thought a lot about teaching and it
seemed likely that during teaching they would think about course design. This was
evidenced by the fact that five out of six faculty members predicted that they would
change their course while they were teaching it, or, at the very least, they would keep
careful records to help them redesign the course for next time. Additionally, the same five
faculty members easily imagined how their thinking about course design and teaching
might change as they taught, but all six suggested that I conduct post teaching interviews
to identify actual changes in their thinking. Consequently, I designed the current study to
include the online course design and teaching activities, as well as follow-up interviews
after the teaching activity.

The pilot study also indicated to me that the activity of designing an online course
is situated within a larger web of institutional, individual and technological contexts that
may be different from those required to design and teach face-to-face courses. I
concluded that focusing only on the faculty members’ stories was limiting. Moreover, I
realized that studying such a rich web of connections required a theoretical framework
that valued the richness of the contexts even while valuing the role of the individuals in
the process. With those issues in mind, I chose to frame this study within the parameters

of activity theory. Activity theory, broadly defined, “Is a philosophical and cross-

disciplinary framework for studying different forms Of human practices as development
processes, with both individual and social levels interlinked at the same time” (Kuutti.
1996; p. 25). An activity framework acknowledges that changes in work activities implies
a history of established practices and that change is likely to involve meshing new ideas,
artifacts and contexts with well-established beliefs and practices (Bruce, 1993;
Engestrom, 1999; 2000a; 2000b).

According to Bruce (1993), change often reflects situation-specific compromises
between the old and the new ways of doing things. The participants interpret and then re-
create the activity as they adapt it to fit with institutional and physical constraints, and
with their own goals and practices. Thus, innovation is a layered process where the effect
of previous decisions, institutional context and personal histories shape what comes next.
A new activity does not emerge from a vacuum, and neither does it exist in a vacuum. As
the new activity comes into being, it is re-created to conform to the real or perceived
goals, accountabilities, responsibilities and norms of the people who implement it within
their contexts.

Developing a better understanding of this process was one of the goals of this
dissertation. Adapting an activity framework allowed for both the analysis of individual
transformations in thinking embedded within collective activities, as well as analysis of
collective activities where various stakeholders in the process had distinct developmental
histories emphasizing different goals, tools, divisions of labor and rules. These
differences sometimes led to tensions or disturbances within or between individuals,
which could be traced to systemic contradictions. In turn, contradictions and disturbances

were sometimes a springboard for innovation, and individual and systemic

transformations (Engestrom, 1994; 2000b). An activity framework also allowed me to
expand upon the existing research base in distance education, teacher thinking, teacher
change, faculty development and technology infusion. At the same time, this research
provided the opportunity to expand upon the literature that assesses the usefulness of
activity theory as a framework for this kind of research. A more detailed explanation of
activity theory and how it was adapted for use in this research is provided in later
chapters, but first 1 describe the importance of and context for this study followed by

some of the key questions that prompted this research.

Importance of the Study

Much of the existing research on online teaching focuses on issues such as how
the course is implemented, the nature of the interaction between faculty and students and
evaluation of Ieamer outcomes (Bolanger & Jordan, 2000; Mehrotra, Hallister &
McGahey, 2001; Williams, Paprock & Covington, 1999). Specifically, a lot of the
research (particularly in the area of Computer Mediated Communication) tends to focus
on particular technologies such as different kinds of discussion or chat sofiwarc, and how
these are instantiated within an online class. Less emphasis has been given to the
experiences of faculty members working collaboratively with others to develop and teach
online courses and whether these activities change their thinking about larger issues of
teaching, learning and technology. Consequently, we have little knowledge of how the
interactions between various stakeholders may lead to changes in work processes and

thinking across groups and individuals.

This is a particularly opportune moment to conduct this research for several
reasons. First, technology changes at an ever-faster rate. Thus, focusing research attention
on a particular instantiation of a technology would not have offered guidelines on what to
do when the technology changes. For example, research on text chat may become
irrelevant once video chat or avatar (graphic representations of real people in cyberspace)
based chats become prevalent. In contrast, by focusing on transformations in individuals’
thinking and work processes during online course design and teaching activities, 1 have
gained insights that apply across different technologies. Also, focusing on the broader
context of change brought about by the incorporation of new technologies through the
intentions and actions of a range of stakeholders’ experiences provided a richer and more
nuanced contextual view of how systems interact and change or remain stable in the face
of coordination and conflict.

Finally, this research is timely because we are currently at an interesting moment
in the diffusion and spread of a new pedagogical technology. Educational historians have
pointed out that schools have changed very little over time (Cuban, 1986; Papert, 1993).
The advent of online courses may be the single biggest change in education that we have
seen in years. These changes are ongoing though online courses are not yet the norm.
However, once online courses become more accepted they will also become more
scripted, formulaic and characterized by automatic routines, tacit knowledge and
unquestioned practices. Hence, it will be more difficult to capture participants’ thinking
about the process. As things stand now, research on this new technological medium of
instruction is something that can inform our understanding of how technological

innovation is accepted and extended in pedagogical settings. Such an understanding may

not be possible a few years from today as these approaches become mainstream. By
offering a fine-grained analysis and understanding of how technical innovation can lead
to changes in practice, this research can help offer suggestions for better course
development as well as contextual and technological changes that could support faculty

in online course development and teaching.

Questions That Prompted This Study

A major premise in this study is that faculty members’ course design and teaching
activities in a face-to-face environment are often characterized by automatic routines and
tacit knowledge and practices. Furthermore, the introduction of a new context for these
activities presents a challenge to established ways of thinking and may force faculty
members to bring to a conscious level their tacit knowledge. Consequently, such a period
of transition provides an opportunity to explore the experiences of individuals and
collaborative groups involved in a new work activity. Based on this, several questions of
interest arose around this topic. For example, what is the process by which faculty
members develop and teach online courses? Do these activities force them to confront
tacit thinking as well as transform their thinking about larger issues of teaching such as
their understanding and representation of content, their beliefs about students and
learning, methods of course design and their attitudes toward technology? In addition,
how do various individuals from different systems within the university that may have
different goals, responsibilities and accountability come together to work collaboratively
on a project? Did their work together result in newer procedures or changes in their

thinking, either individually or as a group?

With these broad questions in mind, 1 used activity theory, which is explained in
chapter two, as a framework for this study. Before moving on to the explanation of

activity theory, I conclude this chapter by describing the context for this study.

The Context for the Study

The advent of the World Wide Web, the growing online education industry and
competition for a share of this market impelled a college within a large Midwestern
university to create a new online master’s degree program. The three faculty members
(Jim, Juliet and Mikala)I that are the focus of this study were all developing and teaching
courses for this new master’s program. The dean of the college met with faculty members
to announce the new program and explain how it would work. In order to support faculty
members in the creation of courses for the new degree program the college offered a
range of incentives. All faculty members who developed an online course would receive
10,000 dollars and a laptop computer to keep once the course was over. Faculty members
also could attend informal seminars on a voluntary basis. In the seminars, they met with
technical experts and others who already had taught online courses. The seminars were an
open forum where participants could discuss their experiences, concerns, and offer advice
to each other.

Since the administration was aware that their faculty members (including the
three that are the focus of this research) had well~developed skills in and philosophies
surrounding pedagogy, learning and course design, there was a concern that faculty

would question the integrity and pedagogical soundness of a course if they were not

 

I All names are pseudonyms

intimately involved in creating it. In addition, the college wanted to stand out from online
programs at some other universities whose courses were designed by hired professionals
as opposed to the professors who would teach them. In response to these concerns, the
college asked two of its faculty members who were also experts in technology to create a

course to teach faculty how to develop their own online courses. 2

The Faculty Development Class

Two professors who were employed by the college that was developing the online
program were assigned the task of creating and implementing the faculty development
course.3 The design for the course, referred to here as FAC-DEV 101, grew out of their
philosophy and ongoing research on integrating technological innovations into teaching.
They called it “The Design Team Approach.” Their goal in this approach was to help
faculty members integrate content, pedagogy and technology. In their view,

Quality teaching requires developing a nuanced understanding of the complex

relationships between technology, content and pedagogy and utilizing this

understanding to develop appropriate, context specific strategies and

representations. Productive faculty development needs to consider all three issues

not in isolation but rather taken together (Mishra, Koehler, Hershey & Peruski,

2002a, 2002b; Koehler, Mishra, Hershey & Peruski, in press).

Instead of just handing over course content to a web designer to place online, the

“learning by design” approach advocates that expert teachers take a hand in the design of

 

2 There was a perception by some interested parties in this process that some faculty members were
unhappy about the online program due to several factors such as resistance to change, a perception that the
college might be too focused on financial gain as opposed to academics, the degree of control faculty
members would have over the creation of the classes they might have to teach and a resistance to adding
more to faculty members’ workloads. Based on these perceived tensions the college responded with the
incentives described here. Although these contradictions between systems could prove interesting for
additional analyses, they were not the focus of this study and therefore very little data were collected that
would permit further analysis of these contradictions. However, these ripe issues will be considered as the
focus for future studies.

3 . . . . .
One of the professors was also the director for this dissertation prOject.

10

the technology to support their pedagogical purposes. This approach relies on the process
of design to develop the necessary skills and fluency for understanding the nuances of
integrating technology and pedagogy.

In their work with students, the FAC-DEV 101 instructors had been looking for
ways to include authentic projects and they came up with the idea to include master’s
students and faculty together in the course. Master’s students enrolled to learn how to
design technology to help solve a problem of educational practice while faculty members
enrolled as “students” to learn about online learning and teaching and to develop the
online course they would teach the following year.

Within the faculty development class, teams consisting of one faculty member
and three or four master’s students worked on designing an online course. The major
activities of the course consisted of readings, explorations with technology, prototyping
of the online course, online and in-class discussions, and peer review and feedback. A
typical class period consisted of a whole group component (to discuss readings and issues
that applied to all groups), and a small group component for the design teams to work on
their prototypes (Mishra, Koehler, Hershey & Peruski, 2002b).

Only two of the three faculty members in this study, Jim and Juliet, enrolled in the
F AC-DEV 101 class. They worked with their design teams to develop a mock up of their
course web site. The third professor in this study, Mikala, was unable to fit the faculty
development class into her schedule; therefore, she used her 10,000-dollar stipend from
the college to form her own design team. The team was comprised of graduate students
who were former professionals in a field related to the content of the online course.

Mikala’s design team developed the content and structure for her online course as well as

11

decided what software programs the online students would have to learn. However,
unlikeJim and Juliet, Mikala’s team did not work directly with the technology to create a
mock up of her course web site. Instead, they left the web site to technology experts at
the university’s Virtual University (VU), a new unit that had been created to support

faculty members in offering online courses.

The Virtual University

The course development model used by the VU made the faculty members
responsible for developing the content of the course while the VU staff designers and
programmers developed the technology. The W staff also developed a series of software
modules (called “widgets”) that could be integrated into different courses based on
faculty members’ needs, requests, and course designs. The widgets include a discussion
board, chat rooms, file uploading facilities, etc. Interaction between the faculty members
and the designers and programmers was through a “producer,” also an employee of the
VU. The producer was the key person in this equation who was responsible for taking the
content and design ideas developed by the faculty member and instantiating them using
the tools made available by the VU technical staff (Mishra, Koehler, Hershey & Peruski,
2001)

In the next chapter, I provide an overview of activity theory and an explanation of
how 1 adapted it for use in this study. I also provide definitions of terms commonly
associated with activity theory and explain their relevance to this study. Following that, I

explain the “systems” concept in activity theory and define the'systems of interest in this

12

research. Finally, 1 frame the research questions asked in this study in the language of

activity theory.

13

 

Chapter 2

Theoretical Framework

Overview of Activity Theory

Alter Vygotsky’s death in 1934, his colleague, A. N. Leont’ev and others in
Khar’ov reworked elements of Vygotsky’s theory. The results came to be known as
activity theory (Axel, 1997). Activity theory focuses on the activities in which people are
engaged, the nature of the tools they use in those activities, the social and contextual
relationships among the collaborators in those activities, the goals and intentions of those
activities, and the objects or outcomes of those activities (Engestrom, 1994).

The unit of analysis is activity and the goal is to analyze the activity systems for
their components and the dynamic reciprocal relations among them. Kuutti ( I 996)
defined activity as, "A form of doing directed to an object, and activities are
distinguished from each other according to their objects" (p. 27). Activities include goals,
means, the process of molding the object, and the results. Subjects transform objects and
the subjects change and develop themselves (Davydov, 1999).

Activity theory stresses that thinking is embedded in historically mediated object-
oriented and artifact—mediated collective activities (Engestrom, 1994). The theory is
useful for studying different forms of human and social/institutional learning as
interlinked developmental processes where the problem or object drives the learning
(Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999). According to this view, knowledge and learning are

situated and contextually bound (Jonassen, 2000).

14

The theory also adopts Marx’s dialectic materialist view of activity and
consciousness as dynamically interrelated (Leont’ev, 1981), which provides an
alternative perspective to the mentalistic and idealist views of human knowledge that
claim that learning must precede activity. In contrast to other theories, 3 key assumption
in activity theory is that conscious learning emerges from activity not as a precursor to it.
The fact that the problems under consideration are often ill structured and framed within
larger individual and social contexts make the process and the solutions unpredictable

and emergent in nature (Jonassen, 2000).

Applying Activity Theory to this Study

Contradictions and Disturbances

The approach to understanding phenomena in this study was inspired by the work
of Engestrom (20003; 2000b). When looking at learning and transformations in
organizational settings, Engestrom based his analysis on contradictions that occurred
within activities and between surrounding activities. Contradictions may occur between
systems that have different goals, responsibilities and accountabilities or there may be
contradictions in how tools, objects and subjects are perceived and understood.
Contradictions also may arise because individuals working collaboratively to create an
object are concurrently members of multiple communities. The communities may be
overlapping or independent activity groups that have different objects, tools and social
relations. People must adjust roles, beliefs and actions to resolve conflicts that may exist

within and between systems (Jonassen, 2000).

15

According to Hasu & Engestrom (2000), “Contradictions manifest themselves in
disturbances and breakdowns in work processes as well as workers’ innovative attempts
to solve them” (p. 65). Disturbances and breakdowns refer to a disruption in the normal
functioning of things forcing individuals to adopt a more reflective or deliberative stance
toward ongoing activity (Winograd & Flores, 1986; Bodker & Gronbaek, 1998).
Studying the various systems that individuals are a part of and identifying disturbances,
everyday troubles and breakdowns in work processes is a way to highlight the systemic
contradictions. The importance of contradictions is that, although learning can be
deliberate, contradictions can also be openings for learning, and transformations in

thinking, work processes and systemic change.

Definition of Terms

Intersubjectivity and the ZPD

Two concepts associated with activity theory, intersubjective understanding and
the zone of proximal development (ZPD), emerged during data analysis as explanatory
vehicles in this study because of a focus on participants' transformations in thinking while
working cooperatively with others to create an object.

Intersubjective understanding is a constructed, shared understanding of a situation
(Hutchins & Klausen, 1998). Such understanding is constructed in the course of
participants’ interaction with one another around a common goal. In the course of their
interaction, participants not only construct a shared understanding of their particular
situation, but each person also gains new knowledge in the process. For example, in this

study, the participants in the online course design teams and the VU producer entered the

16

situation with little shared prior understanding of how each other’s systems worked. They
only had knowledge of discrete pieces of the puzzle that they had to integrate. During
their interaction, they constructed a shared understanding of their particular situation and
each person gained new knowledge in the process.

Vygotsky‘s (1978) notion of the ZPD was that aside from a person's present skills
and understanding there is a zone within which the person is capable of or motivated to
learn. In activity theory terms, this concept is expanded to include collaborative groups
and contexts because contradictions in everyday work activities can be a springboard to
learning and change in both individuals and systems. Hence, contradictions create a space
within which learning can take place, i.e. a ZPD at the group and system level (Bodker &
Gronbaek, 1998).

Analysis of the design activity in this study presented opportunities to uncover
such zones of proximal development, that is, where contradictions arose in the work
activities and led to transformations in thinking and work activities for both individuals
and systems.

In the next section of this chapter, I attempt to more clearly define the concept of
“activity system” and describe the different “activity systems” that were analyzed in this
study. Finally, I revisit the initial questions that prompted the study and state them within

the framework and language of activity theory.

Activity Systems

According to Hasu & Engestrom (2000), “Activity is driven by a collective object

and motive, but it is realized in goal-oriented individual and group actions” (p. 63).

17

Furthermore, the components of any activity are organized into activity systems that have
complex mediational structures (Engestrom, 1994). They are systems that produce events
and actions and evolve over relatively extended periods. An activity system includes a
subject, an object, an outcome, mediating artifacts, community, division of labor and
rules. In this study the activity was “designing and teaching a course for an online
environment.” These activities took place within organized activity systems, the

components of which are described below.

Subject

A subject is an individual or sub-group whose agency is chosen as the point of
view in the analysis (Engestrom, 1996). Even when the focus is on an individual, such as
the faculty members in this study, the context must be included in the unit of analysis
since people function within social systems. This implies that research within the
framework of activity theory is always essentially collective. Consequently, a minimal
meaningful context for individual actions must be included in the basic unit of analysis
(Kuutti, 1996).

Although I primarily focused on faculty members’ transformations in thinking
during the online class design and teaching activities, I also collected data from and
provided the frame of reference of other individuals and systems with whom the faculty
members were associated as they worked to achieve the object. These other individuals
and systems included the faculty development class, the faculty members’ course design
teams, the VU system and the producer, and the faculty members’ online class in

progress, which included the students in the online class. Thus, in this study, the subject

18

was “the faculty member” but also included the points of views and perspectives ofotlier
individuals and systems with whom they were associated while they created and taught

the online class.

Object

The object refers to the object of the activity. “An object (in the sense of
‘objective’) is held by the subject and motivates activity, giving it a specific direction”
(Nardi, 1997, p. 73). An object also is what connects individuals' actions to the collective
activity because it is believed that generally, peoples' ability to perform is predicated on
groups of people (Jonassen & Rohrer-Murphy, 1999). In this study, the object was to
design and deliver an online class. The object was a material thing (the online course as
represented in a web site, print materials, syllabi, course activities and so on) but it also
had less tangible qualities. It was also a plan, an idea, and a design that was being
manipulated and transformed by the actions of individuals and groups (i.e. by the
participants in the activity). For example, while the course was being developed, it was
being shaped and transformed by the faculty members and technical assistants, the course

content, the technology tools and the institutional context.

Outcome

The outcome is the result of the transformation process. In other words, the object
(the design and delivery of an online course) is transformed into an outcome (the
completed course design and the delivered online course). The outcome is what motivates

the existence of the activity. There are other less tangible outcomes as well, such as

19

transformations in individuals’ thinking, changes in work processes and institutional
changes that may have been prompted by the activity. The transformations are described

in more detail in the analysis sections of the dissertation.

Mediation

An activity always contains various artifacts or tools and signs (e.g., procedures,
heuristics, computer hardware and software, etc.). These artifacts mediate the activity
within the cultural context in which the activity is situated (Bellamy, 1996). Engestrom
(1999) considers mediation one of the most important concepts in activity theory in terms
of its relationship to the notion of "control" and human agency. "The idea is that humans
can control their behavior - 'not from the inside,’ on the basis of biological urges, but
'from the outside,’ using and creating artifacts" (p. 29). Thus, activity theory argues that
psychological processes are conditioned by mediating artifacts as well as cultural,
institutional and historical contexts (Wertsch, 1998). Tools mediate or alter the nature of
human activity and when internalized, influence peoples’ mental development. In turn,
humans alter tools and subsequently the broader social context as well (Jonassen, 2000).

Mediation is multi-layered in that artifacts, such as tools and heuristics, mediate
between individuals (subjects) and their purpose (object), but subjects are part of
communities and participation in the community also mediates the activity. Thus, the
community’s rules and tools mediate individuals’ activities. In turn, the division of labor
or the role that each community member plays in transforming the object mediates the
community’s relationship to the object. Roles can encompass the power that each

member wields and the tasks that each member is held responsible for. Consequently,

20

individuals’ actions toward an object are mediated by the tools used, as well as
community membership, which include rules and the division of labor within the
community. These aspects of an activity system, community, rules and division of labor

are described next.

Community

Communities consist of the individuals and subgroups that focus at least some of
their effort on the object. Subjects are concurrently members of multiple communities
and knowledge is distributed among members, other communities, tools and the object
that is created (Jonassen, 2000). Thus, communities are systems of social relations that
affect individuals’ cognition. Communities mediate motives, tools, artifacts and actions.

Although the data collection in this study was focused on the faculty members,
they were concurrently members of multiple communities. Consequently, in data analysis
these communities and the individuals within them also were of interest. For example,
two of the faculty members’ participated in the faculty development class where they
worked with design teams that fiinctioned both within the faculty development class, as
well as outside the class when the design teams worked with the VU producer. The VU
producer was of interest due to his collaboration with the faculty members, but he also
was part of the Virtual University system. The faculty member who did not take the
faculty development class created her own design team and then went on to work with a
W producer. Once the faculty members’ online courses were up and running, they
became part of a classroom community that included their online students. At the same

time, the faculty members still had ties to the VU community. All of these community

21

members were also part of other independent or overlapping communities. For example.
the faculty members were part of a department within a college within a university, as
well as part of a wider community outside the university that teaches subject matter in a
particular discipline, and so on.

The point is that subjects have to contend with different motives, tools and
artifacts associated with various communities. These all become mediators of their
actions within the communities creating the object. For example, faculty members who
took the faculty development class had exposure to technologies that were not available
within the VU system. The faculty members also acquired knowledge of design options
that were not compatible with VU technologies. Subsequently, the faculty members had
to work with a VU producer who did not have the same tools and heuristics at his
disposal. This contradiction led to disturbances in their work processes as they created the

object.

Rules and Division of Labor

Communities have rules (both tacit and explicit) and divisions of labor, both of
which are the less visible social mediators of activity (Engestrom, 1994). Rules refer to
explicit regulations, laws, policies and conventions that constrain activity, as well as the
implicit social norms, standards and relationships among members of the community.
Rules guide, in part, the actions or activities acceptable by the community.

The division of labor is the horizontal division of tasks between community
members and may encompass perceived expertise. Division of labor also encompasses

vertical divisions of power based upon actual or perceived status of the various members

22

in the community or role-based divisions of labor. For example, in this study the faculty
members said that they tried not to be in control of their design teams, but they had the
status of “professor,” while their design teams consisted of students. In addition, both
students and faculty members knew that the faculty had the final say in how the site
looked and what its content would be. This set up a tacit power relationship within the
design teams that also may have affected the division of labor within the teams.

On the other hand, the relationship between the VU producer and the faculty
members had a different and more complicated division of power. Although the faculty
members had control over the content of their course, they often had to cede control over
the design of the course to the VU producer who knew more about the technology

(particularly the technology supported by the VU).

Tools

Tools are anything used in the transformation process such as physical tools
(computers, software), or mental tools, such as models, theories or heuristics. The use of
culture-specific tools shapes the way people act and think; that is, they mediate the
relationship between the subject and the object. In turn, tools are also altered by the
activity. Tools are both enabling and limiting: "It empowers the subject in the
transformation process with the historically collected experience and skill 'crystallized' to
it, but it also restricts the interaction to be from the perspective of that particular tool or
instrument" (Kuutti, 1996, p. 27).

In the context of this study, different communities had various tools at their

disposal to create the object. Faculty members used past experiences in designing face-to-

23

face classes as a model to begin designing their online classes. The faculty members that
took the faculty development class also were introduced to new heuristics as well as
technical tools. On the other hand, the VU producer had a different set of technical tools
and heuristics he used to create other similar objects. When the two communities came
together to create a common object, they had to mesh their different tools to create the
object and sometimes transformed existing tools or created new ones to achieve the
outcome.

Technical tools played an important role in this process for all of the faculty
members. Tikhomirov (1999) concluded that technology is a means of influencing human
activity and consequently the human psyche. However, the specific character is not
defined by the technology, but first by the organizational and social conditions of its use
and by the characteristics of the activity. The data analysis in this study revealed how
computer technology aided in the creation of the object but also created disturbances
within and between systems, as well as generated new forms of creative work that would

have been impossible without computer technology.

Contradictions, Disturbances and Transformations

Seeing the world of designing and teaching online courses through the lens of
activity theory led me to three key concepts central to this research. They are
contradictions, disturbances and transformations. Although these terms have been

mentioned before, they are discussed in detail below.

24

Contradictions and Disturbances

The various communities involved in the creation of the object (e.g., the college
that created the online degree program, the faculty development class, the design teams,
the VU and the VU producer) seemed to have a common goal or object of action.
However, the individuals involved were simultaneously members of other overlapping or
independent activity groups that had different tools, social relations, responsibilities and
accountabilities.

When individuals from these different activity groups meet and interact to create
an object, the differences can highlight systemic contradictions. Contradictions are a
misfit within elements, between them, between different activities, or between different
developmental phases of a single activity (Kuutti, 1996). Contradictions are manifested
as problems, clashes, disturbances or breakdowns within individuals, between individuals
and within and between systems. Contradictions are seen as sources of development in
that they can lead to new forms of work activity as well as transformations in thinking
and in systems. Contradictions and disturbances are not assumed to have a negative
connotation although in some cases conflict may arise from them. Contradictions may
simply be a disruption that results in reflection and coordination among participants.

In some way, contradictions and disturbances are an “essential tension” (Kuhn,
1977) that leads to transformations and changes. Though these tensions may lead to
contradictions and disturbances in the short term, these are essential for the evolution and
development of practices in the domain. In the Kuhnian sense of the word, “essential
tension” represents the idea that no new knowledge or learning (paradigm shift) can

occur without this tension between normal and revolutionary science. I have taken

25

liberties with Kuhn’s original meaning and application to convey two ideas: (a) the idea
that such tensions are inevitable given the different backgrounds, interests, goals,
intentions and accountabilities of individuals and groups; and more importantly, (b) the
fact that whether or not participants interpret disturbances as positive, negative or
relatively neutral, these tensions can lead to changes and transformations in work process,
in systems and in individuals' thinking and learning. These transformations are what keep
systems alive and vibrant. The notion of transformation is discussed in greater detail

below.

Transformations

In activity theory, transformation is a key notion that is understood as changing
the object (Davydov, 1999). Davydov noted that not every change is a transformation and
that “Transformation means changing an object internally, making evident its essence and
altering it” (p. 42). However, it is not clear what “essence” actually means. Consequently,
“transformation” is a notion that is continuing to be studied by activity theorists.

Vygotsky (1978) referred to transformation at the individual level where be
emphasized the internalization of culturally given higher psychological functions. A
common example of this is children learning skills and knowledge in interaction with
adults and peers that are more experienced. However, Vygotsky’s early studies examined
not only the role of given artifacts as mediators of cognition, but also how children
transformed and created artifacts of their own in order to facilitate their performance

(Engestrom, 1999).

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Engestrom (1999) also argued that individual transformation is not the only type
of transformation that must be understood and mastered. He took the notion of
transformation to the level of the system because, "People face not only the challenge of
acquiring established culture; they also face situations in which they must formulate
desirable culture" (p. 35).

For the purposes of this study, 1 adapted the term “transformation” to refer to
changes in individuals, systems and tools. For example, if an individual changed his or
her thinking or work activities, this constituted a transformation. If a system, such as a
department within the university was changed in some way due to the activities of

individuals or other systems, that also constituted a transformation, and so on.

Summary

The creation of a new object requires multiple actors associated with different
communities that work collaboratively to create the object. Community members are
associated with various systems, each having a distinct perspective on the developing
object. From an activity-theoretical perspective, tracking the process of creating a new
object from its earliest phases through completion provides a concise example or
“laboratory” to examine the multiple historical layers, perspectives and viewpoints in and
around the developing activity and object. In the creation process, separate historical
layers and perspectives meet and interact (Engestrom, 1999). Such encounters are
realized through different perspectives that the parties construct during the process, which
is mediated by community norms, rules, division of labor, tools and signs (Jonassen,

2000). Such encounters also may highlight systemic contradictions that can lead to

27

disturbances in work process. In turn, contradictions and disturbances can be
springboards for change in individuals and systems. In this study, these theoretical
concepts were applied in the analysis of three faculty members as they worked

collaboratively with others from various systems to create and deliver an online course.

Research Questions

Seeing the research from the point of view of activity theory enabled me to
tighten and focus the original questions that drove me to conduct this study. The key idea
to understanding phenomena in this study is based on the notion of systemic
contradictions that could lead to disturbances within and between participants that are
working collaboratively to achieve the outcome. Contradictions are historically formed
within systems that have their own goals, intentions, accountability, divisions of labor
and rules. Additionally, contradictions at the system level can lead to disturbances within
and between the participants and systems engaged in collaborative activity because the
participants are concurrently members of other systems. Contradictions that manifest
themselves in disturbances can be a springboard for transformations in thinking and work
processes. With these issues in mind, I focused and refrained my initial questions as
follows:

Question I: What contradictions and disturbances emerge during the activities of

designing and teaching an online class?

Question 2: Does participating in these activities transform the thinking of the

participants or the systems on issues such as course design, teaching, learning,

technology and face-to-face teaching?

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Chapter 3

Methodology

Overview of the Study Design

This was a qualitative research study where the primary focus was three faculty
members’ activity of designing and teaching an online class for the first time. Using an
activity theoretical framework, 1 attended to faculty members’ experiences as they
worked within various systems to achieve the objects. The systems included the college
of education and the faculty development class; the faculty members’ design teams; the
VU producer and the VU system. I identified contradictions within and between systems
that manifested themselves in disturbances and breakdowns in individuals’ thinking and
work processes. Disturbances and breakdowns were linked to transformations in
individuals’ thinking and work processes, as well as transformations in systems and tools
(Engestrom, I999).

The analysis resulted in the presentation of three cases (one devoted to each
faculty member) as well as a cross case analysis. As suggested by Miles and Huberman
(1994), analysis of three cases is well suited to understanding more varied phenomena
such as where certain events are likely to occur or not occur, identification of negative
cases, and the formation of general categories of how certain conditions may be related.
By analyzing three cases, I was able to take the analysis beyond a simple single case
study, evaluation study, or comparison study and deepen understanding and explanation

of the activity. Analyzing three cases allowed me to focus on understanding the

29

uniqueness within each case and Similarities and differences across cases while avoiding

simple “either—or” dichotomous conclusions of “better than” and “worse than.”

Participants

Selection of the Participants

The three faculty participants of the research were all faculty members at a
college within a large Midwestern university, which had recently (as of the time of data
collection) instituted a Master of Arts degree that was to be offered online. I acquired a
list of potential participants from the coordinator of the online master’s program and from
one of the professors who had taught the faculty development class. I narrowed that list
down to faculty members who were teaching online for the first time. From that shorter
list, I derived a sample of convenience and attempted to ensure some variability by
seeking faculty members from different departments within the college. 1 narrowed my
list down to three faculty members and met with them to seek their consent. All three
agreed to participate in the study. The faculty members included two women and one
man, all tenured faculty members with nine to twenty years of higher education teaching
experience.

The three faculty members who agreed to participate provided me with the names
and contact information of their VU producers. One of the producers, who worked with
two of the professors in this study agreed to participate. The two professors who shared
the same VU producer also were enrolled in the faculty development class. The third
faculty member in this study did not take the faculty development class. She had used her

stipend from the college to assemble a group of graduate students to function as her

30

design team. This faculty member was assigned to a different VU producer but he
declined to participate in this study. Because of this, the faculty member provided me
with the name and contact information of the student assistant (also a member of the
design team) who worked most closely with her and the VU producer throughout the
design and teaching activities. This student assistant agreed to participate in the study.

Once the study was approved by the University Committee on Research Involving
Human Subjects (UCRIHS), the three faculty members and their technical assistants who
agreed to participate read and signed consent forms. In addition, once the faculty
members began teaching their online classes, I asked for and received permission from
their online students to observe the class throughout the semester (see Appendix A for
the informed consent forms).

One of the professors who taught the faculty development course was also the
director for this dissertation. He provided verbal consent and read and agreed to any

comments that he made that were included in this study.

Description of the Participants

The key participants in this study were three tenured faculty members employed
by a college within a large Midwestern university that was instituting a new distance
delivery system for a Master of Arts degree to begin in the fall of 2001. It was these three
faculty members, whom I called “Jim,” “Mikala” and “Juliet,” whose perspectives were
the primary concerns in this study. A description of and background information on each

faculty member is provided in their case analyses beginning with chapter five.

31

Three other participants also provided data for this study. They included one VU
producer, one student assistant/technical advisor, and one of the professors who taught
the faculty development class.

The VU producer whom I called “Sam” worked with two of the faculty members
in this study (Jim and Juliet, who also took the faculty development class). Sam came to
the university as a student several years before our interview. He had graduated with a
bachelor’s degree in an area not closely related to technology. However, during his
undergraduate studies he began working with technology as a hobby and took a couple of
classes in design and computing. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, he took a position
as a graphic design director for a small city’s web site. He came back to the university
and worked for six months in another position when he saw an opening for a producer at
the VU. Since he was interested in web-based education and technology, he took the
position and had been employed for one and a half years at the time of our interview.

The fifth participant, whom I called “Bonnie,” was one of the graduate student
members of Mikala’s design team. As a member of the design team, Bonnie took part in
the development of the content and course structure for the online class and made
suggestions as to which software programs the online students should learn, such as
PowerPoint, Word Perfect and spreadsheets. Before starting her Ph.D., Bonnie had
obtained both an undergraduate and a master's degree in a field related to the one that
Mikala was teaching in. Bonnie had worked for several years in her field before coming
to the university to start her Ph.D. She had developed technological knowledge over the
years out of both necessity and job opportunity. She also became certified at a different

university in the use of technology. Through that certification, she learned how to use

32

correct terminology, work with hardware and software, use different types of computers,
and she Ieamed about technology applications in her field (the same field that Mikala’s
course was designed for). At the time of our interview, Bonnie was doing web design of
images using Photo Shop, creating web pages, and she had worked with databases, both
implementing commercial software and creating custom databases.

Once Mikala’s design team disbanded, Bonnie was responsible for transferring
everything to the VU producer. Once the course was up and running, Bonnie monitored it
throughout the semester, however she did not have direct contact with students. Her role
was to provide support and to “maintain contact with the W producer to make sure that
students were finding all the links that they needed, that there was a thread to be followed
that was clear and that they were comfortable in that environment” (Bonnie, interview,
April 18, 2001). In addition, she did some research to find new web pages related to the
online students’ interests and needs.

The sixth participant was one of the two professors who had taught the faculty
development course". At the time this study was conducted, he had been an assistant
professor with the college for three years. He had expertise with educational technology
and design, though had not personally taught an online course (at the time the study was
conducted). He (and another faculty member with an expertise in educational technology)
had been asked by the college’s administration to create the faculty development course
to help faculty design their online courses. This course was the third offering of the
faculty development course and he had been involved in all three of the courses that had

been taught so far. The structure of the faculty development course was strongly

 

4 . . . .
This professor was also the director of the dissertation.

33

determined by his interest in learning technology through design, which was explained

above in the section that described the context for this study.

Data Sources

Participant Interviews

Each of the three faculty members participated in a series of three in-depth
interviews. The interviews took place during the online course design activity, about
midterm during the teaching activity, and after each faculty member’s online course had
ended. Since my goal in the interviews was to understand the faculty member’s point of
view on their experience in online course design and teaching, the interviews were a mix
of semi-structured and open-ended questions. (See appendix B for the interview
protocol). The first interview gathered professional and technical background, data on
how the faculty members carried out the course design activity, their perceptions about it,
what they Ieamed, and data regarding their interactions with others and with the
technology during the activity. The second interview focused on the faculty members’
experience teaching the online class, their interactions with others (e.g., the online
students, the VU producer and the VU system, etc.), their interactions with the
technology and the course content and what they had Ieamed from their activity so far.
The final interview was a reflection on their experience designing and teaching the online
course, their interactions with people, systems and technology during these activities, and
what they had Ieamed. In addition, I watched for clues to changes in their thinking about

online course design, technology, teaching, learning, etc.

34

The faculty interviews took place over a period of three to eight months. They
were conducted in the faculty members’ on-campus offices and lasted between one and
one half and two and one half hours each. Each interview was tape-recorded. I also took
hand written notes to supplement the interviews. After the interviews, I made notes on
any follow-up that was required. In some instances, I contacted the faculty members via
email to get clarification on certain items. In other instances, I waited until subsequent
interviews to get clarification and to ask follow-up questions. Subsequently, I transcribed
each tape-recorded interview and printed out a paper copy for review.

The VU producer, Sam was interviewed four times over an eight-month period. I
interviewed him at about the same intervals as the faculty members-- during the online
course design activity, during teaching and after teaching. The interview questions were
similar to the ones I asked faculty members (see appendix B for technology assistant
interviews). The interviews focused on understanding the VU producer’s role, goals,
intentions and motivations, the tools he employed, the VU system where he worked, his
interactions with other people and systems, and whether and how he may have influenced
faculty members’ thinking about course design, teaching and technology. I also watched
for clues to changes in his thinking about online course design, technology, learning and
teaching. Based on these goals, the interviews were a combination of semi structured and
open-ended questions. The interviews took place in the producer’s office on the
university campus and lasted between one and two hours each. I tape recorded,
transcribed each interview, and printed out a paper copy for review.

The student assistant, Bonnie was interviewed one time after the online course

had ended. The interview was a condensed version of the interviews I did with the W

35

producer. The goal in this interview was to understand Bonnie’s role in the activity and
whether and how she may have influenced the faculty member’s thinking about course
design, teaching and technology. I also gained insights into the course design activity and
her subsequent interactions with the W system and producer. The interview took place
over the phone and lasted about one and one half hours. It was tape-recorded and
transcribed for later analysis.

Although I did not conduct any formal interviews with the professor who taught
the faculty development class, I had informal verbal contact with him throughout data
collection and analysis. He was the director for this dissertation and I had worked with
him on a related research project that involved the faculty development course. This work
resulted in several conference presentations and a paper. Some of the information about
the faculty development course, the intentions of the professors who taught it, and the
activities of the design groups were taken from these other publications (Mishra, Koehler,

Hershey & Peruski, 2001, 2002a, 2002b; Koehler, Mishra, Hershey & Peruski, in press).

Observations

On two separate occasions, I observed two of the faculty members in the faculty
development class. I took notes during the observations, which served as supplementary
data in three areas. First was the supplement to faculty members’ reports of their
experience in the class such as how the class was organized, classroom activities, the
content of the class and the technology that they Ieamed about and interacted with.
Second, the observations provided supplementary data on the faculty members’

interactions within their design teams during the class, such as how the team worked

36

together and determined their respective roles, rules and divisions of labor, as well as the
technology that the team interacted with for their specific course designs. Third, during
these observations I viewed chronological iterations of the faculty members’ course
websites and listened to their discussions about how they had arrived at each iteration,
what their next steps would be to change it, and what factors they considered when
making changes.

From time to time, I also observed all three of the faculty members’ online
courses while they were teaching. I took notes during the observations, which served as
supplementary data to the faculty members’ verbal accounts in interviews about their
experiences. Specifically, the observations were focused on faculty members’
interactions with the technology, the VU producer and the W system, and interactions

with students and students’ interactions with each other.

Artifacts

I obtained a CD-ROM copy of each faculty member’s final version of his or her
online course. These artifacts provided supporting data and a broader perspective
concerning what technology was employed, navigational structures, graphic designs and

aesthetics.

Data Analysis
The Process of Data Analysis
While all sources of data were reviewed and analyzed together, the interviews

were the primary focus of analysis with the other sources of data (observational notes,

37

CD-ROMs of the courses, etc.) serving a supportive role (i.e., corroboration or refutation
of interview data). I reviewed the transcribed interviews multiple times to get a more
holistic conception of the content, to find instances that related to my study questions, to
uncover unanticipated side issues and to identify themes (contradictions and
disturbances). This technique facilitated decisions about which data chunks to pull out,
which patterns best summarized a number of chunks and which stories were emerging
(Miles & Huberman, 1994).

Subsequently I used a word processing program to create a chart for each faculty
member. The charts were organized according to themes and interview questions. I
plugged data into the chart, which I had summarized from the faculty member and
assistant interviews and supporting data sources. I also created a cross case chart to look
across faculty members employing the same process used for the individual charts. I
printed out paper copies of each chart so that they could be viewed side by side. To get
another visual display of the data, I cut up the paper copy of each chart and organized
them by themes, interview questions and faculty member. I arranged them on a large
board according to the themes and interview questions, as well as the time-period of the
interview (design activity, teaching activity, after teaching activity) so that I could look
within and across each faculty member. I also placed the chart pieces in a three-ring
binder according to the themes, interview questions and time-periods of the interviews.

As suggested by several qualitative researchers (Erickson, 1986; Fetterman, 1991;
Miles and Huberman, 1994) I looked for key linkages among the data that supported and
refuted the major themes I had identified as well as patterns of generalization within and

between cases. I also attempted to link the themes to each other and looked for negative

38

instances to disconfirm the links or that suggested new connections that needed to be
made.

In data analysis, I focused on the activities of online course creation and teaching
as ongoing activities and used the interviews and supporting data to construct a
chronology of each faculty member’s activities. From this chronology, I wrote a
chronological narrative on each faculty member paying particular attention to identifying
contradictions, disturbances and transformations in individuals and systems. I used the
narrative to develop a chronological profile on each of the faculty members, which was
written in each person’s own voice. I used the narratives and the profiles to identify
additional contradictions, disturbances and transformations.

The analysis revealed disturbances within and between the participants. The
disturbances were then traced back to systemic contradictions. These shed light on the
participants’ transformations in thinking, on artifacts, and on systems, as well as on the

creation of innovations and changes in work processes.

Data Presentation

Faculty Member Profiles and Case Studies

I used the interview data to produce a profile on each faculty member, which was
written in the first person. In some instances, 1 included supporting data fiom the faculty
members’ technical advisors, also written in the first person. The profiles are located in
Appendix C and are intended to serve as supporting data for readers who wish to gain
more insight into the faculty members’ perspectives and their thinking as they engaged in

the activities. They are presented as a chronology of the activities. The profiles and the

39

supplementary data described above provided the basis for the case analyses on the
faculty members that begin in chapter five. The profiles are also provided as a reference
so that readers can get a better understanding of the context surrounding the quotes
provided in the case analyses. In the next chapter, I provide a more detailed explanation
of why I chose to write a profile for each faculty member and how the profiles were
constructed. Following that I have provided a case analysis on each faculty member and

then a cross case analysis in order to answer the research questions raised in chapter two.

40

CHAPTER 4

Faculty Members’ Profiles

Crafting A Profile

I wrote a profile (located in appendix C) for each faculty member in his or her
own words that chronicles their experiences in creating and teaching the online class. The
profiles are a condensation of raw data that interested readers can refer to in order to get a
better sense of the participants' experiences. They also provide readers with a sense of the
context surrounding the quotes in the case analyses that begin in chapter five.

Crafting a profile of a participant’s experience is one way of sharing interview
data and opening up one’s interview material to analysis and interpretations (Seidman,
1998). It is a way to transform data into a story, which is one way that people make
sense of themselves and their social world (Mishler, 1986). Profiles have a beginning,
middle and an end, as well as some sense of conflict and resolution. According to
Seidman, a profile is most consistent with the process of interviewing because it allows
the researcher to present the participant in context, to clarify his or her intentions, and to
convey a sense of process and time, all central components of qualitative analysis.
According to Seidman,

We interview in order to come to know the experience of the participants through

their stories. We learn from hearing and studying what the participants say.

Although the interviewer can never be absent from the process, by crafting a

profile in the participant’s own words, the interviewer allows those words to

reflect the person’s consciousness (p. 102).

To craft the profiles I read through each interview multiple times and selected all

the passages that related to the interview questions and the themes that I had created

41

based on earlier readings and the preliminary analysis I briefly described in chapter three
(see "Data Analysis" in chapter three). The themes or categories included participants'
backgrounds, their experiences in designing and teaching their online course, and others
that related to my study goals and research questions. Once I had made these selections
from each participant’s interview, I put them together as a single transcript for each
participant. This resulted in a transcript that was about one half the length of the original
three-interview transcript for each participant.

Next, I read the new versions multiple times and again selected the most relevant
passages (those that related to the participants’ backgrounds, experiences and those that
addressed my original research goals and study questions). The remaining data formed
the profile in the participants’ words rather than a third-person transformation of that
voice. Seidman (1998) and Kvale (1996) argue that this method avoids distancing the
reader fi'om the participant and keeps researcher intrusions to a minimum because he or
she is limited to selecting compelling material and weaving it together into a first-person
narrative. The final versions of the profiles represent about one third of the length of the
original three interview transcripts for each participant.

The profiles presented in appendix C are faithful to the participants’ words but at
times, it was necessary to add my own words to make transitions between passages or to
clarify a passage. When I inserted myself into the profile, I placed my words in brackets.
In addition, I deleted fi'om the transcripts certain characteristics of oral speech that a
participant would not use in writing, for example, repetitious “uhms,” “abs,” “you
knows,” and other such idiosyncrasies that do not do the participant justice in a written

version of what he or she has said (Seidman, 1998). I believe that this liberty was

42

justified since the transcripts were not the basis of discourse analysis or semantic
analysis, for example.

As much as possible the profiles are presented in the order in which it came in the
interviews. It was important to me that I try to remain true to that order since material that
means something in one context may not mean the same thing when transposed to
another context. However, I took the liberty of doing just that if 1 determined that the
material from one interview fit with a part of the narrative based on another interview.
When this was the case, I thought about it carefully and did so after deciding that it did
not distort the meaning to take something out of its context and transpose it onto another
context (Seidman, 1998).

I have located the profiles in the appendix since they seemed to detract from the
flow of the manuscript. However, I believed it was important to keep them in the
dissertation so that any reader seeking further explication of my interpretations (either
supportive or interrogative) could view the profiles on their own. I am also sensitive to
the fact that not many people would read these profiles in detail. For that reason I have
tried to provide enough background information in the individual case analyses to make
them understandable to someone who has not read the profiles in detail.

Finally, in crafting both the profiles and the case analyses, 1 did my best to protect
the identities of the participants. I used pseudonyms that did justice to each participant by
taking into account issues of ethnicity and gender. I also deleted details that easily
identified the participants such as what department in the university they work in, who

they work with and the title and description of the online class that they taught.

Chapter 5
Analysis and Interpretation
(‘Jim’,

“I Think There Is A Tremendously Creative Aspect To This Work”

Introduction to the Case

This analysis is mainly related to the professor “Jim.” However, since he was part
of various interacting systems, the analysis also reveals contradictions, disturbances and
transformations in other individuals and systems. For example, there was a contradiction
between the faculty development class and the Virtual University, which led to
disturbances in Jim’s work with the VU producer. These disturbances led to
transformations in Jim, and the VU producer as well as to system transformations.

The analysis is chronological in nature in that it closely follows Jim’s activity
from the beginning of online course design through the teaching activity to his reflections
on the activities after he taught his online class. The case analysis is drawn from the
profile in Appendix C that readers can access to understand more of the context
surrounding each quote in the case analysis. Woven throughout the case analysis are the
contradictions and disturbances that arose or revealed themselves during the activities.
The analysis culminates with an explanation of the individual and system transformations

that occurred during the activities.

Backgron on Jim

Jim has been a professor in higher education since 1988 and has been a tenured
faculty member at this university since 1996. In order to develop his online course, he
enrolled in the faculty development class where he worked with four graduate students to
create a mock up for his class. His team was unique because he had brought them to the
class instead of being assigned a team when he arrived. He had worked with these
students on other projects in the past and they had all expressed an interest in this project.

Jim had taught the content he planned to use in the online class previously in the
face—to-face context but he was changing the curricular framework and teaching methods
for the online course by implementing Problem Based Learning. Jim supplied most of the
course content but the students on his team also contributed content and took the lead role
in the integration of the technology. Once the faculty development class ended, Jim and
several of his team members worked with Sam, the VU producer to refine and ready the

course for online delivery.

Description of the Online Course

Jim’s course was a master’s level course and one of the core courses in the
program required for all master’s students. It was also a course that doctoral students as
well as students outside of the program sometimes took.

The content was to be studied through the analysis of a set of problems that had
widespread application and currency for people working in practice settings. The

problems would be “messy problems” where there was not one right answer. They would

45

be representative composites from actual practice settings and students would work in

teams to solve them.

Collective Activity Systems: the Design Activity

A New Context for Teaching

Normally in face-to-face course design, Jim worked alone to develop a class.
Once he had developed his content and a basic structure for the course, he would leave
room open for spontaneous changes during the course. Usually, he would not prepare a
lecture for each course but he often presented an overview or a short lecture to students
using an outline. Subsequently, he used a variety of experiential activities to engage
students with the content, such as group work, case work and problem solving exercises.

Developing an online course was a deviation from Jim’s usual script of designing
a course for a face-to-face environment. Although he still wanted students to engage in
experiential Ieaming, he felt that he had to plan all of those activities and frontload all of
his content in advance. Moreover, in face-to-face course planning, his thinking about
class management was tacit and he could be creative and spontaneous to suit the mood of
the class on any given day. In contrast, in the online context, issues of class management
had to be explicitly thought through and dealt with before teaching the class.

I am more nervous than I have been about my teaching in a long time. . .. So just

figuring out for yourself what you have to do to manage that is a tough one until

you are into it sometimes. . .. And then of course just not being skilled in that kind

of pedagogical environment; not knowing for sure how to be helpful (Jim,

interview, July 11, 2001).

The deviation from Jim’s usual script of face-to-face course design created a

disturbance that made him question his role as a teacher. Although he was excited by the

46

prospect of considering these questions, they also created lingering anxieties about

managing the process.
You can create a design that’s really dynamic and Cracker Jack and then it’s like
well, ok, does this mean there is no need for a teacher? If there isn’t, then what
does that mean to be present to the students in that kind of environment? I don’t
know the answer to that. I’m not nervous about that part. I’m excited and
interested in what that means. The nervous part has to do with classroom
management... managing the whole thing, managing the enterprise and making

sure that it’s going to be helpful. I think in theory it makes a lot of sense and I’m

absolutely convinced that it’s the right thing to do but in practice things can turn

out a little different (Jim, interview, July 11, 2001).

This initial disturbance, created by moving his course online, was confounded by
the fact that Jim planned to try out a new curricular framework in the online class called
Problem Based Learning (PBL). The PBL framework was also one of the major factors
that motivated him to create the online class. For a number of years he was becoming
increasingly dissatisfied with the topical orientations to courses in his discipline. He
viewed his discipline as a professional practice and believed that the curriculum should
reflect that. “One of the ways in which we can change that is get off a high theoretical
topical focus in our courses and we can begin to make our courses more directly linked to
practice” (Jim, interview, May 7, 2001). He found his solution in PBL, which he
described as both a teaching methodology and a curricular framework.

Because of his goal to integrate PBL and online learning, he faced several
challenges beyond that of merely creating an online class with existing content. He had to
learn about PBL, online Ieaming, teaching, and course design and marry them with his

content and the technology to create a coherent course that fit into the overall online

masters program being offered by the college. This combination of factors mediated his

47

thinking about online course design and teaching, and affected his confidence in his
teaching skills and his thinking about his role as a teacher.

It creates a whole host of questions and issues, which I can think about and

wonder about. . .. I think the surprising thing for me was how it tested and

questions my own confidence as a teacher and really what teaching is all about

anyway. What are you really doing when you are teaching? What is the value of

your contribution in the whole thing? I don’t know that (Jim, interview December

18,2001)

The College System

A contradiction at the college system level also created a disturbance in Jim’s
work and mediated his thinking and actions. Although the college offered several
supports to faculty members (e. g., financial support, laptop computer, the faculty
development class, etc.), the college’s administrators had decided not to provide a course
buyout or overload pay to faculty members for this work. This became an important
mediator in Jim’s experience and ultimately affected his feelings of success.

My responsibilities as a professor make the time commitment and the idea of

setting some kind of a schedule for this course difficult. It’s hard to do when

you’ve got a schedule that requires you to be flexible and meetings here and there

and all over the place so that part of it makes it hard. This gets done on top of

everything else. There wasn’t space created in my life to do this interesting

project. It was like life is full already and let’s just make it more full (Jim,

interview, 12-18-01).

The Faculty Development Class

Jim was one of two professors in this study that enrolled in the faculty
development class (the other one was Juliet, whose case is described in chapter seven). In
the faculty development class, Jim and his design team worked closely with the

technological tools to develop a mock up of their course web site that they would later

take to a producer at the VU to put it online.

48

The professors who taught the faculty development class viewed the Virtual
University as technologically limited with little expertise in curriculum design. One of
their goals for the faculty development class was for faculty members to gain more
understanding and control over the online course design activity including both the
technology and curriculum design. To this end they helped the design teams to explore a
wide range of aesthetic and technological options available outside VU and discussed the
affordances and constraints offered by various technologies both within and outside the
VU.

One of the differences between the W and the faculty development class was
that in the latter, the design teams were introduced to Blackboard (a commercial course
management system) to use in the construction of their online course web sites. It is one
option for online course development that came with an extensive suite of additional
tools for student tracking, assessments and so on. Unlike Blackboard, the VU system was
not an integrated system and had only a limited set of widgets for use in their courses.

One of the professors who taught the faculty development class revealed in a
personal communication (August 29, 2002) that he was aware that this philosophy and
the use of tools (such as Blackboard) that were not available to VU set up a potential
contradiction between the faculty development class and the VU. He knew that this could
lead to disturbances between faculty members and the VU producer, but he also
understood that contradiction could be a springboard for change. The instructors for the
faculty development class hoped to encourage the VU, indirectly through the faculty
members, to update and expand their available tools in order to create more

pedagogically sound course designs and hand over more control to faculty members. I

49

will return to this contradiction later in this analysis, but first I will describe the activities

of Jim’s design team within the faculty development class.

The Design Team

When Jim designed face-to-face classes, he usually worked alone to develop the
content and structure of his course. He also did not feel the need to finalize all of the
course content before the class started. He usually had a general structure in mind for the
course but he liked the freedom to make small changes from week to week based on
students’ needs and interests and on his own continuing investigations into relevant
literature. In contrast, designing an online course in a new technological context seemed
to require extensive preplanning and frontloading of content into the web site, something
that he was not used to doing. It also required collaboration with technology experts since
Jim lacked the technological skills required to create an online class. Consequently,
working collaboratively within an activity system in a technology-laden context was a
deviation from Jim’s usual course design script.

The object of the activity (creating an online class) united the design team or
activity system. Although the team had a common goal or object, how they would
achieve it was not at all clear. Even the object was not well defined because the team
members did not have a clear, shared vision of what the final product would be or should
be. Thus, the final state of the object was itself a starting point to be developed into a plan
and an object through the collaboration of all of the members.

To achieve the new object, the team members had to use new procedures and

tools. Their thinking was not only distributed socially between participants, it also was

50

distributed between the participants, the technological tools, and the heuristics that they
employed to create the new object. Unlike the other teams in the faculty development
course however, Jim’s team had a history. They had worked together on other projects
and they had developed a good working relationship and a sense of trust among them.
They also had loosely defined roles before beginning the activity. Jim was the content
expert and provided the initial aesthetic vision for the course. He also had the final say on
the outcome. Two other members were viewed as the technology experts, although all the
graduate students had some technological skills. Another student was interested in
cooperative learning online, while the last student was interested in course structure and
navigation within the site.

The team also had a common starting point. None of the members was an expert
in PBL or online course design so they began on a level playing field in these respects.
Because none of the members was an expert in PBL, much of their initial activity was
directed toward understanding PBL, as well as Jim’s vision for the course. As the group
moved toward a shared understanding of these features, they began developing a
structure and aesthetic for the course. It was only then that they tried to implement these
ideas through technology. As they worked to integrate the pieces of the course, the design
team members naturally gravitated towards different roles.

What happened very shortly was there was a kind of natural division of labor...

one of the most interesting things is that what was actually produced was largely

their work... but it reproduced the very vision that I had so there had to be a kind

of understanding and incorporation of their vision (Jim, interview, May 7, 2001).

As the activity progressed, the divisions of labor blurred because the members’

activities overlapped as they began to integrate the different pieces of the course

(aesthetics, content, structure, navigation, etc.). Jim maintained his role as the content

51

expert and overall visionary, but be relied heavily on the team for their technological

expertise, which also influenced the design and the content.
They influenced a lot the ways in which we thought about (the content), laid it out
and approach to the study of the content. . .. How to lay out the problems and how
they could be navigated, interlaced and interconnected. . .. The orientation, for
example, became a whole lot more than what I thought it was gonna be. It went
fi'om a few paragraphs to set of structured learning experiences to nudge them
into this way of learning. I didn’t have that in mind but as we talked, thought
about what was needed, because of the nature of the course, we might need this.
(Jim, interview, May 7, 2001).

Jim characterized the teams’ activity as conflict free throughout the design process.
Initially, the teams’ activity progressed in a linear manner beginning with a common
focus on learning about PBL and understanding Jim’s vision for the course. After that,
however, the process became more iterative where the team went back and forth between
working on discrete pieces, presenting their ideas to the group, discussing the pros and
cons until they reached agreement, and finally integrating the pieces.

Decision-making was very informal, very fluid. Surprisingly I didn’t have to tell

them to do things. They knew what to do. I didn’t give anybody any tasks or jobs

to do. They figured those things out for themselves. Towards the end, I became a

person who said well, now what’s left (Jim, interview, May 7, 2001)?

The Virtual University

The usual script in this university for working with the VU was that faculty
members brought raw content to the VU producer who worked one on one with faculty
members to develop the web site, course structure and navigation through the site. Once
the faculty member approved the final design, the producer loaded the content into the
site and made it functional using the tools available through the VU. When the producer

got a full rough draft of the site up onto the VU system, he made the needed revisions and

added images that fit with the topic of the class. Thus, there was a particular division of

52

labor wherein the faculty member and the VU producer had little knowledge of each
other’s area of specialization.

The VU system was inherently contradictory because in order to complete this
work the VU producer had to use idiosyncratic tools that were not compatible with
outside systems such as Blackboard, which Jim had used in the faculty development
course. In addition, the producer had been trained in a graphic design tradition as opposed
to curriculum design and typically, be created lecture online classes as opposed to highly
interactive ones. Thus, the W was a “closed system” whose tools and sometimes
philosophies were not compatible with the needs and philosophies of their clients, the
faculty members. Jim’s course design team, on the other hand, came from a curriculum
design tradition and created a highly interactive course structure by utilizing a wide range
of tools that were compatible with Blackboard but were not compatible with the VU
system. The VU producer explained how the VU system worked.

The problem is we’re a very centralized programming and server administration

unit that everything has to go through them and because of that, I can’t use one

thing for one class and use another thing for another class. I have to use one thing

for all of them so that does cause some problems (Sam, interview, December 20,

2001)

From the start, Jim’s work with the VU producer was characterized by deviations
from the usual script. That coupled with the inherent contradictions within VU led to
disturbances in their work together. Jim arrived at the VU with an almost complete mock
up of a highly interactive online course, which his design team had created in the faculty
development class. And, even though the design team had particular divisions of labor,

the members also worked in coordination with each other so that they all had knowledge

of each other’s specializations. In addition, Jim brought some of his design team

53

members to the VU to work with the producer instead of working with him one on one.
Thus a new member, the VU producer, was introduced into an already cohesive team.

Initially the VU producer viewed these deviations as beneficial because it would
allow him more time to devote to refining and improving the design. He suggested
changing the navigation, the course structure and the aesthetic appearance of the site.
However, Jim’s design team was happy with their design and resisted the producer’s
suggestions. The producer was unable to persuade Jim and his team members and since
one of the producer’s main goals was to satisfy the client, he acquiesced. Nevertheless,
this created some conflict between the producer and Jim’s design team.

He had two people working with him throughout the whole thing who had an idea

of how they thought it should be and I always got the picture from them that they

didn’t trust, they didn’t think that I knew what I was doing and Jim was more
willing to trust them than he was to trust me and so I think it was just that lack of

trust (Sam, interview, December 20, 2001).

As previously indicated, these disturbances can also be attributed to the
contradiction between the faculty development class and the VU system. In the faculty
development class, the design team had exposure to technologies and design options
(Blackboard) that were not available at or compatible with the VU system’s technical
tools or design philosophies, as the producer noted in the following quote.

Working with his graduate assistants that had different ideas on how things should

be done (was a problem). The design is one, they’re used to working outside the

VU system. There’s a certain amount of tools that we use at VU and people who

are outside VU don’t have access to those tools so they’ve become accustomed to

working within other systems and it was really hard to get them to see that we

need to mold things into our system (Sam, interview, December 20, 2001).

Moreover, since the design group was a client of the VU, one of the producer’s

goals was to satisfy them. In the past, the producer had been able to handle such

disturbances but in this case, his usual methods did not work.

54

Normally it works to just accept what the faculty is thinking in the beginning and

then as things go on, they come to realize on their own that this doesn’t work and

that doesn’t work but... in this case, that never came to realization (Sam,

interview, November 20, 2001).

Finally, the divisions of labor were also upset when the group went to the VU.
The producer was no longer the sole technology expert. He had to share that role with
Jim’s team members. Hence, disturbances stemmed from at least four sources: (1)
differing philosophies on design and implementation, (2) the contradictions within the
VU, and (3) the contradiction created by the differences between the VU and the faculty

development class, which included the differences in tools, design rules, and divisions of

labor.

Informal Support Systems

Aside from the technical support that Jim received from his design team members
and the VU, he also had a son who was skilled with technology. His son helped him Ieam
how to upload data to the web page and use the editing function so that he could edit his
own web page. His son also helped with other technological functions.

I tried to do the audio on my computer at home and my son showed me how to

turn the microphone on. I never knew to turn the microphone on. You gotta click

on it. . .. I would’ve never known to double click on the volume thing (Jim,

interview May 7, 2001).
The Online Teaching Activity

The VU System and the Professor

The disturbances between Jim and the VU system kept piling up during the

teaching activity. In Jim’s view, the VU was not responsive to his needs evidenced by

their slow response time when he reported a problem to them. In his opinion, the VU did

55

not understand faculty and student needs or the type of learning that they were doing. He
believed that the VU did not understand how an interactive course was run and what the
needs were for students. There were three key examples of this. First, the online system
went down one time and knocked out the web chat function.

There was one critical period where the whole system went down and I got a clear

picture that the programmers didn’t really understand the way in which this

course was structured because it was no big deal to them (Jim, interview,

December 18, 2001).

Because Jim’s course was highly interactive and required students and the
professor to communicate with each other frequently, they lost time when the system was
not fixed in a timely manner.

The second example was when Jim asked the VU producer to design something
that would provide him with a count of which students were online and when. Although
the producer was able to create an innovation that was compatible with the VU tools, the
VU administrators would not let him implement it. The VU producer explained the
problem in the following quote.

When Jim wanted to track students we don’t have anything set up to do that right

now. It could be set up... but then it brought up issues with my bosses about

human subject clearance and stuff like that. Was it okay to do this and was it
ethical to collect data about students using these pages and things (Sam,

interview, September 11, 2001)?

The VU could not resolve the issue in time to implement the innovation, which
further reinforced Jim’s frustrations with them and his opinion that it was an antiquated
and unresponsive system.

The third example that Jim offered was related to the chat system designed by the

W for each course. At one point there was a glitch in the system that caused it to place

“new” flags on old postings that students had already read. Because of this, students spent

56

time rereading “old” postings. Although it was eventually fixed, Jim thought that it was
not done in a timely manner. These three examples led him to the following conclusion,
The technology piece was just an irritant and that was a constant. . .. The VU
technology seems antiquated and cumbersome... I think there are a number of
areas where VU needs to be much more supportive to make this online thing go
(Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).
Assessing Student Learning
Although Jim thought that the online context provided a better view into students’
Ieaming and thinking about the content, it also created a disturbance in his thinking about
student assessment. He thought that some students deserved higher grades than they
received but were penalized if their team members were not as committed as they were.
In some instances when I was computing the final grade, I could tell when I
wanted to give this person a 3.5 because I could tell from individual work that it
wasn’t a 4.0. It would come up with a 4.0 based on the team product which
carried them. I had a couple where it was the other way around so I’ve got to
build in some component of individual grading within that team product. I’m not
happy and I don’t think they’re happy either ‘cause I think some of the students
felt that they were carrying the weight of the other people and they didn’t like that
(Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).
Although many professors also encounter this problem in face-to-face courses,

Jim did not say that this was true for him, therefore it remains unclear as to whether, for

Jim, this was something that was unique to the online context.

The Teacher’s Role
The teaching activities in the new online context also led to some disturbances in
Jim’s thinking about his role as a teacher. The disturbances seemed to stem from several

sources. For one thing, unlike his face-to-face teaching activity, Jim had trouble in his

57

online class discerning when and how to intervene in team chats and deciding where the

pedagogical moments were.

The team chats... knowing when and how to intervene in those conversations,

when to make a comment or to say something that needs to be said. That was

hard. Sometimes it was real obvious like oh god I have to get in there and correct
that misunderstanding. That was every once in a while but most of the time, it’s
just sort of gray as to whether you should say something or need to say
something. I guess a way to think about that is to just not to know for sure where
the pedagogical moment is in that conversation not recognizing always or not

being able to clearly tell (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).

Second, was the fact that he found the class-wide chats stressful because they
were too fast-paced, which made it hard for him to keep up with conversations.

Third, in our initial interview, Jim had talked about how important it was to him
to help students integrate the affective/emotional dimension of their thinking with the
content/cognitive aspects of a course. Although he believed that he achieved this in his
face-to—face teaching, by the end of the online teaching activity, he was still uncertain
about how to help students make that connection online.

I am deeply committed as a teacher to what I would consider the

affective/emotional dimension of Ieaming. I really believe that’s where the most

significant Ieaming takes place and particularly if you are able to integrate content
or cognitive stuff in with the emotional. But I have no idea how to connect with
that online I mean it just seems like an ephemeral, like a black hole and so the
consequence of that is that we spend time in kind of intellectual conversation and
supporting and upholding content. There are a lot of emotional issues around each

of these problems and I just was not able to figure out how to get at that in this

particular environment (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).

58

By the end of the course, Jim’s questions about his role as a teacher online were
still unanswered. “Even still, I mean I don’t really know for sure what my role is in this
medium or what it should be. I think I raised more questions about that than I did get

answers” (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).

Teacher Identity Online

Questions about his identity as a teacher also emerged for Jim during the teaching
activity. For example, he was surprised at how few questions there were from students
about content or requests for clarification compared to what he would typically get in a
face-to-face class. “Students rely on you as content expert which is tied to one’s identity.
I didn’t get that online and simply not having a good handle on whether they’re really
learning the content.” (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001). This was also related to Jim’s
uncertainty about whether or not his guiding questions for the cases helped students
structure their inquiry.

Some people were using the guiding questions very explicitly to structure their

inquiry and others it seemed to be a distraction, almost like another assignment

they had to do. Those are hard things to do too those guiding questions to write

that are not so specific that they are going to narrow the focus but are not too

broad that they are completely meaningless. Those seem to be hard to write (Jim,

interview, December 18, 2001).

Both of these issues may also have been related Jim’s use of the PBL format,
which encourages students to be more self-directed in their Ieaming. However, Jim

remained unsure of whether it was the PBL format or the online context, or a

combination of both factors that led to the disturbances.

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Tools

The Technology

The technology outside the VU also created disturbances, which Jim viewed as
another source of frustration. For example, people were bumped off line a lot and there
were times when Jim was unable to connect when he was out of town. There were also
issues with students’ limitations in technology. Some students had trouble downloading
and uploading data, there were problems for those with limited bandwidths and Jim
believed that the time delay in their synchronous chats caused fragmentation in their
conversations.

Another source of Jim’s frustration with the technology was his own lack of skill
in using it. In Jim’s view, this disturbance could be traced to the college administration
who had not provided faculty members with extra time to engage in this activity. Because
of a lack of time, Jim was unable to Ieam to use some of the technology to the level he
felt was required. For example, he had difficulty using the editing software in the way it
was intended. Consequently, he had to invent new and less efficient ways to edit the
content in the site during the teaching activity. That resulted in additional loss of time that
he could have devoted to the class. He also believed that this inhibited his ability to be
spontaneous and creative during the class.

I want to make the announcements on our home page for example and I don’t do

it in Dream Weaver. 1 just do it right on the page because I don’t know any of the

commands so that limits what I can do. I need to Ieam the language or I need to
get more facile at editing and the whole web page you know? I want to be able to
go in and easily and fi'eely make changes in my web pages. So, I didn’t Ieam a lot

about the sort of technical parts of the technology (Jim, interview, December 18,
2001)

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As a result, Jim experienced a continuing sense of a lack of control over the
technology, which he thought if he could master would save him time when designing the
course, as well as allow him to be more creative and spontaneous during both the design
and teaching activities. The disturbance also stemmed in part from his frustration at
having to rely on the VU whom he saw as unresponsive and as having antiquated
technological tools.

Learning more about the technology would make it easier for me to do some of

these things. My idea would be that ultimately I would be able to do this entirely

myself because it allows me to play more. I don’t have to create something for a

producer or an artist and see what they do with it. I’m at my computer. I have the

idea. I can go to the software and I can begin to work with it to see whether it’s
possible or to what extent it’s possible. The other thing is that it’s much more
creative that way. I think there is a tremendously creative aspect to this work.

That’s really the exciting part (Jim, interview, May 7, 2001).

PBL as a Mediator in Students’ Learning

Jim thought that the use of a PBL format was his best decision, even though it had
created some disturbances in his activities. Based on the feedback from his students, be
identified two main issues of importance related to student learning in a PBL format.
First, he believed that there was a deep sense of collaborative learning among students
that seemed to be a new experience for most of them. It was more than working in teams
in a class; it was that the entire experience was grounded in being part of a team. From
the first day of class, the students saw themselves as part of a team and a collaborative
effort. In Jim’s opinion, the result was that students began to appreciate collaborative
Ieaming in a way in which they had never experienced it before.

Second, Jim reasoned that PBL facilitated self-directed learning. He believed that

students began to see themselves as capable of inquiry in a way that they had not

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understood about themselves before. They Ieamed content as they saw appropriate to
their interests and needs; however, this scenario also highlighted an inherent
contradiction. On the one hand, Jim was pleased that students were not spending a lot of
time trying to second-guess what it was that he thought they should know. Instead,
students focused on what they needed to know to solve the problems before them. Since
the problems did not have one right answer, they weeded through a lot of content that
they did not want or need and made their own decisions about what was important. As a
result, the students became more self-directed in their Ieaming. On the other hand, Jim
was concerned about whether be fulfilled his responsibility to familiarize students with
the literature in the field. “They have to know their way around the literature, they have
to know about studies and certain theorists and certain scholars, whether they like the
person’s ideas or not they just have to have some awareness of it” (Jim, interview,
December 18, 2001).

Jim also noticed that some students took this individualization too seriously and
just pursued what they wanted. Consequently, he found himself bringing students back to
the task at hand virtually all semester long. He realized that a PBL format was inherently
contradictory in that sense.

There was a lot of that, this is what I want to do or it has implications for this and

they would spend a lot of time on what I would call the methods piece and I had

to continually nudge them back to theory of (the subject matter) and say this is

our job here this semester primarily (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).

Some students complained that Jim was being too prescriptive and that drawing
the boundary made them feel like he was not letting them do what they really wanted to

do. Jim agreed with his students and noted that this was one of the inherent contradictions

created by using a PBL format. According to Jim, when PBL is constrained within the

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context of a course, it creates a major limitation. However, he still thought it was better
than teaching a topical course, but he could see that in the future it would be beneficial to
design a series of courses that would take into account the directions that students were
pushing.

They were pushing in directions, which were quite natural in the PBL approach...

and I think ideally that’s the way the curriculum should be. It should be a series of

graded problems that stretch out in increasing complexity. But, when the students
start working on them and they raise questions like that you don’t say well that’s
not exactly in our scope, which is sometimes exactly what I had to say. So, they

were pushing in directions which were natural to PBL but I was pushing back in a

kind of unnatural way, which was subject matter based so that was a tension that

had everything to do with teaching PBL in a course-based or a subject matter-

based format (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).

Disturbances also arose during the teaching activity that resulted from the original
course design, including the curricular and navigational structures. Jim had deliberately
tried to create a course design that he (and his design team) thought would encourage
students to create a community of learners both within their small groups and class—wide.
Although Jim was satisfied that the small groups formed learning communities, be was
disappointed that a class-wide Ieaming community never materialized.

He thought that the class-wide discussion board would be a forum for ideas,
questions, conversation, sharing of ideas, and students pressing one another about their
statements and beliefs. Jim hoped that the students would share with one another exciting
and interesting ideas, observations and findings. That never happened and Jim attributed
that to three main things. First, he believed that students were putting all of their time and
energy into their teamwork, which were so intense and focused that it detracted from

their forming a class-wide community. Second, J irn had not structured the class wide

chats in a particular way, which could have confused students about their purpose and

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importance. Finally, Jim had initially set up six class wide chats per week. However, he
quickly realized that that was too many and he cut it back to three chats in order to ease
the workload for students. Despite his reflections, Jim was still uncertain about how to
remedy these problems for the next time. “(The discussion board is) a great place to
continue your reflection and your Ieaming but that by and large did not take place and
that was disappointing and I don’t know what to do to make that different” (Jim,

interview, December 18, 2001).

Transformations

Once Jim had finished teaching the online course be reflected on the activity, as
did the VU producer. Data from these interviews revealed that both participants
experienced transformations in their own thinking, as well as the potential for

transformation in both the VU system and the faculty development class.

The Online Teaching Activity

When Jim first began the online course design activity, he had reservations about
whether or not he would be able to “see” students’ learning in that context.

In face-to—face I know the students are there. I know they’re thinking and

engaged. I can see their faces. I don’t know how that’s gonna play out online.

Those are scary issues. This whole thing could fall completely flat (Jim,

interview, May 5, 2001).

However, by the end of the course he was convinced that the online context might
actually facilitate students’ Ieaming especially if it is writing intensive such as his course

was. He believed that because his course was writing intensive, students’ work and

thinking was more visible to him than it was in the face-to-face context. He was also

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surprised at how well he got to know his students online due to the visibility of their
work. In addition, the online environment made students’ contributions in teams more

visible than in face-to-face classes.

Learning can be more real in online environments than in face-to-face classes. I
think there is a distinct possibility that students are learning more and Ieaming
more that’s real in online environments. You can hide in face-to-face teams. You
can loaf and get by and Ieam very little because the teacher often times does not
have a clear sense of what you are learning, doesn’t have clear evidence of your
individual standing and performance. In the online environments you’ve got, well
not a pathway to their soul but it’s pretty close and so it’s kind of hard to hide. I
know when people are loafing. I know when people are not doing the reading. I
can tell whether they are thinking carefiilly about stuff. I can tell when they’re not
online. Those are all things which become much more transparent online (Jim,
interview, December 18, 2001).

The F ace-to-F ace Teaching Activity

Because of his online teaching activity, Jim experienced transformations in his
thinking about student Ieaming in the face-to-face context. He realized that having
students write more in the online class had been valuable to their Ieaming and to his
getting to know them better than he ever had in his face-to-face classes.

Because more of their thinking (was) in writing I thought that I was more in touch
with the students’ levels of inquiry and that was a good feeling to

see that develop and grow. I’ve seen them begin to check their assumptions and
see evidence that they’re doing that. I didn’t realize what I didn’t know about
students until I started doing this. I thought I relate to students and I get to know
them. The truth is that there are weeks that go by and there are some students that
I don’t remember their name in class. They come up to me in the hall and I don’t
know who they are. I recognize them as part of my class but, let alone know
anything about them or how they’re thinking about the course or what they’re
thinking about it so that was pretty cool. I was aware of how much I was getting
to know them and know about them, about their thinking, what they think about,
how they think about this content in relation to their work and other classes. I was
really surprised. I didn’t think that I was that ignorant. That will have
repercussions now in my face-to-face classes. I will be much more conscious of
trying to get to know who the students are and more about them so that will have
direct implication for that (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).

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His thinking about this issue also extended to students’ teamwork in face-to-face

classes.

A person will come together in a team chat (online) and say this is what I’m
thinking about doing what do you think and someone else will say well that’s
going to take us in a whole different direction and that’s not really dealing with
the thrust of the problem, etc and when you assign teams like that in the (face-to-
face) classroom you’re never privy to that kind of conversation so having the
opportunity to see that inquiry process unfold is really quite delightful and to
watch it mature. I miss that in my face-to-face teaching. I think it’s important and
I’m gonna have to find some way to deal with that in face-to-face (Jim, interview,
December 18, 2001).

Technology

Although the disturbances between the W and Jim were never resolved, he
concluded that he needed to Ieam more about how to operate the technology so that he
did not have to rely on others. He also set a goal to Ieam more about the technology so
that he could be more spontaneous in both his course design and teaching activities.

The other part is mastering the technology to the point where I’m comfortable
with it and can use it in a creative way. I think the more I know the betterI can be
at creating. I think there is a relationship between those two things. I need to
Ieam the language. I need to get more facile at editing the whole web page. I want
to be able to go in and easily and freely make changes in my web pages. . .. I want
to be able to create video, to use video (and) audio. I don’t want to have to ship it
off to producers (Jim, interview, July 11, 2001).

Jim reported that what he did Ieam about technology was more abstract and
related to students’ Ieaming.

Students brought in resources from god knows where. I didn’t give them those
links, I didn’t tell them to go there but they found all sorts of stuff well beyond the
curriculum, well beyond the bibliography that I gave them. Once they got familiar
with the environment, they began to see what it was capable of doing. They got
access to national databases and were able to pull those down and look at them
and think about them in ways that they hadn’t thought about before so the online
environment facilitates that inquiry. It’s like; It’s right there. If you’re drinking
and you’re inquiring at the same time when you are online like that it is just a

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click away and it takes you right there and it’s just, I’m impressed by the power of
that process (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).

With regard to the role of technology and the online context in this activity, Jim
concluded,

It’s not just like finding a way to get this stuff delivered. You’re actually creating

a new way, your instructional deliveries; you’re actually creating fundamentally

different ways of understanding (Jim, interview, May 7, 2001).

Jim’s statements indicated that he was coming to appreciate another inherent
contradiction; there is a dynamic and complex relationship between content, pedagogy
and technology (Mishra, Koehler, Hershey & Peruski, 2001). Creating such disturbances
within faculty members was one of the primary goals of the faculty development class

since such contradictions can, and did in this case lead to the formation of new goals in

this faculty member (P. Mishra, personal communication, August 29, 2002).

Problem Based Learning

While Jim recognized the inherent contradictions in implementing the PBL
framework, he also believed that be confirmed his initial contention that a PBL format
and the online context were made for each other. He believed that learning online was
inherently problem oriented, and good for solving problems, doing inquiry, getting
students to confront content more often throughout week, and working collaboratively

with others.

The VU Producer
The contradiction between the faculty development class and the VU system led

to disturbances between Jim’s design team and the VU producer, but they also were a

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springboard for change in the producer’s thinking about how to work with faculty
members. He thought seriously about how to change his style of interaction with faculty
members in the future to mitigate such disturbances. In addition, he began to think about
other software that he might use to better suit the needs of different courses.

I think I would make it clearer in the beginning that they were working through

VU for a reason and that if it wasn’t going to work with VU than maybe we

should explore some other options such as Blackboard that would maybe suit their

needs and wants better than working with the VU system (Sam, interview,

December 20, 2001).

Furthermore, the VU producer decided to enroll in a graduate degree program in
education to Ieam more about teaching and course design. “That’s why I’m dong this
Ph.D. degree now is hopefully to get a lot more of the methods for thinking about that”
(Sam, interview, December 20, 2001). It would be simplistic to argue that it was just
Sam’s experience with Jim’s class that encouraged him to pursue a doctoral degree
program. Sam was also the producer for many other faculty members (across different
departments and colleges across the campus including one who was part of this research,

Juliet). However, his experiences with being a producer and seeing which courses worked

and which did not, encouraged him to take this step.

The W System

The VU producer had created an innovation for Jim’s class that would allow Jim
to get a record of which students visited the site and when. Although the W producer
was not able to implement it at the time, it now exists and can be used in the future in

other courses and thus is a change in the VU system.

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The contradiction between the faculty development class and the VU system may
also have spurred some transformation in the VU system. However, these claims are
based upon reports by the W producer since no data were collected directly from the VU
administrators. First, the VU producer reported that he had been having discussions with
the administrators about their role in online teaching.

I think the interesting thing is that we’re beginning to think about here within our

department is how we change the pedagogy from a face—to-face class synchronous

to an online. How do we change that, how do we change the teaching (Sam,

interview, December 20, 2001)?

Second, the VU producer said that the VU was acutely aware of the need to
update their technology in order to meet new requirements by professors for interactive
courses, for example.

In a corporation, we would hire one person to maintain the current system and

another to continually develop new versions of the software. I don’t think we will

do that but we had a meeting about it and the administrators are now seeing the
changes needed as more urgent so I think it will happen very soon (Sam,

interview, December 20, 2001).

The Faculty Development Class

After reading the data from this study, one of the instructors from the faculty
development class became concerned about having created contradictions between the
VU and the faculty development class. The contradictions included, introducing faculty
members to a wide variety of technological tools not available through the VU as well as
encouraging faculty members to take more control over the course design process than
was usually the case when working with the VU. These contradictions led to disturbances

between the faculty members and the VU, and consequently, the FAC DEV-101

instructor was compelled to think about how he might help the faculty members to adjust

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their roles, beliefs and actions in the future to resolve disturbances that might arise
between systems (P. Mishra, personal communication, August 29, 2002). The FAC DEV-
101 instructor’s reflections indicated that once contradictions and disturbances are
identified and reveled to the participants, this may lead to transformations in thinking and

in systems.

Summary of the Case

This analysis shed light on many of the issues that people designing and teaching
online courses may face, as well as the inherent contradictions within and between
systems that manifest themselves in disturbances in work processes. For example, a
contradiction (lack of time) existed between Jim’s existing responsibilities and the new
task of creating an online class. He was left with little time to deal with the complexities
of developing and teaching a course that integrated content, technology and pedagogy in
powerful ways. Although he was unable to reconcile all of these complexities in his first
experience, he began thinking carefully about them and looking for ways to resolve these
conflicts in future online courses.

This analysis also revealed the ramifications of certain contradictions within and
between systems that led to disturbances between participants. The object of the activity
(designing an online course) may have been a uniting force but the disturbances between
the VU producer and Jim’s design team highlighted the idea that all systems contain a
variety of different voices, as well as layers of historically accumulated artifacts, rules

and patterns of division of labor. In this example, these factors were clearly a source of

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conflict, nonetheless, the participants still were able to achieve the object and ultimately
there were transformations in both individuals and systems.

Finally, Jim’s case was a striking example of how deviations from one’s normal
script can force participants to bring to a conscious level their often tacit thinking about
larger issues of course design, teaching and technology. Because of his activity, Jim
thought about teaching and learning in new ways, not only online but also in his face-to-
face teaching. Furthermore, he began questioning his role and identity as a teacher.
Although he had not resolved all of these questions at the time of the study, he was not
left with a sense of despair, but rather a sense of wonder and curiosity, which motivated

him to continue to delve into these questions and improve his teaching in any context.

7]

Chapter 6
Analysis and Interpretation
“Mikala”

“I’m Trying To Find My Virtual Nature”

Introduction to the Case

Like the previous analysis, this analysis is specifically related to the faculty
member Mikala who worked within various interacting activity systems to design and
teach an online course. This analysis reveals systemic contradictions and disturbances
that led to transformations in Mikala’s thinking. Mikala’s case differs from the other two
cases in that data were not available from the VU producer that worked with Mikala,
therefore his perspective is not represented. However, data were available from Mikala’s
student assistant who was part of the course design team and who worked closely with
the VU producer once the design team disbanded.

As in the previous case, Mikala’s case is presented chronologically and
contradictions and disturbances that arose or revealed themselves are woven throughout
the analysis. The analysis cuhninates with the transformations that Mikala experienced
because of these activities. In addition, the analysis is drawn from the profile of Mikala
located in appendix C, which the reader can access to better understand the context from

which the quotes included in the analysis were taken.

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Background on Mikala

Mikala has been an adjunct university professor and lecturer since the late 19805
and a professor at this university since the early 1990s. Mikala was the only faculty
member in this study who did not enroll in the faculty development class. Instead, she
utilized her stipend from the college to hire several graduate students, who were former
professionals in the field in which she was teaching, to help her develop the online class.
The course content that the design group developed was not content that Mikala had
previously taught face-to-face.

Unlike Jim and Juliet, Mikala's focus in her course development meetings was on
content. Mikala and her design team did not use technology to create a mock up of the
web site or address other technological issues aside from determining what software

programs the online students would Ieam during the semester.

Description of the Online Course

Mikala’s online course was geared at helping students to develop ways of
thinking, planning, implementing and assessing technology in the practice setting.
Students would Ieam about employing computer technology as a tool in their work,
professional development, problem solving, management, and strategic planning. The
course would also address the tensions that technology brings to a practice setting such
as, pressures by both external and internal advocates for computer technology use in
professional settings, versus the appropriateness of its use in other work related activities.
The students would also examine emerging research in the field, as well as share their

own experiences with technology in their work settings.

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The course would be designed around cases that were based on real situations in
practice settings. It was to be highly interactive with the students working in teams but
also doing individual activities. In addition, all of the activities required students to use a
variety of computer programs to do things like literature reviews on line, search for web-
based resources, participate in synchronous and asynchronous conversations, and create

power point presentations and spreadsheets.

Collective Activity Systems: The Design Activity

A New Context for Teaching

Like the other two faculty members in this study, Mikala had no previous
experience teaching online. She was motivated to create an online class for several
reasons, including the decision of the college to create a new master’s degree program,
their incentives for faculty members, the growth of technology, and the necessity of its
use in professional life for herself and her students.

Typically in a face-to-face course design activity, Mikala worked alone to develop
the content and structure for her courses. In contrast, for an online class in a topic that she
had not taught face-to-face, she desired the input from disciplinary and technological
experts. According to Mikala, what was similar about designing a course in the two
different contexts was her level of organization and preparedness going into the activities.

Thus, the initial disturbances faced were two-fold: a new context for course design and

teaching new course content.

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The College System

Mikala lacked the technological skills to create an online class and unlike the
other two faculty members in this study, she was unable to enroll in the faculty
development class. However, since the college had offered a range of support to the
faculty members, she was able to create her own design team using the 10,000-dollar
stipend from the college. Thus, by offering incentives besides the faculty development
class, the college provided additional means for faculty members to find technological
and pedagogical support for this activity. “I think some things affected my motivation
like getting the support that we got, the 10,000 dollars, the laptop computer, the (VU)

producer, I mean that certainly motivated me” (Mikala, interview, August 21, 2001).

The Design Team

Although Mikala did not participate in the faculty development class, she thought
it was necessary to work with others who were both technologically literate and content
experts in the disciplinary area in which she was teaching.

I put together a team of professional people. .. now full time Ph.D. students. All

the people on the advisory team are quite adept on computers. So, integrating the

use of different programs as well as the important questions that (the online

students) had to deal with was explicitly woven into every activity (Mikala,

interview, August 21, 2001).

Mikala’s design team met regularly in brainstorming sessions where the members
offered ideas from different perspectives within their fields of expertise to develop
realistic case scenarios or problems that would form the basis of the course. In an

iterative process that took place over several months, Mikala collected the information

fi'om their meetings and wrote the syllabus, classroom activities and cases. She took them

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back to the team to discuss and made additional changes based on their input. Unlike Jim
and Juliet, Mikala's team focused almost exclusively on developing the content. Mikala’s
team did not work with the technology to create a mock up of the course web site. Their
only interaction with technology was to determine what software programs the online
students would learn during the class. In addition, once the group disbanded, Mikala and
her student assistant Bonnie practiced using the synchronous web chat function provided
by the W in order to familiarize themselves with it before using it with students in the
online class.

The creation of the object was dependent upon the personal knowledge of the
members and their collaborative activity. The cognitive responsibilities were distributed
among participants, and artifacts and knowledge were distributed among the members,
other communities, tools and the product created (Jonassen, 2000). Bonnie captured the
groups’ process in her description of the construction of the cases, “It was very
collaborative. I don’t think you could detect where our contributions were in that process
because it’s all lumped together in the case” (Bonnie, interview, April 18, 2002). In other
words, each team member brought unique, as well as shared knowledge about the course
content, which they combined to create the cases. The group members also brought
knowledge, or heuristics from previous, face-to-face course design experiences,
knowledge from their previous work experience, as well as knowledge about software

programs that were appropriate for the online students to Ieam.

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The Virtual University

Once the design team created the content for the online class and decided what
software programs the online students would be required to Ieam, Mikala met with a
producer from the VU to determine the course structure, aesthetics and navigation. Since
Mikala’s VU producer was unwilling to participate in this study, the data related to this
system and the collaboration between Mikala and the VU producer were gleaned from
both Mikala and Bonnie, her student assistant.

Once the design team disbanded, Bonnie became Mikala’s assistant and was
responsible for transferring everything to the VU producer. Once the course was up and
running, Bonnie monitored it throughout the semester but had no direct contact with
students. Her role was to provide support and to “Maintain contact with the VU producer
to make sure that students were finding all the links that they needed, that there was a
thread to be followed that was clear, and that they were comfortable in that environment”
(Bonnie, interview, April 18, 2001). In addition, Bonnie conducted some online searches
during the course to find new web pages related to the student’s interests and needs.

In her work with the VU producer, Mikala did not deviate from the traditional VU
script for working with faculty members. Mikala developed the course content and the
VU producer developed the web site. Mikala felt comfortable with this approach and was
happy with her VU producer and the VU system in general. She characterized her work
with the VU as smooth and productive.

I went to the Virtual University with a fairly solid plan — I just needed them to put

it up and to help me further think through what technology might be added to

facilitate the learning, the communication, the experience of community on line.

Because I work effectively in a collaborative fashion, VU was able to enhance the

work I had arrived with. I think that (the VU producer) and I did a very good job
of setting up this class (Mikala, interview, August 21, 2001).

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Because of the VU producer’s technological expertise, Mikala had him take the

lead role in that capacity.

I had seen many, many examples and I shared ideas with (the VU producer) but in
the end, he’s the expert and I said to him to do his thing. He gave me options on
design features and we went from there. You know, trusting the people on your
team and respecting their work is extremely important. I trusted Norman (Mikala,

interview, August 21, 2001).

Since Mikala did not take the faculty development class, she may not have been
exposed to the variety of technological tools and design options available outside the VU.
In addition, she did not have an interest in Ieaming more than was necessary to Ieam
about the technology. She accepted the VU’s technological capacity and course design

features without much question or challenge.

I approached this with a good deal of passion to learn what I could do so, I didn’t
encounter any problems — or what I considered problematic. I often said — I’d like
this or this to happen — can you make it happen? Or I’d say, I saw this on another
online class that I liked; do you think it makes sense to use it here? Or I’d say,
okay, we can’t do it right now, but let’s think about it and maybe try it next time.
Perhaps the challenge I faced is that I don’t know very much about what all one
can do -— but that’s not a challenge in a negative way, but a challenge in a very
positive way (Mikala, interview, August 21, 2001).

The Online Teaching Activity

The VU System and the Faculty Member

In Mikala’s opinion, her collaboration with the VU during the online teaching

activity was disturbance free.

I think that (the VU producer) and I did a very good job of setting up this class.
Even when he left for (vacation) and we had a couple glitches (Sam) got on and
there was always someone there that could help. I didn’t experience as many
technical problems as other people have had and I think it had to do with how
organized we were going into this and how quickly (the VU producer) responded
to what I needed (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001).

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Mikala attributed the noticeable lack of disturbances with the VU, compared to
others that she was aware of, to her attitude toward problems in general and the technical

support of her VU producer.

How quickly I could let things go it was like well okay this didn’t work that’s
fine we’ll just do it differently later you know why fret about it ‘cause there is
nothing you can do (but) you know if we didn’t have (the VU producer’s)
technical support I could have never done it. It would just worry me too much and
I just knew that. . .. Whatever I asked him to give me he gave me which is very
interesting because I know of a couple of faculty who are creating classes right
now and they don’t appear to be getting as much technical support as I’ve
gotten... I don’t know why that is. I don’t know if it’s because the faculty
member isn’t being precise and organized about it or if the producer is unfamiliar
with the platform in the capacity... it’s always been just very good. I can’t say
enough about him (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001).

Informal Support Systems

During the teaching activity, Mikala also sought information and support from
colleagues with whom she could discuss various issues as they arose. This was not
atypical however, because even when teaching face-to-face classes she found that she
communicated regularly with other professors in her area of expertise to exchange ideas
and concerns over their classes. Her propensity for seeking support and interaction with
like-minded professionals carried over into her online work.

Jim is teaching an online class and he and I have been talking a lot about it this

term. So, having colleagues that I know are doing it or have done it and just being

in close proximity so that we can talk about these things I think affected the way I

was thinking about doing it or about what I was doing. It affirrned many times,

what I was doing. IfI had a problem with a student, I had feedback immediately.

So, having colleagues I think helped me out a lot. It’s not unusual. . .. We talk a

lot... about our (face-to-face) classes and any problems that we may have so it’s
not unusual (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001).

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Tools

The Design Team

According to Mikala and Bonnie, the primary tools used during the course design
activity were collaboration and discourse among the design team members. The design
team members also drew upon their prior experience and heuristics from face-to-face
teaching activities. Although Mikala was the team leader and had the final say on the
design, she also viewed others (her student design team and the W producer) as experts
based both on their professional experience and their technological capabilities. She
described the team process as time consuming, iterative, smooth, productive and
rewarding.

After our conversations, I went away and thought hard about what they said, then

I came back to them with a proposal of what a class might look like, what it

would feel like, and what questions we would address and how. We talked more

— taking apart my proposal, enhancing it in many ways. Then I went away,

thought, and planned more. We had decided on casework, so, I began with this.

This process of going to the team then working something up, sharing it, taking it

apart, reworking it went on for about four months (Mikala, interview, August 21 ,

2001).

Technology

Mikala had been interested in the use of technology as a tool to enhance Ieaming
and teaching in the face-to-face context for some time. Her husband was involved with
technology in his work and she was interested in learning more about it and how it could
benefit her in her work. She also noticed that many of her students were talking about the

use of technology in her classes. They wanted to know how they could use it to become

more efficient in their own work. These factors were in part what motivated Mikala to

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develop the online course, but her thinking about technology was more philosophical as
opposed to having a to Ieam how to use it.
I have this zone of comfort around technology that I need to know only what I
need to know and when people teach me new things I keep saying well this is new
information that I really don’t want to know because I don’t want to be
accountable and responsible for it. I just want to give it to you to do (Mikala,
interview, December 7, 2001).
Thus, Mikala was willing to Ieam about the technology that was necessary, but
her focus on the technology was more philosophical in nature such as, what was its role

in teaching and Ieaming, how could it help one become more efficient in one’s

professional life, etc.

Technology as a Mediator in Teaching

Mikala often remarked that she did not Ieam much about technology and indeed
her goal was not to Ieam too much. However, data analysis revealed that she continually
thought about the mediating role of technology in her life, in her interactions with
students and in students’ Ieaming. For example, she noted that she spent much more time
online than she would typically spend attending to a face-to-face class. “It’s a lot more
‘cause you’re in contact with your students everyday and it’s not like that in (face-to-
face) classes (Mikala, interview, October 1 1, 2001). She compared the online class to the
most intense face-to-face class she had taught that required spending a lot of individual
time with students. The online context seems to create these opportunities between
faculty and students. Mikala believed that in an online class, there was more a feeling of
talking with students one on one as opposed to a face-to-face class where the

communication was generally one to many.

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I put more hours into this online class than I would normally put into a face-to-
face class except for the dissertation prep classes. That is about just as much time
‘cause if you have twelve to fifteen students in your class you’re meeting with all
of them a lot individually and so that’s what this reminded me of that kind of
intensity and that kind of availability (Mikala, interview, October 11, 2001).

She realized that the online context, as well as the way her course was designed
(highly interactive), created the potential for open lines of communication twenty-four
hours a day, seven days a week. This had both benefits and drawbacks and may have
been an inherent contradiction in the online context. The result for Mikala was frustration

and having to set up clearer boundaries between herself and her students in order to

protect her time.

Sometimes I got really frustrated and angry because it always appeared that
people expected me to be there when they were discussing (synchronous chats). I
got a couple of emails that said well you haven’t responded to our discussion
thread and I thought well I was on it all day and so there was this kind of a tone
regarding my availability online and I would get a little perturbed. It was like I
just cannot get on this everyday. It’s like teaching a class every day even
Saturdays and Sundays and I had to tell them that I’m only getting on once a day
at this time to read the discussions and spend an hour or hour and a half and I did
it every day at the same time. I would never do this for a face-to-face class but
they are doing a very active communication with each other, a very active process
as opposed to reading something and then writing about it. They are actively
engaged in an experiential activity, which means that the instructor must be
present in that process. Because almost all of my activities were engagement in a
process meant that I had to put more time into it than I would in an embodied
situation (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001).

Aside from that, Mikala liked the informal tone in her students’ personal
communications because it facilitated the formation of a community of learners that she
had hoped would develop in the course. “In their emails and what they write it’s much
more comfortable and informal. It is what you would expect in a face-to~face class and so

it was good. I think (it) has created a really nice community” (Mikala, interview, October

11,2001).

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However, there was a down side to their informality. Mikala was a little troubled
when students’ first papers came in because the tone seemed too informal to her- not like
scholarly writing. She wondered if she needed to make her expectations for students
clearer.

They did their first overview paper and it’s like reading an email message. It’s

like an abbreviated, it’s not the kind of paper that I would expect to get in a face-

to-face class and I’m wondering if that’s okay. It doesn’t feel okay. I just have to
figure it out. I’m wondering if I have to give more parameters (Mikala, interview,

October 11, 2001)?

On the other hand, she appreciated what the technology could offer to students in
terms of their learning and professional growth. “(Students) wouldn’t normally have gone
to the intemet and done research and take a look at what other (professionals in their
field) are doing and find resources on the intemet” (Mikala, interview, December 7,
2001)

Mikala pushed the envelope in that regard by using the web as her primary text
for the course. She was intrigued by this idea, which was a departure from what she and
others considered “normal” in a graduate class, but she also realized that she needed to
flesh out this idea a bit further for future courses.

One of the things that’s been interesting is that everybody is so astounded that I

don’t have texts. My text is the web and I think I need to play with it this year

because I want to use the web more as a text but because I haven’t really played
with it I don’t know really what more to do with it so next year I’ll do better

(Mikala, interview, October 11, 2001).

Technology as a Mediator of Communications

During the teaching activity, Mikala thought a lot about communication online,

how it was different from face-to-face, and how it could affect relationships with

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students. However, communicating with students online also highlighted inherent
contradictions in the medium. She realized that she needed to work on this aspect of her
online teaching in response to several incidents. For example, in one incident she
described how a student became angry with her due to a miscommunication that Mikala
believed was the result of the online context.

I had a student who got really angry with me. That made me think about how I

was talking about something... and I think I offended her and so I had to think

about that. I don’t even know what I said actually but I had to think about that.

That highlighted that it was important to think about (my online communication

skills). I think that there are other factors that students bring to the venue that you

don’t know about that I think affected me along the way. It would in a face-to-
face class as well but it affected me a little bit more here because (of the distance).

(In face-to-face) I’m physically closer and I could apologize. I could see your

reaction but online, it’s like that delayed kind of thing so I think that affected me

just understanding that delay (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001).

In her course, Mikala had students work in teams throughout the semester to
analyze the cases that the design team had developed. Her students’ interactions around
the course content also provoked Mikala’s thinking about how she might use the
technology to solve problems and benefit her students. She found that she had to develop
new monitoring techniques and new ways to intervene in the team process.

There is a lot of that teaming thing where you get one person who sends you

emails or calls you up whining and stuff and it’s harder to deal with that in this

kind of a venue than it is in person. . .. In person, you can watch the team working
and intervene and even though I was trying my best to watch it, (initially) I didn’t
have the different threads. I couldn’t see the progress on a daily basis with the

first case. I couldn’t intervene fast enough (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001).

This problem arose because neither Mikala nor the W producer had experience
with highly interactive online courses and therefore they did not know enough to provide

each group with their own space or thread for discussion. Without prior experience with

this activity, Mikala could not have been expected to think of this in advance. However,

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this incident highlighted a contradiction in the W system; producers are rarely
instructional design experts. This creates a gap in the division of labor between the VU
producer and the faculty member. In face-to-face classrooms, the groups can create their
own spaces by simply turning their backs to one another (and away from other groups),
or they can move around the room to generate a somewhat “private group space.”
However, in an online context, the instructor has to designate specific spaces for groups.
It is not surprising that Mikala did not think of this in advance, given this was her first
experience teaching online.

Once she recognized the problem, she had the VU producer provide each group
with their own space, which made it easier for her to follow each groups’ progress and
manage it if needed.

The second case, because I got onto every one of the discussion threads, I could

see the progress, I could see what they were posting, I could see what they were

saying to one another, I could go into their chat logs and see what they were
chatting about and get onto their discussion thread and make clarifications, make
suggestions. I could immediately intervene. Or I noticed that one person wasn’t
getting on so I would email that person and I would say that I’ve noticed in the
discussion board in the chat room I’m not seeing you is something wrong with
your computer or blah, blah, blah. I think that’s really important in doing these
kind of team projects is setting up these communication systems so that you can
see the progress on a daily or every other day basis. You can intervene
immediately ‘cause a lot of times, the students won’t say anything until the very
end and then they get their grade and they complain because they got a bad grade

and they say stuff like well you know my contribution was blah, blah, blah. So I

shouldn’t be penalized for a team grade you know it’s a toughie (Mikala,
interview, December 7, 2001).

Transformations
Once her online course had ended, Mikala reflected on the activity, what she

Ieamed and what she still needed to work on. Because of her activities, she experienced

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transformations in her thinking about technology, teaching online and her face-to-face

teaching.

The Online Teaching Activity
Mikala found that having her students work in teams online was one of the most
challenging things that she faced in this class. It was clear that she had to think about it
more in order to make it work the way she wanted it to in future classes.
The whole team process (was challenging). I think I need to do this one more time
to figure it out but doing team work in this venue is a challenge» guiding it.
and no one really knows how to do it in person let alone here so just trying to
figure out how to prepare people to do team work and then to do it online is
something I need to think through. In embodied situations I can actually teach
people how to work in teams I just haven’t figured out how to do that online. I
don’t expect people to know how to work in teams and so I usually do a couple of
exercises in sequential order to build them up to working in their teams (in my
face-to-face classes). There’s a lot of communication strategies and opportunities
to deal with conflict and conflict resolution in these little activities that we do but

it wasn’t in this online class so I just have to figure it out (Mikala, interview,
December 7, 2001).

However, she Ieamed at least one method for managing groups in an online
context when she realized after the first case that she needed to create private spaces for
each group. By creating separate group spaces, she was able to better monitor and
manage their interactions and intervene when needed. Thus, she was confronted with the
concept of virtual space and how to use it to one’s own, as well as students’ advantage in
the online context.

Through this activity, Mikala also gained new confidence as a teacher. When she
began this activity, she had some reservations about her ability to do it well. However,
she was able to build her confidence as a teacher in the online context and imagined

herself teaching other online courses.

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I Ieamed a lot about myself as an instructor/facilitator in this venue in terms of I
questioned my capacity to do this and to enjoy it as much because I enjoy the
physicalness of (face-to-face teaching) and that’s one of the reasons why I did it.
It’s different. I remember when we first talked I had this fear it was like fear
factor of doing this and now I’m not afi'aid of doing this at all. I know other things
that I can do I mean I got so excited about some of the things that we were doing
and the discussions that we were having I thought oh I could think of doing
another class online. I could actually see teaching another subject and doing it a
little differently and having some individual and collectively engaged activities,
having a reading and then discussion threads around the reading. I began to have
all these different ideas so I Ieamed a lot about my own capacity to be effective in
this venue. I honestly, I hoped that I would be effective in this venue but I didn’t
know (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001).

The technology mediated Mikala’s thinking about teaching in other ways too, for
example, in deciding how to grade papers and how to make her expectations for her
students clear to them. In addition, she began to think about how her students’ writing
was public in a way that was different from face-to-face classes.

The other thing, which is real interesting, is making the writing so public.
Everyone can read it. I think that it has helped me understand the necessity of
having my students write for a broader audience and not just for me and making it
public. . .. I think just creating that publicness of writing is an excellent Ieaming
tool and makes people understand that they’re not writing for the professor. They
are writing for a disciplinary area so I think I’m getting much clearer about that
and it’s changing the way I think about how papers are presented and I’m thinking
about how grading can be different too (Mikala, interview, October 11, 2001).

The issue of making the writing public also made her think about how technology
mediates student Ieaming.

The anxiety of having to write for others is a tough thing to get through and I
think it’s good that they try. I have to figure out ways; I do it in the doctoral
program where little by little their writing becomes more and more public and
they get better and better at critiquing and scrutinizing each other’s writing in a
positive and constructive manner. But how to figure out how to do that online
with a class like this I haven’t yet figured it out (Mikala, interview, October 11,
2001)

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Finally, although she had experienced several disturbances around issues of
communication in the online context; in time she became clearer about what the
communication issues were. In addition, she thought of ways to transform her online
teaching activities in order to make up for the lack of immediacy, timing, and visual cues
that she had taken for granted in the face-to-face context.

I am beginning to Ieam how to better communicate online. It’s a different
language... the tenor of what you write. I’m much more careful and cautious
now... because how you string words together can mean different things for
different people. . .. It’s tone; it’s word choice. For different people you
communicate differently. (In face-to-face classes) I don’t communicate the same
way with each student. It’s very different and unique to that person and so I’m
Ieaming how to read the other person in their talk so that I can communicate with
them effectively. I think it’s how you see yourself in relationship to other people
and how you see yourself as a teacher. It’s important for me to make sure that I
can communicate with an individual to help them help themselves. I try to do that
in person and so I’m trying to do that online. It’s very different; it’s just sort of a
nature of who you are and how you communicate. I’m trying to find my virtual
nature so to speak (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001).

Face-To-Face Teaching

Mikala also believed that the online teaching activity would have a
transformational effect on her face-to-face teaching.

How it really has affected my teaching I think is that I am using more technology

in my face-to-face teaching... so technology has helped me a lot in terms of

expanding the realm of teaching. I gathered a good deal of information about

what’s available on the Internet about different sites, what they offer, how to

locate things so that was something that I was forced to do. I wouldn’t have

normally done that myself and that’s good for me ‘cause when I teach other

classes I can refer my students to these sites (Mikala, interview, December 7,
2001)

Technology
Because of Mikala’s online teaching activity, she acquired more knowledge

about, and awareness of the technology, as well as a belief in the value of such

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knowledge. “I’m figuring out how to navigate the web much better and with (the VU
producer’s) help with all these glitches, I’m beginning to understand the technical pieces
a bit better and the potential of it, which is really important” (Mikala, interview,
December 7, 2001).
Overall, this experience resulted in changed activity for Mikala. She Ieamed new
things about technology, and about herself as a teacher in a technological environment.
It’s almost an iterative process. When I get on line it gives me some limitations
like time limitations, how quickly I can write, you know there are some
disembodied limitations... but I found that I could do more with it as well. I had
different channels of communication so... it also was somewhat liberating. So it
was a real reciprocal process and to give an inanimate thing a life is so unusual to
do but for example we had the chat rooms, discussion threads, email, telephone,
fax mail, hard copy and face-to-face ‘cause a lot of them live very close and I
have actually seen a handful of the students. . .. So, what happened here is that I
had many different avenues of communication and so that was for me a potential
and so I interacted with that. How can 1 use all these different threads of

communication to do different things? I like that a lot (Mikala, interview,
December 7, 2001).

Summary of the Case

This analysis highlighted the importance of faculty support by the administration.
For example, because the college offered a variety of incentives, Mikala was able to form
a collaborative team of technical and content experts to help her develop the course in
lieu of taking the faculty development class. The collaboration helped her bring together
the pedagogy with the content and the technology, something she admitted she would not
have been able to do on her own.

This analysis also shed light on some of the issues that faculty members who are

designing and teaching online courses may face. For example, initially neither Mikala nor

the VU producer thought about the need for separate virtual spaces or chat rooms for the

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student teams. The result was that Mikala’s students bombarded her with emails about
their progress and they were annoyed that she did not respond to their conversations
quickly enough. Mikala used the technology to solve this problem by having the VU
producer create separate chat spaces for the teams, and by communicating with students
about their expectations of her and what she could reasonably provide for them. The
incident also highlighted a contradiction within the VU system; the fact that the VU
producers generally do not have knowledge of instructional design created a gap that led
to a disturbance during the course.

Communication was an issue that pervaded Mikala’s consciousness during the
teaching activity. She became aware of what powerful mediators technology and the
online context are. Disturbances arose that provoked her thinking about her
communication skills in the online context. As a result, she thought hard about how she
could improve her communication skills in order to avoid problems and to help her
students Ieam the content.

One of the interesting things in Mikala’s case was her remark that she did not
Ieam much about technology. However, the analysis revealed that she frequently thought
about the mediating role of technology in her teaching, in her communications with
students, and in students’ Ieaming. This led to transformations in her thinking about how
technology works, its potential, how it mediates communications, and how she could use
technology in her face-to-face teaching. The activity also raised new pedagogical
questions for her to consider in future online classes such as how to help her students
Ieam to work in teams online and ways for her students’ writing to become gradually

more public.

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Chapter 7
Analysis and Interpretation
“Juliet”

“I Got To Hear Everybody’s Voice”

Introduction to the Case

Like the two previous cases, this analysis is mainly focused on one professor,
“Juliet,” while she worked within various interacting systems to design and teach her
online course. The analysis reveals contradictions at the system level and disturbances
specific to Juliet’s case. The analysis also reveals transformations in Juliet’s and the VU
producer’s thinking that resulted from the contradictions and disturbances. Furthermore,
the VU producer also created a technological innovation for Juliet’s course, which may
have transformational ramifications for the VU system.

As in the other two cases, this analysis is chronological in nature and the
contradictions and disturbances that arose during the activities are woven throughout the
analysis. The analysis is drawn from the profile located in appendix C. Readers may refer
to the profile in order to get more of the context surrounding the quotes in the analysis.
The analysis culminates with the transformations that both Juliet and the VU producer
experienced, as well as speculation on transformations that may occur in the VU system

because of their activities.

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Background on Juliet

At the time of our interview, Juliet had been a professor for about nine years total
and in her current position as a tenured Associate Professor for about two years. Her
primary motivations for taking on this project were that she saw it as a fun and
intellectually challenging project, a convenience for herself and her students, and a way
to encourage her students to recognize online Ieaming as a viable option for continuing
education.

Juliet was familiar with the content she planned to teach online, having taught
pieces of the content in several different face-to-face courses in the past. The difference
online was that she had to condense the content into one six-week course. Juliet enrolled
in the faculty development class where she worked with three students to develop a mock
up of her course web site. When the faculty development class ended, the team disbanded
and Juliet began working with Sam, the VU producer. Sam made some refinements and
additions and got the class up and running. He also provided support during the course

and met with Juliet to discuss revisions when the course was over.

Description of the Online Course

Juliet planned to teach a six-week summer course (condensed from an original
fifteen-week face-to-face course) that was designed to meet the needs of both students
who planned to become scholars, as well as those that were already working
professionals. The course would be set up so that each week of the class, the students
would have three units to work on (or three days in the class). The first day would be

content and information dissemination where students would have reading assignments in

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texts that they would have to purchase for the class, as well as reading from online sites
that they would be required to visit.

The second unit (or day) in each week would be comprised of students working
together in small groups where they would be applying the information they had Ieamed
about in unit one. The groups would work on cases and have structured exercises that
would culminate in a group product.

The third unit (or day) would consist of each group posting their products back to
the course web site so that the entire class could View each groups’ work. Each individual
student would then be required to reflect in writing on the products of each group and to
post their reflections to the course web site. The week would culminate in Juliet
providing group feedback via voiceover to the whole group. The last requirement for unit
three was for each student to send Juliet a one to three page personal reflection paper
about the week’s activities and the products that were produced. In addition, each student

had to send Juliet a feedback about how the group work went that week.

Collective Activity Systems: The Design Activity

A New Context for Teaching

Although Juliet had no prior experience designing or teaching online courses, she
had some exposure to online courses through her spouse. Her spouse taught online and
she had talked with him about some of his struggles while he was Ieaming to do it.
However, she had never thought seriously about what it would be like to teach online or
how she might design a class. Consequently, the first disturbance that Juliet faced was the

new online context.

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Typically in a face-to-face course design activity, Juliet worked alone to develop
the content and structure for the course. She usually prepared for each class just before
each class meeting. She had brief notes about the content that she wanted to cover and
never wrote out a lecture in its entirety. She would provide some content to students, and
then they usually would work in small groups doing problem solving and analysis. In
contrast, Juliet realized that in the online context, her students would need the full extent
of the content, therefore she had to write out most of the content and load it onto the
course web site.

In the online class, she found that in order to design the course she not only had to
prepare all of the content in advance, she also had to prepare to teach a different kind of
student than she was used to in her face-to-face classes. In the past, she had taught
students that planned to become scholars as opposed to practitioners. Because of the new
online masters program, she found that a new audience of students was slated to take her
course- practitioners. She had to consider what would keep them interested in the content,
which mediated her thinking about what content to include and how to teach it.

That’s forced my thinking... pushed me to think about the practical aspects of

this because I can have half my course drop out, saying it’s boring. (Practitioners)

get bored, they start looking ahead. . .. We have to get to the good stuff. So I’m

gonna be a lot more pragmatic, a lot earlier than I had intended (Juliet, interview,

May 2, 2001).

There were three other primary concerns that also mediated Juliet’s thinking
during the course design activity. One was the concern that she would not have
relationships with her online students in the way that she did in face-to-face classes. The

second concern was how to get students to participate at deep levels in the class. Her

third concern was how to create a Ieaming community online.

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. .. How to make the applications happen in this environment, that’s where I’ve
really been pushing because I would do so much of this in role play and
simulation in the classroom, how to do that, assimilate to that online is where I’ve
been a little more worried what might happen. How do you do that, transform
what I might do in a face-to-face class to an online environment? I tried to think
about what would I want the students to be involved in in any format. I want them
to have best practice ideas, theories, concepts, and some reflection about their
own practice so I tried to build that in. I tried to think about things that would be
interesting and how to engage them and how to coerce them to do that. In a
classroom, you coerce them by your social persuasion skills. In an online format,
your grades are tied to this because they won’t do it unless you provide some sort
of incentive to do it because there is more anonymity etc. so I’ve tried to think

that through (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001).

The Faculty Development Class

Juliet was one of two professors in this study who enrolled in the faculty
development class. Unlike the other two faculty members in this study, Juliet did not
know her student design team members before entering the faculty development class.
Juliet was assigned to a group of graduate students after she entered the faculty
development class. Once she began working with her design team, they worked closely
with the technology to develop a mock up of Juliet’s course web site that she would later
take to a VU producer to put it online.

According to Juliet, she Ieamed several things in the faculty development course
that mediated many of the decisions she made about course design. She also thought that
the faculty development class had been crucial to her ultimate success in teaching her
online class. For example, although she already believed in the value of forming a

learning community in the classroom and in active participation among students, she did

not have a clear idea about how to realize that vision in an online context until after she

took the faculty development class.

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I would not have understood this medium without the faculty development class. I
would not have done the reading that I did in instructional design. We had such
good discussions about both the technology and the Ieaming and teaching online
that the product would have looked quite different. I probably would not have
used the web to the extent that I did. I would have probably done more of a closed
model where 1 supply all the content. It would have probably looked a lot more
correspondence like. I would have tried to do teams but I’m not sure I would have
done it with any level of sophistication. I really thought about what is it gonna
take to make this work online because I had that luxury to do that. I know I
wouldn’t have done as well without the course. It really jump-started my thinking
in that respect (Juliet, interview, September, 26, 2001).

The faculty development class also helped Juliet to think more explicitly about
instructional design, aligning her philosophy on Ieaming with her instruction in a
technological environment, as well as the role of a teacher in an online class.

It requires a completely different way of interacting with students and I hadn’t
really thought explicitly about instructional design before (the faculty
development class)... because you had to lay it all out in advance. I guess I count
on when I walk into a classroom and something doesn’t work well I can fix it. I
can use the force of my personality to make something happen. There is that
immediacy. You can’t do that online. You have to trust that the instructional
design that you’ve developed will hold, will work, and will do what you need it to
do. It was one step removed from my immediate presence so (the faculty
development class) helped me think more about the role of the instructor and the
role of good instructional design. It helped me to think about... do we need to
have real people, is this the best use of my time as a faculty member, do I need to
be in the classroom with those students (Juliet, interview, September 26, 2001)?

Furthermore, the faculty development class broadened Juliet’s knowledge about
how to use the web as a resource for her online instruction. “Instead of me typing up what
is intrinsic motivation, I sent them out to a site to read about that, then they came back,

and I liked that. I thought that was a good use of the technology” (Juliet, interview,

September, 26, 2001).

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The Design Team

Like most faculty members used to designing face-to-face classes, Juliet usually
worked alone. Thus working with the design team within the faculty development class
was another deviation from her normal script. “That was something that was new for me
in teaching. I had worked with teaching assistants but I’ve never seen them as co-creators
of the course” (Juliet, interview, September 26, 2001).

The design team members had never worked together or had any experience
designing an online class. They had no idea how or where to begin. The cycle of
development of the course fluctuated between the horizon goal (Engestrom, 2000a)--
creating an online class-- and more intermediate goals such as how to work together as a
team to create the obj ect-- defining team roles and rules.

The design team spent the first few weeks together working on intermediate
goals, which included establishing a collective system that recognized a division of labor,
as well as defining roles and rules. Since the team comprised one faculty member and
three students, this immediately set up a vertical division of labor and power. The
students seemed to have a tacit expectation that Juliet would take the lead and provide
direction by assigning roles and tasks, for example. However, Juliet believed that she was
incapable of this role because of her lack of technical knowledge. By not assuming that
role, it created a disturbance that resulted in the team spending about five weeks trying to
figure out how to proceed.

I didn’t have a clue of what was possible so I felt like I lost about 5 weeks at the

beginning of the semester. These guys know so much about how to do stuff that

they were kind of waiting for me to give them direction and this is where I said I

tried very hard not to control the team because I didn’t feel like I could provide
direction early on in the course. I was clueless (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001).

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Finally, the students stepped up and began probing Juliet for ideas about how she
wanted the site to look and how she might teach the content in a face-to-face classroom.

They were really instrumental in going; well let’s try this. Let’s play with this idea
and see how it works. They pulled up to the table and contributed in a really
powerful way. The site started to develop, the technical stuff, with really very little
input from me. They’d say how would you teach, what would you wanta do with
this in a face-to-face class? And I would go here’s what I would do. Then they’d go,
oh, we could do streaming video. They knew this techno stuff and I’d write it down.
I didn’t know what they were talking about. So, they translated for me and that was
really helpful (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001).

Once the team members began to understand Juliet’s goals for the class, one of
the students took the lead role by creating the first mock up of a web page. Once he
presented it to the team, a concrete artifact was directly linked to the object horizon. The
student became the technology leader, which was the impetus that shifted the teams’
focus back to the object horizon. As a result, the other team members began to define
their roles.

(He) has been very instrumental in making the site happen and building the site.
He’s been the primary one. As it’s evolved, we’ve shifted, we’ve sort of fallen out
into roles and he has clearly been the onsite developer of the course (Juliet,
interview, May 2, 2001).

Another student began developing activities and exercises that would create a
sense of community among the students in the online class, which addressed one of
Juliet’s main concerns when she began thinking about the course design.

He’s very interested in communities of students and how you build communities
and had been doing a lot of reading about development of community. He had a lot
of really good ideas about activities you could do to do that (and) structures you
could put in place to do that. He was instrumental in pushing that aspect of the
course (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001).

A different student brought an international student perspective to the team. She

asked questions along the way about things that the rest of the team had not thought

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about. Interestingly, from Juliet’s perspective the team members did not affect the content
of the course. “. . .Although they didn’t do any content, they did all this making it happen
which was fun. It just worked” (Juliet, interview, September 26, 2001). However, the
data suggest that the students clearly went beyond translating the technology. They
affected the structure of the course, the aesthetics, and they developed team exercises for
the online students to participate in.

The faculty development class and Juliet’s design team scaffolded her into the
process of integrating technology into online and face-to-face course design. In addition,
the faculty development course and the design team members helped Juliet to think about
issues of content representation and structures that could create an online Ieaming
community. The teams’ activity can be characterized as an iterative process, in which the
members went back and forth between the activities of developing the content, structure,
web site aesthetic, and integration of the technology. Analysis of this team’s activities
revealed the formation and resolution of internal contradictions as well as clear
distinctions between individual and goal-directed action and collective object-oriented

activity.

The Virtual University

Once Juliet’s design team had developed a mock up of the course web site, the
design team disbanded and Juliet took the course to the VU producer. Disturbances arose
in their work together but the producer mainly absorbed them. For example, the producer
was not experienced with creating highly interactive courses and he believed that Juliet’s

course design violated several graphic design principles. Furthermore, Juliet arrived at

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VU with a complete mock up of her course, which, in her view, only required a few
adjustments to be put online.

Initially, the VU producer suggested changing the design and structure of the
course but Juliet liked her original product. Due to time constraints and his desire to
please Juliet, the VU producer agreed to work with her original course design despite his
reservations about the soundness of the graphic design and navigational structure.

It wasn’t the prettiest site. Most people that look at it say that (compared to) some

other courses; they’re a lot more streamlined design. . .. There were some things

in the graphics that didn’t need to be there. There’s a rule in design that if you can
take it out of the design and everything still looks good then you don’t need to
have it in there and I think there were things that we could have taken out of that
design or compressed more, maybe we didn’t need as much yellow space in
certain areas or things like that. That’s where the streamlined, like the packaging

(courses) I think we’ve taken all of that off that design, it’s lean and it’s ready to

go. In (Juliet’s) design there’s still some stuff on it that maybe could get trimmed

but it didn’t (VU producer, interview, September 11, 2001).

The producer did make some changes to the course, however since he had not

developed the original design, and because the course structure was unfamiliar to him, he

encountered some disturbances.
I changed around a few things. I added those icons. . .. Building the course was
very confirsing to me and it’s my fault. I made it too confusing. It was wonderful
for the students because it was really easy for them to get places but the way that I
structured it; how we built it... it was an organizational nightmare. . .. It’s not
linear. . .. You’re going back to some of these links like hypertext whereas (other
courses) you’re going straight through it (VU producer, interview September 11,
2001).

Although the producer blamed himself for the problems, the disturbances also
could be linked to two other sources. First was the contradiction between the faculty
development class and the VU. In the faculty development course, Juliet had Ieamed
about a wide variety of tools that were not available within VU, as well as course designs

and navigational structures that were not within the VU producer’s repertoire. The second

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contradiction developed as a result of the idiosyncratic tools used by the VU and the lack
of training for producers in curriculum design of highly interactive courses. The VU
producer also believed that his lack of knowledge in the specific subject matter was partly

to blame for his confusion.

At times, it’s hard to understand what exactly she wants. She’s got infinite
knowledge more than me in the subject. . .. maybe if I had a little bit more
knowledge on (her topic) or just how to teach something, teaching methods or
something, I may have been able to help prompt her a little bit more for
something that was maybe a little bit more interactive, maybe something that
would have been a little bit more special for the students to look at. . .. (It’s) that
gap of, I know how to do web stuff and you know how to teach so let’s get
together and pool both of our stuff because if you know how to do web stuff and
teach then you can put together a much better class then I think we could
collaborating together (VU producer, interview, July 25, 2001).

Informal Support Systems

Like Jim and Mikala, Juliet also had an informal support system that mediated her

thinking and actions.

My husband does this professionally. . .. So, I’ve seen that and we’ve talked at
length about his struggles. . .. There is a lot of technology in my house and a lot of
appreciation for the medium and online stuff. He’s quite knowledgeable... so we
had those conversations. We didn’t do much fiddling with the course but I asked
his opinion a lot. We talked about more global sort of issues (Juliet, interview,
September 26, 2001).

The Online Teaching Activity
Teaching Philosophy
In our first interview, Juliet described her teaching philosophy by saying,
I’m very respectful that everybody learns in a very different way. I try to
accommodate that in my instruction so that I give people choices about ways that

they can interact with the ideas. Very often, I’ll have multiple options for how to
complete an assignment (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001).

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During the course, however, her students tested her conviction. For example, one
student wanted to move through the course at her own pace and interact only with Juliet
around the content. Juliet refused and was surprised by the student’s request because it
was something she had never encountered in her face-to-face classes. Juliet wondered if
the situation arose due to the online context because she believed that in a face-to-face
class, students were less likely to ask to complete the course at their own pace.

I don’t think I hear that from students in a face-to-face class. I’ve never had

anyone come up to me and say I don’t like what you are doing. I typically do

survey students at mid term to see how they are doing and what is the pace like
for them so I may make some adjustments based on that feedback but I don’t
think I’ve ever had someone say do it differently next time (Juliet, interview,

September, 26, 2001).

Context as a Mediator in Student Assessment

One of Juliet’s main goals in designing any course was for students to work
collaboratively to Ieam the content. She maintained that philosophy in the online course
but she believed that the online context made a difference in her assessment of her
students’ Ieaming. In the online context, students’ conversations were public (in writing
or chat logs). Consequently, Juliet could literally see their process, their thinking and
their participation. Because of this, she could continuously assess their understanding of
the content unlike her experience with face-to-face teaching.

Some of it is the formal structure of this online course. . .. I had to structure in

accountability because it’s a different format. But I can go in and look at all their

web talks and I just get such a rich feeling for what they’re thinking about. That’s

a surprise and the satisfaction. . .. I’ve seen that people are really engaged. I just

feel like I’m getting a richer picture of them (Juliet, interview, September, 26,
2001).

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In addition, Juliet delighted in seeing certain students participate online that she
believed she never would have heard from in a face-to-face class. In the online format, all
students were accountable.

The other thing about this format that worked better than face-to-face is the fact
that the playing field is pretty even. In a face-to-face course, I could tell you who
the three or four students were in this course that would have dominated the class
discussions and because of this format they didn’t get to do that. I got to hear
everybody’s voice and I don’t hear that in face-to-face. I try to structure that (in
face-to-face classes) with a lot of small teamwork so that people are really
engaged but I don’t get to see or hear all their contributions. This format made it
happen. Nobody could slack off (online) well, they could have and one person
tried to and her team landed on her, but it just worked so that everybody had an
equal voice and that was really nice ‘cause I can also tell you who the three or
four students were in this course I never would have heard a peep from in a face-
to-face course but here I heard from them every week (Juliet, interview,
September, 26, 2001).

Tools
The Technology
When Juliet began the course design process, she had limited technical ability.
Her philosophy on Ieaming to operate the technology was captured in the following
quote.
I don’t know a lot about the technical stuff of the computer. I don’t feel like I want
to know that, or need to know that. I don’t need to know how to compress stuff and,
you know, other people can do that. That’s not what I wanta do. I don’t know how
the telephone works either. Nor do I care (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001).
Juliet’s concerns during the course design and teaching activities centered on issues
such as motivating students to participate at deep levels in a Ieaming community, fitting a

fifteen-week class into a six-week time frame, and teaching practitioners, a new audience

that she saw as potentially challenging. In terms of the technology, Juliet was more

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interested in the philosophical issues surrounding technology in education rather than
mastering the technical tools.

However, it was clear from her design teams’ course design activities, and later
from Juliet’s teaching activities, that the technology mediated the course design, content
representations, pedagogy, students’ Ieaming, and Juliet’s thinking about their learning.
In addition, Juliet Ieamed more about how to operate the technology than she had

anticipated.

Transformations

Once Juliet had finished teaching the online course she reflected on her activity,
as did the VU producer. Data from these interviews revealed that both participants

experienced transformations in their thinking and may have effected transformations in

the VU system.

The Online Teaching Activity

The following quote from Juliet captures her thinking about online teaching after

she completed the activity.

I Ieamed that you can do good teaching on the web. I don’t think I would have
said that with as much sincerity or belief before I did it. I had a lot of skepticism
about this format and to be able to really do the kind of teaching I want to do.
What I thought about web-based teaching before I started this was that it was
more like correspondence courses. There was a lot of content and I didn’t really
see how material could be really active that you could engage in constructivist
learning on line but I saw some activities work in the way that I wanted them to.
People were engaged in activities together, building and refuting arguments,
doing some high level thinking about what I wanted them to be thinking about in
this format. So I guess my big lesson in my teaching was that it was possible to
use this medium to really do that well (Juliet, interview, September 26, 2001).

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The Face-to-Face Teaching Activity
Because of her online teaching activity, Juliet realized that in her face-to-face
classes, students were not as accountable for participation as they were in the online

context.

That is something that I would never see in (a face-to-face) class and in a team
situation. The people that are not going to participate are not going to participate
and I watched these people in (face-to-face) classes picking the split ends off their
hair and they can’t do that (online) because they are accountable. . .(Juliet,
interview, September, 26, 2001).

This provoked her thinking about how to transform her face-to-face teaching to
solicit more participation, accountability and to see evidence of students’ thinking.

It really helped me think about how to do this differently in my face-to-face
classes because I never, although I typically put in a 10% participation grade I’m
not very explicit about what I mean by that. I don’t go around with my little point
counter when they’re in small teams and look at who’s really participating. That’s
I think again part of the accessibility issue that I don’t have access to what’s going
on in the small teams in (face-to-face classes) the same way that I did (online).
The accountability was so high here and it was unexpected and I think I got them
to think really well so again it helped me to think about the idea that maybe I can
do more of that in (face-to-face) courses (Juliet, interview, September, 26, 2001).

Juliet also Ieamed more about the World Wide Web than she had expected to and
as a result, she began to integrate the web into her face-to-face classes.

I Ieamed a lot about the web. I bumped into some really cool resources that I’m
continuing to use in my teaching. I’ll bring it up in class... integrate it right into
the classroom. . .. I can do that and I don’t think I would have been so fluid in
doing that before so (the faculty development class) really helped me think about
using the web as a resource for my teaching. . .. this course really helped me to
feel much more comfortable with technology more broadly speaking. I used
technology and the web before like for shopping, I’m not afraid of it in any way
but I think to be more comfortable with it as a teaching tool is one thing and also
to be more comfortable with the stuff you need to do to get it to work like I was
recording and uploading my own audio files in this course. (The VU producer)
taught me how to do that, I screwed it up a couple times and then I got it to work
and then it was fine so I feel like my competency has really grown. I didn’t know
how to FTP something over to somebody, I didn’t even know what that was
before but now, I know how to do that for my course so that’s a cool thing so I

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feel much more comfortable in my technology skills (Juliet, interview,
September, 26, 2001).

Technology

Although Juliet’s goal was not to Ieam how to operate the technology as much as
to think about it philosophically, as a result of the scaffolding provided to her in the
faculty development class and by the VU producer, she Ieamed more about technology
than she had expected. For example, she referred to the discussions they had in the
faculty development class and how they increased her knowledge of what was possible
with technology.

There were applications I hadn’t seen before. I’d seen streaming video but I’d not
seen how it could be linked... used in a course so I kinda thought about them
concretely for the first time. We spent some time almost every week talking about
something technical and those were very interesting to me. What’s a server...
what’s HTML. . .. So all that stuff I Ieamed. . .. That was a nice byproduct of
getting to think about teaching (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001).

Juliet continued to Ieam how to operate various technologies during the teaching
activity through her interactions with the VU producer. She was modest about her
accomplishments but the VU producer was impressed by what she had Ieamed as
indicated by the following comments from the VU producer.

Juliet’s been changing with that stuff all semester and it’s great, it’s been nice to
watch. When she first started she just changed text, now she puts in links, she adds
papers up to the server and then links to them, she changes different htrnl things. . ..
she records her weekly feedback to the students and then converts that to a real
audio and puts it on the server. A lot of times we do that and since she can do it
herself now that makes it a lot easier for both her and 1 ‘cause she doesn’t have to
bother about sending it to me and then worrying whether I did it right or not and she
can also do it while she’s on vacation or what ever. . .. So that’s kind of a good thing
is for her to be at the end of the semester ‘cause now when she teaches it again
she’ll have no problem if she gonna change something she knows how to do it and
she can do it whenever she wants (VU producer, interview, July 25, 2001).

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Instructional Design

During the online course design activity, Juliet realized that she had not thought
very explicitly about course design or instructional design in the face-to-face context. She
had always prepared for each face-to-face class but not as much as she had to prepare for
each online class meeting. In her experience in face-to-face classes, if her methods were
not working, she always knew that through her physical presence and the force of her
personality, she could keep students engaged with the content and keep them on task. In
contrast, in the online context, she believed that the lack of her physical presence would
not allow her to be as spontaneous as she could be in the face-to-face context. Juliet
found that in the online context each class period had to be stipulated before the course
started. This forced her to think about how important it was to use the course design, in
lieu of her physical presence, to engage students with the content and to get them to
participate.

It requires a whole different way of interacting with students and I guess I hadn’t

really thought explicitly about instructional design before I did this course, as I

had to do (with) this course because you had to lay it all out in advance (Juliet,

interview, September 26, 2001).

Content

For the first time in her teaching activity, Juliet was faced with teaching
practitioners. Initially she was concerned that the content would not be engaging enough
for them since they already had practical experience in the field. However, after a short
time in the class she came to realize that having experienced practitioners in the class
helped her think about the content in new ways.

Experienced (practitioners) coming back to this course and being very reflective
about their practice helped me think about the content in really different ways

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because my (regular) students don’t interact with this content in the same depth.
They just don’t have the experience to do it but boy these (practitioners) sure do.
They can enliven it with stories (from their experience), they can talk about their
philosophy... and whether it does or doesn’t support practice. They did all that for
me so it really helped me think about it (Juliet, interview, September 26, 2001).

Two other issues also arose for Juliet due to the new population. One was that she
began thinking about the online program more globally, in terms of how it might serve
these new constituents in valuable ways. Second was how their presence in the course
benefited her more traditional students.

This course has taught me that the stuff we do is pretty important and meaningful

to (practitioners) so we might be able to be of some benefit in that regard both for

the college who is trying to develop this program and for practitioners in the field.

I really liked the interdisciplinary nature of this course. This allowed my (regular)

students to interact with (practitioners) in a really significant way and I thought

that was of use to them in their professional development (Juliet, interview,
September 26, 2001).

Teaching Philosophy

Before teaching online, Juliet’s philosophy on Ieaming was that students Ieam in
different ways. Based on this, she believed that she offered her students a variety of ways
to Ieam the content. However, when one of her students asked to complete the course at
her own pace instead of being part of a small group, Juliet began to question her own
beliefs about student Ieaming and her teaching practice.

It was highlighted for me in this course... I guess I give lip service to the fact that

we have individual differences in learning and everyone has a unique Ieaming

style and so on but I’m aware that I just teach in one way so if you want to do a

correspondence course with me I don’t offer that (Juliet, interview, September,
26,2001)

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The VU Producer

Although the VU producer initially had reservations about the soundness of the
graphic design and navigational structure of Juliet’s course, ultimately his thinking was
transformed through this activity and it piqued his interest in researching such matters in
graduate school.

This course wasn’t designed by a professional graphic designer but it brings up a
whole question of can graphic designers design good interfaces ‘cause I know the
packaging department interface doesn’t work well for classes (in Juliet’s
discipline). I know that because we used a variation on that in a course (in this
discipline) and I don’t think it fits. This design worked really well for these
people and that’s actually one of the things that’s propelling my interest in
research is why the design worked well for these people. It worked perfectly.
People didn’t have problems navigating and there were very few posts saying I
can’t find this and I need to find it (VU producer, interview, September 11, 2001).

The producer’s thinking about this issue also spilled over into his thinking about
how people Ieam in the online context.

One of the things I Ieamed from it about how people Ieam is, I was under the

impression before that the more graphically streamlined something was people are

gonna Ieam better (because) they’ve got less choices to make on each screen. But,
then I Ieamed from this that giving them a lot of choices on one screen actually
was easier for them. Some of the questions it brought up is why did these people

Ieam so much better when there was choices on the left side, choices on the top,

choices (imbedded in the text) going all the way down and choices on the bottom?

It prompted me to Ieam more about interface design; why certain interfaces work

better than others in certain situations (VU producer, interview, September 11,

2001)

Finally, the VU producer had said that some of his difficulty in course design was
due to his lack of knowledge about teaching methods and course content. However, it
also derived from a contradiction within the VU. The VU’S usual script for working with
faculty members set up a particular division of labor where faculty were the pedagogical

experts and developed the course content, while the VU producer tried to integrate the

idiosyncratic technology tools created by the VU programmers. Thus, the pieces of the

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course were designed without any knowledge of the other piece. Because Sam believed
that the VU would not address that contradiction, he was inspired to develop new options
to transform his Ieaming. He had recently enrolled in a graduate program where he hoped
to gain new knowledge and skills in pedagogy and course design. “That’s why I’m doing
this degree now is hopefully to get a lot more of the methods for thinking about that”
(Sam, interview, July 25, 2001). The contradiction within the VU system created an inner
disturbance in the VU producer that led him to take serious action to transform his
knowledge and skills. Although the VU producer worked on many other courses that
created such disturbances, the disturbance mainly derived from the courses that the

producer had worked on within Juliet’s discipline.

The VU System

The VU producer created a tecImological innovation for use in Juliet’s class. The
innovation was a module that allowed Juliet’s students to view and rearrange a virtual
floor plan. It provided a model for Juliet and her online students to refer to in discussions
about how physical space and fumiture configurations can influence people’s activity and
interactions with one another. Subsequently, that innovation became part of the VU’s
available tools to be used in other courses where the same or a similar tool might be

desired. Hence, the VU producer’s innovation effected a change in the VU system.

Summary of the Case
Juliet’s online course design and teaching activities were characterized by a

number of disturbances that led to changes in course design activities, and changes in her

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thinking about teaching, technological capabilities and the use of technology in other
contexts. Facing a new context for teaching meant that Juliet had to participate in various
collective activity systems (the design team, the faculty development class, the VU) to
develop a course. As a result, she was scaffolded in technology and philosophies of
online course design.

In addition, Juliet confronted her tacit thinking about course design, teaching and
Ieaming. She thought more explicitly than she had in a long time about her role as a
teacher, learners in her face-to-face classrooms, and the role of technology in Ieaming
and teaching. She also made changes in her face-to-face teaching because of her activity.

Furthermore, Juliet’s VU producer experienced transformations in his drinking
about course design and teaching, as well as effecting changes within the VU system by

creating innovations.

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Chapter 8
Cross Case Analysis
Introduction

In the previous chapters, 1 presented and analyzed three cases of faculty members
(and their corresponding activity systems) who developed and taught online courses for
the first time. These three cases were presented relatively independent of each other. In
contrast, the focus of this section is on identifying similarities and differences across the
three cases. As in the individual cases, this cross case analysis pays particular attention to
contradictions and disturbances and how they led to individual and/or system
transformations. 1 also use the cross case analysis to develop answers to the research
questions that motivated this study.

The cross case analysis is provided to help enhance generalizability and to deepen
understanding and explanation of the phenomena studied in this research (Miles &
Huberman, 1994). In conducting the analysis, I drew upon Yin’s (1994) replication
strategy. In this strategy, a theoretical framework is used to study one case in depth and
then successive cases are examined to see whether the pattern found matches that in other
cases. I adapted this strategy by studying three cases in depth and looking across cases to
see whether the patterns found in each case were similar or different. I also used a
strategy similar to a variable-oriented strategy described by Miles and Huberman. That
strategy uses inductive coding to locate recurring themes. In my analysis, I created tables
and matrices of the data from the three cases and compared across cases to see if similar

themes were present based on predetermined categories while also leaving room open for

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emergent themes and categories. Subsequently, I used the tables and matrices to produce
a narrative account of the cross case analysis.

The structure of this chapter is similar to the one that was used to develop the
individual cases. I begin by looking broadly at what each individual brought to this new
context for teaching. Following that, I look across the cases at the collective activity
systems that the faculty members worked with (the college system, the faculty
development class, the design teams and the Virtual University). This is followed by
comparing the faculty members’ experiences with the online teaching activity, other
contextual factors, tools, and technology as a mediator for the activity. The next section
looks at the nature of individual and/or system transformations brought about by the
contradictions and disturbances identified earlier. This chapter concludes with a summary
and an attempt to address the research questions posed at the beginning of the

dissertation.

A New Context for Teaching

This was the first experience in designing and teaching an online course for all
three of the faculty members. In other words, they were deviating from their usual scripts
of face-to-face course design. Although Mikala and Juliet had looked at some examples
of other online courses, upon entering this project all three of the faculty members mainly
had only their face-to-face teaching experiences to build on and transfer to the online
context. Not surprisingly, they used their previous experiences from the face-to-face

context as a heuristic for thinking about online course design. For example, Juliet began

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her online course design activity by thinking about what she would do in a face-to-face
class, but initially she had no idea how to transfer that to the online context.

I said things like in my (face to face) class I would do this. But, how to, because I
would do so much of this in role-play and simulation in the classroom, how to do
that, assimilate those experiences online. . .. How do you do that, take whatever I
do in the classroom and just put it into electronic format (Juliet, interview, May 2,
2001)?

Juliet’s activity was also complicated by having to condense a fifteen-week class
down to a six-week class. She struggled with how much content the students should have,
how to break it up across the weeks of the course but also how to interact with the
students and manage her time online. She had not had to consider these issues for some
time in her face-to-face teaching activities.

I didn’t know how much work to give them. . .. I wasn’t sure how to chunk the

information... I wasn’t sure what the content flow should be. . .. It was a real

intellectual challenge for me to develop the course and then to teach it and to
figure out how to manage my time, manage my interactions with students... that
was really very intellectually engaging to think about my teaching in a different

way. . .. I hadn’t really thought explicitly about instructional design before, as I

had to do this course (Juliet, interview, September 26,2001).

Mikala also drew upon techniques she used in the face-to-face context but found
that they were more easily transported to the online context than Juliet and Jim did.

Building a sense of community (is) important to me period no matter what setting

I am in. It is just my nature to want to build a space that’s precious, that is about

learning and respect for our Ieaming. I am also big on the reflective practitioner —

so, I started with a self-portrait type of activity and on top of that built more team-
oriented projects. I wanted people to get to know one another — so my first two

activities are really built on “getting to know you” (Mikala, interview, August 21,

2001)

The differences in Mikala’s experience may have been due to the fact that her

activity was less complex than that of Jim and Juliet. Since Mikala did not take the

faculty development class, she only had to deal with content development and the

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structure for the course. She was not trying to simultaneously Ieam about the technology
used to put the class online as in the cases of Jim and Juliet. Mikala developed the
content, and then took it to the VU producer who handled all of the technological aspects
of integrating the course with the technology. In that sense then, Mikala’s course design
activity deviated less from her usual script than that of Jim and Juliet. In addition,
Mikala’s activity with the VU producer also followed the VU’s usual script and the
predetermined division of labor.

However, a similarity among all three of the faculty members was that the new
activity forced them to bring to a conscious level their often tacit thinking about larger
issues of course design and teaching as in this example from Jim.

It occupies my consciousness a lot. . .. I’m always thinking about what I should

do, could do, should have done, need to do, that kind of thing. All the time, all the

time it doesn’t, I don’t think I was that preoccupied with face to face. . .. It’s like

starting to teach all over again (Jim, interview, October 23, 2001).

Another similarity among the faculty members was their anxiety about their
ability to teach in the new context. They were concerned about whether they would like
teaching online and whether they would be able to do it well. Mikala said, “I questioned
my capacity to do this and to enjoy it... because I enjoy the physicalness of (face-to-
face)... I had this fear of doing this...” (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001). Jim said,
“This whole thing could fall completely flat. .. I think it’s a possibility with this online
environment” (Jim, interview, May 7, 2001).

They also had concerns about classroom management and the amount of time
they would have to devote to the class. “How much time it’s gonna take is a real concern”

(Jim, interview, May 7, 2001). Jim and Juliet were both uncertain about how well they

would get to know their students online versus face-to—face, whether the context would

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facilitate the formation of a Ieaming community, and whether they would be able to
engage their students deeply with the content. For instance, Juliet said, “One of the
concerns I had was that people don’t really participate and it’s hard to get them talking to

each other...” (Juliet, interview, July 12, 2001).

Collective Activity Systems

The College System

The college that developed the online program offered several supports to faculty
members such as financial support, a lap top computer and the faculty development class.
In particular, the example of the faculty members’ course design teams highlighted the
importance of offering a variety of institutional support structures for faculty members.
All of the faculty members were experts in the course content and in designing face—to-
face classes. In the new activity, they resorted to historically formed mediating tools such
as heuristics, previous experience with certain types of students and their philosophies on
learning and teaching. However, their lack of knowledge in technology and pedagogy of
online instruction meant that key knowledge gaps existed, which required a deviation
from the normal scripts of course design and teaching. To create the new object, the
faculty members’ existing resources were combined, used and transformed in novel ways
in collaborative activity within their design teams.

Invariably, the faculty members emphasized the design teams as one of the most
important factors in their design activity. Jim and Juliet benefited from an institutional

structure that explicitly provided design teams (the faculty development class), but

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having additional structures in place (the 10, 000 dollar stipend) allowed Mikala to create
her own design team, something she may not have been able to do without that support.
On the other hand, the college administration had not provided a course buy out
or overload pay to faculty members for this work. This became an important mediator in
Jim’s activity and ultimately affected his feelings of success. In contrast, although both
Juliet and Mikala mentioned that the course design and teaching activities were more
time consuming than face-to face activities, they attributed it to the online context and did
not suggest that the college needed to provide them with more time for the activity.
However, it seems likely that they too could have benefited from additional time to work

on the project.

The Faculty Development Class

The faculty development class was designed as an alternative to the VU model,
the latter of which created a division of labor where the faculty member was responsible
for the content and the VU staff developed the technology and the course design. In the
VU model, the technology is treated as separate from the pedagogy. Mikala’s case
provided an example of this in that unlike Jim and Juliet, who deviated from VU’s usual
script because of their experience in the faculty development class, Mikala did not have
as much opportunity to develop a deep understanding of the integration of technology,
course design, content and pedagogy. Furthermore, the VU is a “closed system” with
idiosyncratic technologies that often limits course design options for faculty members.
Many faculty members, such as Mikala, may not even realize that the VU tools are

idiosyncratic since faculty members generally do not get to experience the integration of

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the technology with the pedagogy and content in the same way that the faculty
development class allowed.

The faculty development class was designed to help faculty members Ieam how to
integrate technology, course design, content and pedagogy and take more control over
these activities. The design teams were also introduced to a variety of technologies and
design options not available to the VU. This encouraged faculty members to design
unique courses that fit with their personal and pedagogical goals and styles, as opposed to
a course designed by the VU that tends to replicate those that came before (Koehler,
Mishra, Hershey & Peruski, in press). The instructors for the faculty development class
also hoped that their approach would encourage the VU to update their technology by
virtue of having faculty members make more demands on the VU to create unique
courses.

Although this approach to faculty development was designed with the best of
intentions, it had some unintended consequences. When the participants from the two
different systems (the VU and the faculty development class) met and interacted, they
faced disturbances that stemmed from the differences in tools, course designs, producers’
lack of knowledge of course design and pedagogy, and divisions of labor between the
two systems.

From Juliet’s perspective, the faculty development course itself played a large
mediating role in her thinking about instructional design, teaching methods, student
Ieaming and technology integration. She also gained a new understanding of and skills in
the use of technology. In contrast, Jim viewed the faculty development class with less

regard. He thought that he Ieamed very little about technology and course design, which

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he also attributed to his lack of time to invest in it. Instead, he believed that he Ieamed
more by actually teaching the online class. “I Ieamed a lot about the technology by just
doing this... taking the (faculty development) course helped but there’s nothing like

being on the front lines (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).

The Design Teams

Given their lack of experience in teaching in this new medium, the faculty
members had to collaborate with others who were more knowledgeable about technology
applications. The task was too complex for an individual faculty member and therefore
was dependent on the personal knowledge of members of various activity systems, and
the coordination among individuals and artifacts (Jonassen, 2000). The collaborative
activity led to the development of new tools, artifacts and procedures.

The design team members were interconnected by virtue of their work on a
common object but each individual was also a member of other social systems. When
different people from different social systems work together to achieve a new object, the
outcome or object is likely to be influenced by the individuals’ memberships in different
communities (Jonassen & Rohrer—Murphy, 1999).

Rules, community and division of labor represent the social aspect of the activity
(Engestrom, 1994). When a new team comes together to create an object, their work is
often characterized in the beginning by establishing rules, community and division of
labor. This held true for all of the faculty members’ teams but was manifested in different
ways depending on the faculty member, their online course content and the students on

their team (Koehler, Mishra, Hershey & Peruski, in press).

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Unlike Jim and Mikala, Juliet did not have preexisting relationships with her
design team members. She also did not initially assume a leadership role in the team
because of her lack of expertise with technology. Her team floundered for about five
weeks until a technology leader emerged by developing the first mock up of a web page.

I felt like I lost about 5 weeks at the beginning of the semester because I was

clueless and clearly, my team was miles ahead of me (technologically). These

guys know so much about how to do stuff that they were kind of waiting for me to
give them direction and this is where I tried very hard not to control the team
because I didn’t feel like I could provide direction early on in the course. I was

clueless (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001).

Although Jim also had little knowledge of the technical pieces, unlike Juliet, he
had worked with his design team members on other projects. Their role definition and
division of labor did not appear to be a struggle. Instead, the team began by focusing on a
common task, Ieaming about problem-based Ieaming, which united them. They also met
on their own time outside the faculty development class. During this time, Jim was also
developing the problems that the online students would work on in his class. As the
design team members gained an understanding of the concept of problem-based Ieaming,
as well as Jim’s vision for the course, they began to shift their focus to refining the
content and working with the technology to develop the online class. At that point, the
divisions of labor became pertinent and they began to gravitate toward their respective
roles. “There was a kind of natural division of labor” (Jim, interview, May 7, 2001). One
reason for this was that the group members knew each other before they started this
activity and they already had a sense of what each other’s skills and preferences were. A

couple people focused on the technology, one person focused on structuring the lessons

and the navigation through the course site, and another person focused on developing an

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extensive orientation designed to teach the online students about Ieaming in a PBL

course.

Surprisingly I didn’t have to tell them to do things. They knew what to do. I

didn’t give anybody any tasks or any jobs to do. They figured those things out for

themselves. Towards the end, I became a person who said well, now what’s left

(Jim, interview, May 7, 2001)?

Mikala’s design team did not seem to struggle to define roles and division of labor
either; however, it seemed that Mikala was always the de-facto leader due to her position
of authority. Although Mikala's position as professor and content expert placed her in a
leadership position, she also viewed her students as knowledgeable professionals who
had more technical ability than she did. Mikala’s student assistant described their
interaction this way, "It was very collaborative. I don’t think you could detect where our
contributions were in that process because it’s all lumped together in the cases” (Bonnie,
interview, April 18, 2002).

Mikala’s team worked only on developing the content of the course and on
deciding which software programs the online students would need to Ieam. They did not
work directly with the technology needed to get the course online nor did they develop a
mock up of the course web site. With this narrower focus (compared to Jim and Juliet’s
activities), there was less need for divisions of labor among the members and therefore no
one, other than Mikala, assumed leadership positions such as “technology leader” until
Mikala began working with the VU producer.

The roles and division of labor became more sharply defined and followed the
usual VU script when Mikala took her content to the producer. Like Jim and Juliet,

Mikala had little technical knowledge and like Juliet, she had little desire to learn it.

Consequently, at this stage in the activity, Mikala relinquished much of the control to the

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VU producer based on his expertise in technology. "He’s the expert and I said to him to
do his thing. You know, trusting the people on your team and respecting their work is
extremely important. I trusted (the VU producer)" (Mikala, interview, August 21, 2001).

Thus, Mikala’s design team was comprised of content experts who, from the
beginning of the activity, were focused on the common goal of developing the content.
Mikala described the work as iterative but separate from integrating the technology used
to put it online. Jim’s team was similar in some ways in that the team was initially
focused on a common task where no one was considered the expert and there was no
need for divisions of labor. However, once the team had a shared understanding of PBL,
they began to work at integrating the online technology with the content and course
design. At that stage, Jim was clearly the content expert and the students were the
technology experts. Therefore, according to Jim, the roles and divisions of labor fell out
“naturally” around these tasks.

In contrast, Juliet’s team did not have a clearly defined jumping off point.
Although Juliet was clearly the content expert, she had little or no technological
expertise. According to Juliet, this prevented her from taking the lead role in the group.
This left the group floundering for the first few weeks because they clearly did not know
whether to start with the technology or the content or both. Hence, in the beginning
stages of their activity, the teams’ focus shifted between the technologies, the content and
the course structure with no clearly defined roles or divisions of labor (other than Juliet as
content expert). However, during this time period, the team used discussion to gradually
develop a shared understanding of things like the “look” and “feel” that Juliet wanted her

course to have, the types of activities she wanted students to engage in, and a sense of the

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types of methods she would use in a face to face class. With this somewhat tentative
understanding, a technology expert emerged when one of the students used his
understanding to create the first mock up of the course. Juliet felt that the mock up was a
good representation of her vision for the course (aesthetically and structurally) even
though it had no content. This provided the team with a common artifact, something
concrete that they could focus on and the teams’ design activity took off from there. Juliet
had something to attach her content to and the other members’ roles began to crystallize
as well (Koehler, Mishra, Hershey & Peruski, in press).

Juliet’s case may beg the question of whether or not the instructors in the faculty
development class could have done more preplanning to help her team progress more
quickly. It seems unlikely that this would have helped because of the inherently
unpredictable nature of such design sessions. On the other hand, a closer examination of
each team (beyond the scope of this study) may result in an improved understanding of
the variety of situations that may occur in the design activity. This understanding could
be used in the preparation of design sessions, not to impose tighter controls on them but
to prepare them to better handle the most common and important types of situations that
occur (Bodker and Gronbaek, 1998).

Jim and Juliet viewed their design team members primarily as technology experts
that did not affect the content. However, the data indicate that the team members went
beyond translating the technology. They influenced both the structure and content of the
courses. Thus, in that respect, all three of the teams had a common element, but there was
greater emphasis in Jim and Mikala’s teams on the students’ role in developing the

content compared to that of Juliet. Juliet was more focused on the content while members

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of her team worked on technology and some pedagogy (mapping out the structure of the
weeks and assignments and suggesting activities that could create a sense of community
among the online learners).

Despite the differences among the teams, all three of them operated on an iterative
basis where they went back and forth with ideas and products. They made decisions
informally by discussing their options, the pros and cons of each option, and their
different perspectives on them. When they eventually would settle on something that all
the team members liked, they deferred the final decision to the faculty members.
Furthermore, their work was not a reproduction of previously held knowledge or activity.
Instead, they drew upon previous knowledge, but they also were innovative and their
activities represented new work processes and led to new knowledge and artifacts.

All of the faculty members reported that because of their participation in
collective activity systems, they successfully reconciled differences between past
teaching experiences and the challenges posed by the new online environment. The
participants in the three design teams entered the situation with little shared prior
understanding of how the process was to work. They had to Ieam new things about
technology, content and pedagogy, but they also drew upon prior knowledge, which they
modified and integrated into the new context of online Ieaming. However, in the course
of their interaction around achieving a common goal, the design teams constructed a
shared understanding or intersubjectivity around their particular situation and each person
gained new knowledge in the process (Hutchins & Klausen, 1998).

Analysis of the design teams’ activities also uncovered zones of proximal

development on the individual, small group, and institutional levels. The ZPD was

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defined earlier as the distance between one’s present skills or understanding and the zone
within which one is capable of or motivated to Ieam (V ygotsky, 1978). In this study, the
ZPD concept was expanded to include small groups and the contexts in which they
functioned within the institution (Bodker & Gronbaek, 1998). In other words, by
engaging in collective activity teams comprised of actors with varying skills and skill
levels, the individual team members were able to go beyond their existing skills when
confronted with new technological possibilities in course design and teaching. At the
team level, the cooperative activity among the individuals within the teams, created new
forms of social and work activity that were collectively generated by the team members
in order to solve the problem of creating the new object, the online class. The team
members’ collective activity also provided a new form of work activity that could
become a model at the institutional level for other faculty members charged with the task
of creating an online class. Thus, the idea of students and faculty working collaboratively
to create a new object was a powerfirl one on an individual, small group, and perhaps on
an institutional level.

Furthermore, the collaborative activity reflected robust reciprocal relationships
where faculty members and students “scaffolded” one another into course design and
pedagogy in a real world application. Students “scaffolded” faculty into the use of
technology as well as providing faculty with multiple perspectives on course structure
and content. They helped faculty navigate the complexities of integrating content,
pedagogy and technology. Moreover, students in the design teams got to work with a
faculty member and design a “real” course, something that they would not have had a

chance to do in most of their other course-related experiences. This activity provided

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students with the opportunity to apply some of the knowledge they gained in graduate
school to an authentic context, and to work with tenured faculty on a real world problem.
This activity also provided students with a view into the process that a faculty member
engages in to complete a project from start to finish, instead of just seeing the final
product of a faculty member’s thinking. They got to see firsthand how faculty think
about curriculum design, teaching methods and student Ieaming, and they had the
opportunity to significantly influence the faculty members' ideas in a team project where
they sometimes had more expertise in an area than the faculty member did (Koehler,

Mishra, Hershey & Peruski, in press).

The Virtual University

All three of the faculty members talked extensively in their interviews about the
role of the VU in their activities. Mikala and Juliet both were satisfied with the support
from the VU and believed that, without the W, they never would have succeeded. In
contrast, Jim was less enamored with the VU. The VU’s rules and tools often frustrated
him and both he and the VU producer encountered several disturbances in their work
together.

Mikala followed the usual script for interactions between the VU producer and
faculty members. As a result, she experienced few disturbances and breakdowns. Jim
deviated the most from the usual script and both he and the W producer experienced
numerous disturbances and breakdowns. Juliet fell somewhere between Jim and Mikala
in deviations and correspondingly, she and the VU producer experienced relatively few

disturbances and breakdowns. Thus, it appeared that the higher the number of deviations

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from the usual script, the more disturbances surfaced and the more the systemic
contradictions were revealed.

The disturbances that occurred in each case could be traced in large part to the
historically constructed division of labor and rules that guided the activity of putting a
course online at this university. The VU programmers developed technological tools,
which were to be used in teaching the online course. The faculty members were ’
responsible for developing the content for their course and rarely had the technological
knowledge to understand what was possible. The VU producer mediated by using the VU
tools to put the faculty member’s course online. The VU producer had training in graphic
design but not necessarily in curriculum design, instructional design or pedagogy. Yet,
they were charged with the task of helping faculty member to re-configure their ideas to
match the available tools.

In general, there are both benefits and drawbacks to these divisions of labor and
rules. There are pragmatic reasons for specialization at both the institutional and
individual levels such as financial and time limitations. Furthermore, not all faculty
members are intrinsically interested in Ieaming about technology, and some may see it as
not worth the time that it takes (a limited resource) away from thinking about pedagogy
and the other responsibilities they have (Koehler, Mishra, Hershey & Peruski, in press).

However, such divisions of labor, rules and idiosyncratic technology limit options
for faculty members, course quality may suffer, producers may make decisions that have
unintended pedagogical consequences, and VU courses may end up looking like clones
of each other instead of reflecting faculty members’ unique visions and styles of course

design and implementation (Koehler, Mishra, Hershey & Peruski, in press).

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If faculty members do not deviate from the usual VU script, the system is
maintained and institutional practices get stabilized as producers present incoming faculty
members with existing online course designs as exemplars (Koehler, Mishra, Hershey &
Peruski, in press). This scenario was most evident in Mikala’s case. She did not take the
faculty development course and she had little interest in learning about the technology
used to instantiate her course online. She saw this as one of the main benefits in having a
VU producer; hence, the W producer took the lead role in this activity. However, one
deviation on Mikala’s part, a highly interactive course with several different teams,
highlighted a systemic contradiction that resulted in a disturbance during her course.
Because of the producer’s lack of training in pedagogy and curriculum design and
Mikala’s lack of experience with online contexts and technology tools, neither of them
had thought to provide a separate space or thread for the online teams to conduct their
own interactions. This led to Mikala’s being overwhelmed by emails and unable to
monitor each teams’ interactions. On one hand, this disturbance may have been avoided
if Mikala had taken the faculty development class because they discussed issues such as
this. In a face-to-face classroom, faculty do not have to separate out the conversations
since the way space is configured, people can easily form their own groups and there is a
tacit understanding that they can physically configure their own spaces for conversation.
However, in an online space, the responsibility for that falls on the faculty member,
something that Mikala (not surprisingly) did not realize. On the other hand, the producer
was a technology expert with some design, but not instructional design skills; therefore
(not surprisingly), he did not realize it either. This disturbance highlighted a systemic

contradiction, the divisions of labor set up by the VU system’s method of online course

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design, and in addition, this scenario strengthens the argument against such divisions of
labor.

Juliet had much the same attitude as Mikala did about Ieaming the technology.
She did not have a desire to Ieam how to operate it nor did she see the need to since she
had the VU producer for that. However, she took the faculty development class where the
instructors for the course had a responsibility for helping faculty members develop their
online course, but their goals were somewhat broader-- helping faculty to understand the
relationships and integration of the technology with course design, content and teaching.
The faculty members also had the advantage of getting several weeks to play with various
technologies and course designs. Consequently, Juliet had more knowledge about online
instructional design and technological options in an online environment than Mikala did.
Greater knowledge of design and technology seemed to be factors that contradicted the
VU system. The VU’s goal was to get the course online with the minimum of problems
using whatever tools they had, but Juliet presented her own mock up of her course and
was resistant to changes that the VU producer suggested. She co-opted more of the
control over the design activity than was typical in the producer’s experience. As a result,
Juliet’s producer encountered several disturbances that could be traced to the systemic
contradictions. However, he also experienced transformations in his thinking and created
an innovation, which most likely effected change in the VU system. The producer’s
outcome supports the notion that disturbances are not necessarily bad, and that they can
spur positive transformations in both individuals and systems.

Compared to Mikala and Juliet, Jim deviated the most from the usual script and

both he and the VU producer encountered several disturbances. Like Juliet, Jim had taken

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the faculty development course and therefore had more knowledge and experience with
instructional design and technological options than many faculty members do. Jim also
brought his own mock up of his course but in addition brought along several of his design
team members to work with the VU producer. This further muddied the waters in terms
of the divisions of labor. All of this was complicated by Jim’s incorporation of the PBL
framework, which was unfamiliar to both the design team members as well as the VU
producer. This latter variable interacted with both the course structure and navigation,
further complicating the activity. In the end, however, the disturbances also led to some
transformations in the VU producer’s thinking and to an innovation. For Jim, the
disturbances just seemed to lead to frustration with the VU system and with himself for
not having had the time to Ieam how to operate the technology, thus making him more
dependent on the W system. He was convinced that the VU system needed to change
and that he needed to explore other systems and to become more facile with the
technology to achieve his goals.

Thus, due to the historically constructed (i.e., constructed separately and
differently within each system) tools, divisions of labor and rules that governed these
activities, deviations from the usual script highlighted systemic contradictions that
manifested themselves in disturbances within and between the participants. However, the
disturbances led to some individual transformations in thinking and actions as well as
some innovations. There may also have been some system changes but that is a more
complex and time consuming process that would require more time and varied kinds of

data collection to track and confirm.

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The Online Teaching Activity

All three of the faculty members’ goals were to create a community of learners in
their online classes. In all of the classes, the students worked in groups to complete
assignments and their grades were partly contingent upon their participation. In order to
track participation, the students had to communicate in writing online. As a result, the
faculty members noticed an increased level of contact and interaction beyond face-to-
face. The online medium also afforded the opportunity for more frequent and sustained
interaction as opposed to a face-to-face class that meets one-day a week for three hours.

Jim and Juliet believed that the methods of communication afforded them the
opportunity to get to know their online students as well as, and in some cases better than
they had in their face-to-face classes. They were able to get a better sense of what and
how their students were thinking about the content, and they saw students participate that
they never would have heard from in face-to-face classes. As a result, they believed that
the online context provided them with a better assessment of their students’ learning than
the face-to-face context.

Initially, all three of the faculty members thought that they would miss the face—
to-face contact with their students. Instead, they were surprised to find that there was
increased visibility of their students and their work. It is pOssible that with the online
medium there is a lack of visual and other contextual cues that faculty may take for
granted in face-to-face classes. Because face-to-face has more of a visual context
available, faculty members may not pay as much attention to the individuals and the
teams that the students belong to. In addition, the online students produced more writing

than they would have in a face-to-face class, which may have helped the faculty members

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to better contextualize their students. The students’ writing may have helped the faculty
members to create images of their students, what they were like and it located the
students within their teams. The faculty members could identify each student’s role in the
team in a way that was not as easy to do in a face-to-face class. Thus, in many ways, their
online students became more visible to them. As Jim said,

I have a general sense of every person. I can visualize (them). I’ve read their

writing. I can visualize and I can understand the ways in which they are thinking

about problems. I would never be able to say that about twenty-six face-to-face
members. I think it is a cool thing. I would not have anticipated that (Jim,

interview, October 23, 2001).

Juliet’s interpretation was pretty close to Jim’s but Mikala differed in her view of
managing students’ team work online until she made some changes in the teams’
communication paths. Once she dedicated a “space” or thread for each team to work in
separately, she had little trouble monitoring them.

In person, you can watch the team working, you can intervene, and even though I

was trying my best to watch it in the first case, because I didn’t have the different

threads, I couldn’t see the progress on a daily basis. I couldn’t intervene fast
enough. I think that’s really important in doing these kind of team projects is
setting up these communication systems so that as the instructor you can see the
progress on a daily or on an every other day basis and you can intervene

immediately (Mikala, interview, December 7, 2001).

Contextual Mediators

All three of the faculty members mentioned similar contextual mediators that
affected their activities. The primary one was the support of the college, both the
financial support and the college’s commitment to making the program happen. Also
notable was that each faculty member created personal support systems above and

beyond what the institution provided. For example, Jim’s son helped him with technical

information and Jim continued to work closely with his design team members throughout ,

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the design and teaching activities. He also used the activity as a research topic for himself
and his students.

Juliet interacted with her husband around the issues facing online teachers and
Mikala sought support and advice from colleagues in the college. In addition, she said
that she had to learn how to use some of the technology because her husband, who
normally would handle that for her, was out of town. That forced her to have to Ieam

some new things.

Tools

Often, software and hardware tools are thought of as being neutral and value free.
However, tools have different affordances and constraints and they guide our actions in
different ways. One of the differences between systems in this study was in the available
tools used to create the objects (i.e., between the faculty development class and the W
system). The differences in the tools used in each system were a source of contradiction
that led to disturbances between individuals’ work activities. For instance, the faculty
development course introduced the design teams to Blackboard (a commercial course
management system) for use in developing the mock-ups of their online course web sites.
However, Blackboard is only one instantiation of what an online course website could
look like. Blackboard is a highly integrated environment that allows only for certain ways
of doing things. It also comes with an extensive suite of additional tools for student
tracking, creating assessments and so on. It is likely that the use of Blackboard in the
faculty development course resulted in contradictions between the systems that led to

disturbances for Jim and Juliet. This was because the VU had a different system that

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allowed for different instantiations of what an online course website could look like and
how it could function.

The VU system was not an integrated system like Blackboard. The VU had a
limited set of widgets that could be mixed and matched based on the requirements of the
course. This was a very different design approach than that espoused by Blackboard.
Moreover, some of the tools that were integrated within Blackboard were not available
from the VU. Having used Blackboard in the faculty development course, the faculty
members may have assumed that such tools and add-ons would be available on any
online teaching platform and thus they based their vision of their course on the
availability of these tools.

For instance, in Jim’s case, the lack of availability of a student-tracking tool
among VU’s widgets became a problem. His request for such a tool led his producer to
develop one but the producer was prevented from using it by his superiors at the VU due
to concerns around human subjects’ clearance. In some fundamental sense, differing
views of what tools should be available created this entire disturbance. Jim felt that as an
instructor, he had the right to know which students were online and when. That was one
way to assess participation. The producer saw his role as being one of helping the faculty
member achieve his goals and thus created a widget to do that. However, the VU
management saw looming ethical and legal issues regarding student privacy.

Juliet faced some similar issues but they were related to the kind of design, both
the graphic and navigational structures, she envisioned for her course. The VU producer
initially did not like her site because it did not fit his vision or the traditional VU

philosophy about how online courses should be designed. However, since one of his

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goals was to satisfy the client (Juliet), he worked with her original design but faced many
difficulties with organizing the navigation through the site. Because of his willingness to
meet the faculty member’s needs and goals, he Ieamed about new design options and,
according to the VU producer, what he was Ieaming was one of the factors that pushed
him toward doctoral research in this area. In addition, as in Jim’s case, the VU producer
designed a new widget for Juliet’s students, which facilitated their understanding of how
physical room arrangements can affect interaction, learning, conflict, management, etc.
The differences in tool availability between the faculty development class and the
VU systems also were a source of two other contradictions-- one within the faculty
development course and one between the course and the VU system. First, the
contradiction within the faculty development course stemmed from the instructors’
philosophies about how people Ieam about technology. One of their goals was to develop
in the faculty a flexible approach towards technology. They were sensitive to the fact that
technology users often made essentialist attributions to the particular technologies they
were used to, rather than seeing a particular technology as being one instantiation of a
broader set of tools. For instance, users of Eudora for email may see Eudora as being
representative of all email packages. The instructors of the faculty development class
wanted to discourage such essentialist thinking by having faculty members work and play
with a range of technologies so that they would develop a more complex and nuanced
way of thinking about technology. However, there is an inherent paradox in this
technique since the first technology introduced to faculty members had the potential of
becoming the paradigmatic software. The students (which included the faculty members)

could essentialize the attributes of that software or tool and see all of online learning

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through its lens. To avoid that outcome, the class had to strike a balance between talking
about tools (email programs, file transfer protocols or the Web) in broad generalities
(which can result in students not Ieaming how to use the tools), versus having students
Ieam to use particular tools and not see the broader issues, but rather see that tool as
being representative of all available tools. This fundamental contradiction was resolved
by introducing students to a variety of tools to discourage essentialist thinking. However,
that also created a contradiction between the faculty development class and the VU,
which led to disturbances in the faculty members’ work with the W producer. Since
faculty members were used to having access to a wider array of tools to meet their goals

than the options available at the VU, they were dissatisfied with the limitations imposed

by the VU tools.

Technology as a Mediator in Learning and Teaching

All three of the faculty members spent more time developing their online classes
than they typically would spend developing a face-to-face class. This was in part
attributable to having to frontload their content for each class meeting before the first
class. They also found that they had to devote more time to online teaching than face-to-
face because the online students produced more writing, and because of the opportunity
for more frequent and sustained interaction compared to a face-to-face class.
Furthermore, they found that they had to attend to their student groups individually on
their discussion threads as opposed to face-to-face classes where they either watched
from a distance while all groups interacted simultaneously or sat in on each group for a

limited period. The benefits to teaching online were that the faculty members got to “see’

individuals and groups processing information, doing inquiry and grappling with the

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content issues. Thus, although online teaching took more faculty member time, they all
agreed that it was worth it to “see” more of their students’ thinking and Ieaming.

All of the faculty members found that providing each group with their own space
or thread for communications, in addition to a class wide space, helped the faculty
members to monitor each groups’ progress and interactions. It also helped the faculty
members to assess each student’s contributions to their group and thus served as an
accountability tool.

The faculty members noticed that the medium also afforded an increased level of
contact and interaction beyond face-to-face. In addition, the fact that students had to
communicate in writing meant that students’ thinking was more visible than the faculty
members had experienced in face-to-face teaching. The medium also afforded students
easy access to course-related content on the Internet, which they often shared with their
classmates during the semester. For instance, Mikala explicitly set out to use the web as
her “textbook” but students exceeded that by finding other pertinent sites and sharing
them with the rest of the class. Juliet used the web as her text to a lesser extent but
realized the convenience and virtue of sending students to sites that provided some of the
course content, such as explanations of theories and concepts. Jim also came to realize
the value of the Internet for this purpose as his students brought web-based resources to
the discussions and problem solving sessions.

While Mikala always seemed clear about her role as teacher, the online context
raised such questions for both Jim and Juliet. For Jim, the questions may have arisen in
large part because of the PBL framework. That framework pushed students to become

more independent in their learning and less reliant on Jim. Consequently, Jim began to

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question what his role was. Alternatively, for Juliet, the issue was centered on
instructional design. In the online context, she had to frontload the instructional design,
which she believed made her interact with students in a different way than she had in
face-to-face classes. Online, she felt that she had less of an opportunity to be spontaneous
and change strategies in the moment compared to her face-to-face classes.

Jim also talked about how the online context impeded his spontaneous nature
because of frontloading of instructional design and content. In contrast, since Mikala
tended to do a lot of preplanning in her face-to-face classes, and carried those procedures
over to her online course design activity, she never grappled with what her role was in the

online context.

Transformations

The preceding analyses revealed that for all three of the faculty members, their
activities led to deeper thinking about often-tacit issues in course design, teaching,
pedagogy, Ieaming and the mediating role of technology in these activities. As a result,
they all experienced transformations in thinking and work processes. In addition, the VU
producer created innovations and experienced transformations in thinking in response to

disturbances.

The Online Teaching Activity
All three of the faculty members gained new confidence as teachers in the new
context. When they started the activity, they were uncertain about their ability to do well

online. Furthermore, they questioned whether they would enjoy teaching online. In the

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end, their actual experience online was contrary to what they thought that they would

find. For example, Mikala said,
I Ieamed a lot about myself as an instructor/facilitator on this venue in terms of I
questioned my capacity to do this and to enjoy it as much because I enjoy the
physicalness of (face-to-face). . .. I remember when we first talked I had this fear

of doing this and now I’m not afraid of doing this at all (Mikala, interview,
December 7, 2001).

Juliet also thought that she would miss the face-to-face contact with students and
she was concerned that she would not be able to form relationships with them. However,
after teaching online she said, “I don’t miss the face to face as much as I thought I would
because I feel like I’ve got relationships with these people and that’s the part that
surprises me because I wasn’t sure I’d have that” (Juliet, interview July 12, 2001).

Jim was initially concerned that he would not have a good sense of what the
online students were Ieaming because he would not be able to see their faces. However,
he found that in the online context, he had a better sense of their learning and thinking
than he had in the face-to-face context.

...You can hide in face-to-face teams. You can loaf and get by and Ieam very

little because the teacher often times does not have a clear sense of what you are

learning. .. clear evidence of your individual standing and performance. In the
online environments you’ve got, well not a pathway to their soul but it’s pretty
close and so it’s kind of hard to hide. I know when people are loafing. I know
when people are not doing the reading. I can tell whether they are thinking

carefully about stuff. . .. Those are all things which become much more transparent
online (Jim, interview, December 18, 2001).

The Face-to-Face Teaching Activity
Participating in designing and teaching an online course for the first time led to
transformations in thinking about face-to-face teaching for all three of the faculty

members. For Jim, the experience of getting to know his students through their writing

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was powerful. Because of that, he believed that subsequently he would require his
students to write more frequently in his face-to-face classes.

Juliet had a similar experience. She found that online, her students were more
accountable for their thinking about the content compared to her face-to-face classes. As
a result, she hoped to figure out ways to change her face-to-face teaching to get similar
results. In contrast, Mikala mainly experienced transformations related to the use of
technology and her comfort level using it in her face-to-face classes.

There are several possible explanations for these transformations. First, the new
context for teaching forced faculty members to confront their previously tacit thinking
about course design, teaching and student Ieaming. Second, in the new context, faculty
was introduced to new and unfamiliar tools. They had to figure out how to integrate new
tools with content, pedagogy and course design. Third, they had to work collaboratively
. with others to accomplish this, and they had to work with unfamiliar systems that had
developed their own tools, divisions of labor, rules, goals and accountability. These

factors also forced the faculty members to think about their activities in a new way.

Tools

All of the faculty members gained more knowledge about what goes on inside the
black box of technology. Although Mikala's course design process differed from that of
Jim and Juliet, she also gained several new insights into technology. For example, Mikala
thought extensively about the role of technology in communications and student Ieaming.
However, all faculty members began to see the bigger picture of how technology works

in this context and they developed new design options for future courses. Mikala and

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Juliet specifically discussed their increased comfort level with technology and their plans
to use it more in their face-to-face classes.

In terms of the design teams, because Jim and Juliet's teams were in the faculty
development class, they were exposed to a wide range of technologies, assessed their
usefulness, and integrated some of them in the design of the course web sites. The teams
interacted around ideas such as the relationships between content, technology and
pedagogy, which played out in a number of ways during the activity of designing their
online classes. For example, they Ieamed about graphic design and how graphic design
gets integrated into course design with the available technology. They also Ieamed about
what affordances and constraints various technologies provided, as well as the impact of
the technology on content representation. In contrast, Mikala’s team focused strictly on
content and only dealt with technology in terms of what existing software programs the
online students should Ieam. Mikala’s team was not exposed to technologies and options
available outside the VU and therefore may not have developed the same kind of

understanding as Jim and Juliet’s teams did.

The Virtual University

Because Jim and Juliet Ieamed about technology available outside the VU and
made more demands on that system to provide variety and options in their final course
designs, they may have experienced more disturbances in their work with the VU
compared to Mikala. However, their knowledge of the technology also allowed them
greater control over course design, led to transformations both in their thinking and the

VU producer's, as well as a couple of innovations that will become part of the VU

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system. The innovations represent a change at the system level because they will be
available for other producers and faculty members to use in their courses.

The VU producer also acknowledged that the VU system administrators were
beginning to discuss issues such as how they change the pedagogy when they put courses
online. Furthermore, the W administrators realized that their system tools had become
outdated and they were actively looking at ways to change the system to keep up with

increased demand for their services.

Summary and Original Research Questions
In this section, I will revisit the two original research questions while
summarizing the cross case analysis. The original research questions were:
0 What contradictions and disturbances emerge during the activities of
designing and teaching an online class?
0 Does participating in these activities transform the thinking of the
participants or the systems on issues such as course design, teaching,

Ieaming, technology and face-to-face teaching?

Contradictions and Disturbances

All of the faculty members were experts in the course content and in designing
and teaching face-to-face classes. The new context represented a deviation from their
normal script, which means that they were a disturbance. The faculty members used as a
point of reference their historically formed mediating tools such as heuristics, previous

experience with certain types of students, and their philosophies on learning and teaching.

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However, their lack of knowledge in technology and pedagogy of online instruction
meant that their existing resources had to be combined, used and transformed in novel
ways in collaborative activity to create the new object, the online class.

According to Jim and Juliet, the disturbances led them to question their role as
teachers and in Jim’s case, his teacher identity. All three of the faculty members also had
fears about their ability to teach in the new context and two of them wondered if they
would enjoy it as much as their face-to-face teaching. These revelations were significant
given the fact that all three of the faculty members had had extensive experience in
teaching face-to-face. It indicated that merely participating in designing and teaching in
the new online context led them to rethink and reevaluate issues that they had long since
put to rest in the face-to-face context. It also supports one of the main propositions in this
study that a new context for teaching may force faculty members to bring to a conscious
level issues that they had not considered in a long time.

Furthermore, the online context as well as the mediating tools was a disruption to
normal teaching routines and modes of communication for the faculty members. For
example, Mikala believed that the context was the primary reason for a conflict with one
of her students. Since she could not see the student’s reactions, it was more difficult for
her to resolve the conflict than if she had been face-to-face. This incident forced her to
Ieam new communication skills in the new context. On the other hand, the context also
allowed faculty members to gain insight into their students’ thinking about the content
that they thought was missing in the face-to-face context.

In addition, during their activities, systemic contradictions arose and led to

disturbances in faculty members’ work. One disturbance was Jim’s increased anxiety due

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to a lack of time in his schedule to complete this work. This may have been in part due to
the fact that the college failed to provide faculty members with extra time in their
schedules. Although the other two faculty members did not mention this as a disturbance
in their activities, they commented on the extra time that both designing and teaching the
online course took.

Other contradictions stemmed from the VU system. The system had idiosyncratic
tools that limited design options for faculty members. In addition, the producers
generally were not trained in instructional design, and the division of labor set up by the
system (faculty provide content and VU provides the technology) led to disturbances in
the faculty members’ work with the VU producers. For instance, in Mikala’s case, neither
Mikala nor her VU producer had the knowledge to realize that they needed to create
separate threads for Mikala’s online students to work in their groups. In Juliet’s case, her
course design presented a challenge to the producer’s usual script and led to difficulties
configuring the navigation through the site. Jim’s case represented the highest level of
deviation from the VU’s usual script and resulted in disturbances and frustrations for both
Jim and the producer.

However, these disturbances were also traced to contradictions between the
faculty development course and the VU system. The faculty development course, among
other things, gave more control for the course design process to faculty members, which
was in conflict with the traditional division of labor, rules and tools at the VU. When the
faculty arrived at the VU with complete mockups of their unique and highly interactive
online courses, it resulted in disturbances for both faculty members and the VU producer

(although more so for Jim than for Juliet).

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Many of the contradictions and disturbances appeared to lead to transformations
in thinking about technology, course design, teaching and Ieaming. These

transformations are summarized in the next section.

Transformations

The interactions between individuals from different systems led to disturbances,
which highlighted the systemic contradictions. Often this led to transformations in
individuals’ thinking and innovations to alleviate tensions and disturbances. These
outcomes lend credence to the “essential tension” (Kuhn, 1977) argument that, although
these tensions or contradictions may lead to disturbances in the short term, these are
essential for the evolution and development of practices in the domain. Therefore, it

could be argued that transformations are what keep systems alive and vibrant.

The Mediating Role of the Online Context

The new context created a disturbance that led to new work processes that often
took place in collaborative activity across and within systems. For instance, the faculty
development class transformed the online course design activity by combining faculty
development and student learning for the purpose of designing an online course.
Furthermore, since the college offered a range of supports to faculty members, Mikala
was able to create her own design group instead of enrolling in the faculty development
class. Thus, the college’s support structures made another transformation in work

processes possible that also can be used as a model for future design activity.

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The case analyses also showed that faculty members experienced a range of
transformations in their thinking about technology such as its role in mediating
communications, student Ieaming, teaching and course design. In addition, the online
context had transformational ramifications for their face-to-face teaching. The
transformations included the faculty members’ plans to infuse more technology into their
face-to-face classes, changing their face-to-face teaching in order to gain more insight
into their students’ Ieaming, and finding ways to increase their students’ participation
within small and whole group activities.

Perhaps one of the most interesting and important transformations that occurred
was in the individual faculty members themselves. These faculty members had been
teaching for many years, they were comfortable with and confident in their practice, but
much of their thinking and knowledge about it was tacit in the face-to-face context.
However, once they faced the new context with its contradictions and disturbances, their
transformations went beyond their thinking about teaching, Ieaming, course design and
technology. They faced anxieties about their ability to teach that they had not experienced
in many years and they reflected in a new way about their role as teachers. In Jim’s case,
these anxieties touched the core of his thinking about his identity as a teacher.

The VU producer also experienced a range of transformations such as finding new
ways to communicate with faculty members during the design activity. He also had
exposure to new curriculum designs and new navigational structures within a site. What
is more, the producer referred to this activity as one of the factors that encouraged him to

enroll in a doctoral program.

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System level change is a more complex and time-consuming process, but there
were indications that changes may occur in the faculty development class and the W
system. The instructor for the faculty development class noted that the results from this
study encouraged him to think about ways to transform the class to make the transition to
the VU easier for faculty members.

Furthermore, it is likely that the VU producer changed the VU system by creating
and infusing innovations into the system that will be available for future classes. In
addition, the producer had discussions with VU administrators regarding how they

change pedagogy when it goes online.

Continuities

Adopting the notion of contradictions and disturbances as springboards for
transformation has been a useful analytical tool in this study. However, this approach
could imply that there is a “causal” pathway to transformation (i.e., contradictions and
disturbances necessarily lead to transformation), which may be too simple of an
explanation. Moreover, an emphasis on contradictions and disturbances emphasizes the
problems and transformations, but it ignores some things that do not change. Therefore, it
may be useful to also examine issues such as, what was continuous for the participants
between the old and new contexts for teaching and what were the ramifications of the
continuities.

Data analysis revealed that there were continuities between the faculty members’
face-to-face and online course design and teaching activities. For example, in both their

face-to-face and online teaching, all three of the faculty members displayed a

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commitment to teaching and to providing core content for students, a concern for quality
education and student Ieaming, and a high level of self-reflection on their teaching.
Perhaps what is most interesting is that if these continuities had not existed, faculty
members may not have faced the contradictions and disturbances that they did. The fact
that they were reflective and continually questioning their practice, often led to
contradictions and disturbances, as well as transformations.

For example, there were continuities in the faculty members’ thinking that led to
transformations in their face-to-face teaching. In their face-to-face teaching, all three of
the faculty members had their students engage in small group work to complete projects.
This practice came out of the faculty members’ experiences and beliefs about how people
Ieam in face-to-face classrooms. The faculty members implemented this practice in their
online course designs, however they discovered that online, since their students’ group
activity was documented in writing, students’ group participation and information
processing was more visible than in the face-to-face context. As a result, the faculty
members began to think about how they might transform their face-to-face teaching to
replicate their experience in the online context.

Not all continuities led to positive transformations, however. Continuities, like
contradictions and disturbances, can lead to fi'ustrations. An example of this from Jim’s
case was his discovery that he had difficulty managing whole class discussions online,
which was something that he had not experienced in the face-to-face context. Online, he
had trouble discerning when, where and how to intervene in whole class discussions.

Juliet’s case provided an example of how continuity can lead to a disturbance and

a transformation in one’s thinking. In her first interview, Juliet said that one of her

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philosophies about how people Ieam was that students were all different, they Ieamed in
different ways, and she believed that she accommodated students by providing a variety
of avenues for students to Ieam. Although Juliet approached her online teaching with the
same philosophy, she began to question her belief when one of her online students asked
to move through the course content at her own pace, instead of being part of a group.
Juliet refused the student’s request and the result was that Juliet questioned whether her
own philosophy was realistic and implementable. Hence, that continuity in Juliet’s
philosophy became a springboard for her to reexamine her belief and ultimately to realize
that maybe she did not hold that philosophy after all.

The preceding examples show that identifying continuities, in addition to
contradictions and disturbances, broadened the scope of the findings in this study in
several ways. First, the analysis showed that continuity, not just contradictions and
disturbances, led to reflection, disturbances, transformations, and sometimes no change at
all. Second, the analysis showed that identifying the continuities can highlight the
recursive nature of development, as in the example of the faculty members’ rethinking
their students’ group work in face-to-face classes after having “seen” their students’
group work online. In contrast, contradictions and disturbances can imply linearity and
could mask the recursive nature of development. Finally, the example of Juliet
reexamining her philosophy on Ieaming strengthened the argument that a change in

venue could force faculty members to be explicit about their tacit beliefs and practices.

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Chapter 9

Discussion

Summary of the Study

In this study, I used an activity theoretical framework to analyze three faculty
members’ experiences with designing and teaching online courses for the first time. I
presented the analysis in the form of three case studies (one for each faculty member), as
well as a cross case analysis. There were two main research questions addressed in this
study. The first question was: what contradictions and disturbances emerge during the
activities of designing and teaching an online class? The second question was: does
participating in these activities transform the thinking of the participants or the systems
on issues such as course design, teaching, Ieaming, technology and face-to-face teaching?

Although the analyses focused primarily on the faculty members’ experiences and
outcomes, activity theory offered a framework to study goal-oriented individual and
group actions that took place within wider contexts or activity systems. An activity
system integrates the subject, the object of the activity, and tools into a unified whole.
The activity theory framework employed in this study was inspired by the work of
Engestrom (20003; 2000b) who based his analysis on contradictions that occurred at the
system level within activities and between surrounding activities. Contradictions at the
system level tend to manifest themselves in disturbances and breakdowns in individuals’
work processes. Disturbances and breakdowns may force individuals to adopt a more
reflective or deliberative stance toward ongoing activity (Hasu & Engestrom, 2000) and

lead to transformations in thinking, work processes and systems.

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Analysis of the data from this study revealed various systemic contradictions that
emerged and became visible in interactional situations within and between the activity
systems involved in achieving the object (i.e., the online course). The contradictions
manifested themselves in disturbances within and between the participants and in some
instances led to transformations in thinking, work processes and systems. In addition to
contradictions and disturbances, the analysis also revealed that there were continuities in
faculty members’ beliefs and actions, which sometimes led to reflection, fi'ustrations,
contradictions, disturbances, and transformations. At other times, the continuities were
simply continuities, or things that did not change regardless of the context.

Based on the results of this study, there are a variety of implications for
individuals, groups, institutions, and theory. The following section elaborates on the

implications in these four areas.

Implications

Implications for Faculty Members

This study broadened the scope of the literature on online course design and
teaching with its focus on faculty members as they worked within various activity
systems to develop and teach their first online courses. In tmn, the results from this study
may have implications for faculty members in other institutions. For example, during the
activity of creating and teaching online classes, the faculty members had to determine
how to structure and represent their content online, manage the “classroom” and
orchestrate the learning environment, establish relationships with students, communicate

effectively with students, create a Ieaming community, organize teams, and appropriately

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respond to and intervene in the group process online. Although these are teaching
dilemmas that good teachers often grapple with, this study revealed that these issues are
often tacit in the face-to-face context after years of experience. Alternatively, the online
context provided a valuable laboratory in which to consider these issues once again.
Thus, although teaching online is time consuming and sometimes creates anxiety, it can
be an important activity because it may magnify some of the critical problems that very
good teachers think about in any context.

This study also showed that teaching online could provide faculty members with
new insights into their face-to-face teaching. For example, all three of the faculty
members that participated in this study, planned to change their face-to-face teaching in
various ways because of their online teaching experience. Two of the faculty members
gained new insights into their students’ learning and thinking because more of their
students’ thinking was visible in writing in the online context as compared to their face-
to-face classrooms. Because of this, the faculty members planned to have their face-to-
face students engage in more writing about the course content in their face-to-face
classes. The faculty members also saw increased student participation in small group
activities online. As a result, two of the faculty members hoped to find ways to increase,-
as well as track the participation of individual students working in teams in their face-to-
face classes.

Designing and teaching an online class also led all three of the faculty members in
this study to acquire new knowledge about technology, such as how it operates in the
online setting, various uses for technology online and face-to-face, and how technology

mediates teaching, students’ learning, and relationships and communication with

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students. Because of their new understanding of how to incorporate technology into their
classrooms, the faculty members planned to incorporate more technology into their face-
to-face classrooms. They were also motivated to gain a better understanding of and skill
with the technology used to create and teach online courses.

This study also revealed the potential pitfalls in designing a class for and teaching
in an online environment. These activities were time consuming and raised challenging
questions for faculty members, some of which were different than the questions they
wrestled with in face-to-face classrooms. For example, a key question that kept emerging
for the faculty members in this study was, what is the role of the technology in mediating
Ieaming, teaching, and communications with students online. One faculty member
wrestled with how to identify the “teachable moments” during online discussions. That
faculty member also struggled with how to get students to participate in whole class
discussions.

The new online context also forced the faculty members to face their anxieties
about their ability to teach in a new context. They also raised questions about their own
role and identity as teachers. The new context represented a disturbance to established
practices that provided the opportunity to face previously tacit thinking about issues such
as, course design, teaching methods, and philosophies on teaching and Ieaming. The new
context was also a place to explore how continuities in thinking and actions, brought
from the face-to-face context, could result in frustrations, disturbances, and
transformations. Alternatively, some things did not change even in the face of
contradictions and disturbances such as, faculty members’ commitment to teaching,

learning, and providing certain core content for students. Perhaps without these

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continuities, the data would not have been as rich as it was. For example, had the faculty
members’ lacked a strong commitment to teaching and high levels of reflection on their
practice, they may not have faced the contradictions and disturbances that they did.

This study also showed that, on one hand, contradictions, disturbances, and
continuities could lead to positive transformations. On the other hand, contradictions,
disturbances, and continuities could also lead to anxieties and frustrations. Therefore, it is
important to note that not all contradictions and disturbances are positive and lead to
growth and change. For example, the faculty member Jim, successfully grappled with
several disturbances throughout his activities. However, at times, he also felt
overwhelmed due to a lack of time in his schedule. Jim’s case raised the question: to what
extent are disturbances growthful, healthy, and beneficial to faculty members, and to
what extent or under what circumstances are disturbances not growthful, healthy, and
beneficial? Although the results fiom this study indicated that some disturbances enabled
thoughtfirl teachers to get insights that they may not have had previously, it is also
important to recognize that some disturbances could be too great a burden to overcome.
Thus, in any analysis of contradictions and disturbances, there should be recognition that
disturbances can be valuable, but for some people in certain contexts, they could be too
overwhelming. In light of these findings, teaching online should not be entered into
lightly because, depending on the faculty member, the context, and the support provided

by the institution, the disturbances could be too great for some people to handle.

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Implications for Other Participants

In addition to faculty members, there were also implications for other individuals
that may work with faculty members to achieve a new object. For example, in this study,
the VU producer’s thinking was transformed in several ways because of the
contradictions and disturbances that arose during the activity. The contradictions and
disturbances, such as differences in design orientation, background, divisions of labor,
and the technological tools available from the VU, resulted in some anxiety and
frustration for the VU producer. However, the producer not only created new widgets to
satisfy faculty requests, he also began to think about new ways to interact with faculty
members in order to avoid disturbances in the future. Furthermore, this experience was
one of the factors in his decision to join a doctoral program to Ieam more about the
psychology of online course design and teaching.

The students in the faculty members’ design teams also benefited fi'om the
opportunity to work with faculty members on an authentic project. The students Ieamed
about online course design, technological tools, and influenced the ideas of faculty
members on technology, course design and content (see Koehler, Mishra, Hershey &
Peruski, in press for complete data). This study indicated that students and faculty
working together was a powerful mediator in both students’ and faculty members’

learning and feelings of success.
Implications for Institutions

This study also raised questions that other colleges may benefit from exploring

such as, what type of supports are important for faculty members undertaking the design

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and teaching of an online class? The college system in this study provided a variety of
supports from which faculty members could choose to suit their particular needs. For
example, all three of the faculty members said that they benefited from the informal
seminars where participants could discuss their experiences, concerns, and offer advice to
each other. The monetary support provided by the college also was an incentive for
faculty members to undertake the project, but more importantly, it provided Mikala, who
was unable to take the faculty development class, with the means to hire her own
graduate student design team to help her develop her online course. Without the monetary
support, she may not have had that opportunity.

The faculty development course was another important support provided by the
college in this study. The course provided the opportunity for the faculty members to
Ieam more about the technology and to take more control over the online course design
process than was typical for most faculty members who worked with the VU system at
this institution. In addition, the faculty development course provided a new model for
faculty development that other institutions could investigate further to determine if a
similar course would be beneficial to their faculty members.

One of the values of the faculty development course was that it was not specific to
particular technologies. This was important because technology can quickly become
irrelevant when replaced by newer technologies. Opening up technological possibilities
provided faculty members with more knowledge of technology, greater control over their
own course designs, and it led to transformations in thinking, and technological
innovations. However, the faculty development model also raised questions about

whether it was a good idea to have a course that, by design opened up technological and

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design possibilities for faculty members as opposed to more narrowly constraining them
to fit within the model already established by the VU. This faculty development model
led to some disturbances and frustrations for the participants that might have been
avoided with a different faculty development model, or one that was more sensitive to the
potential disturbances the class could create between faculty members and VU producers.
The example of the contradictions between the faculty development course and
the VU also indicated that it could be beneficial to faculty members if the activities and
services provided by different departments within a university were coordinated more
carefully. Other institutions could use this data to anticipate some of the contradictions
and disturbances that might arise, thereby benefiting both faculty members and their
students. However, not all contradictions and disturbances can be anticipated and this
study also showed that they are not necessarily bad, since steps that individuals and
organizations take to minimize them, often lead to transformations in thinking, work
processes, and technological innovations, as well as new contradictions and disturbances.
Finally, this study indicated that it might be necessary for institutions to provide
faculty members with extra time in their schedules to complete this work. Although the
college system in this study offered several important support structures, they failed to
provide extra time in faculty members’ schedules, which led to disturbances in at least
one faculty member’s activities. This study showed that it takes a tremendous amount of
time, as well as physical and emotional energy for faculty members to create their first
online course. Creating an online course was not a simple matter of transferring face-to-
face courses to the online context. Teachers who care about teaching think deeply about

issues such as their ability to teach, their role as teachers, classroom management,

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engaging students deeply with the content and, in some cases, their teacher identity.
Participating in this process led faculty members to rethink and reevaluate issues that
they had long since put to rest in the face-to-face context. Administrators should
recognize that these are significant issues that require a lot time and energy from faculty
members. Thus, an awareness of how to support faculty members in this process is

important.

Implications for Theory

This study provided the opportunity to consider the usefulness of activity theory
in this kind of research. Recognition of the history of systems and how they developed
separately in terms of their tools, rules, and divisions of labor, for example, was a useful
analytic fiamework. The analysis highlighted how participants’ collaborative work
activities can reveal systemic contradictions that manifest themselves in disturbances in
individuals’ work activities. Activity theory also provided a way to view conflicts as not
so much rooted in the personalities of individuals, which is sometimes the case, but as
rooted in the systems in which individuals are a part. Thus, conflicts between individuals
can be the result of different perspectives, tools, and incompatible divisions of labor and
rules that are inherent in the systems in which individuals must firnction. Activity theory
also provided a framework within which I could identify what mediates activity, as well
as how certain tools or artifacts are used and changed during activities. This is important
because I was able to see how individuals change or Ieam, and in turn, how individuals

can effect systemic and institutional change.

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Beyond being a test of the usefulness of activity theory, the results from this study
strengthened the argument in favor of using it. Activity theory not only provided a
framework to guide data collection, analysis and interpretations, it also provided a way to
show analytic generalization in that multiple cases supported the same theory (Yin,
1994). The fact that the theory could be applied to three cases means that there are some
overarching issues and concepts that go beyond the immediate cases. In addition to
analytic generalization, the study may also be of value for case-to-case transfer because
of the level of detail provided in each case (Firestone, 1993). With this level of detail,
readers may be able to draw implications from this study for their own settings by
examining both similarities and differences between the cases presented here and their
own situations.

Activity theory looks at the dynamics, contradictions, and dialogical interactions
within the activity systems of each participant of a network (Engestrom & Escalante,
1996). However, it may not always be possible to identify and to study all of the relevant
activity systems for each participant. Each participant is presumably a member of many
different activity systems, all of which may influence the creation of the object. For
example, the participants in this study referred to activity systems outside the university
that influenced their thinking, such as family members, but they may also have been
influenced by systems that they did not mention, such as interactions with colleagues at a
conference, personal reflection while they exercised, and so on. This begs the question of
whether activity systems actually exist in such a clear sense as they were portrayed in this
study, while in fact, a lot of thinking and activity may have been taken place outside the

particular systems focused on in this study. The participants’ activities may have been

159

influenced in settings that were not accessible by the researcher, or the participants may
not have mentioned all of the relevant systems during interviews. Furthermore, even if all
of the activity systems could be identified, it may not be practical to study all of them.

Consequently, the validity of the concept of “activity systems” could be
questioned. Are researchers oversimplifying and overlooking the fact that activity
systems are much more dynamic, and fluid, and hard to draw boundaries around than
what is apparent at first glance? Are researchers looking more narrowly at Ieaming and
change for pragmatic reasons resulting in oversimplifying a case? These questions should
remind researchers that, while the theory is useful in many ways, it also might restrict
one’s view if analyses of important systems have been omitted.

Finally, while identifying the contradictions and disturbances in the activities was
useful, the analysis also raised questions about whether focusing exclusively on those two
concepts may have implied that there is a “causal pathway” leading to transformation.
Might other analytic tools provide additional insights? For example, this study revealed
that some of the continuities in faculty members’ thinking and activities also led to
reflections, contradictions, disturbances, frustrations and transformations. Furthermore,
identifying the continuities provided data on what did not change for these faculty

members regardless of the context, contradictions, and disturbances.

Limitations
Methods
Methodologically, Engestrom (1990) argued that the ideal data for an application

of activity theory consists of historical analysis of the organization, longitudinal

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participant observation, interviews and discussion in real life settings. Compared to these
requirements, the data presented in this study are less than ideal since interviews were the
primary data source. In addition, one of the W producers did not participate in the study
therefore his perspective was absent from one of the cases. Since the other VU producer’s
perspective was an integral part of identifying and understanding contradictions and
disturbances, the data from the case without the W producer’s perspective may have
been thinner than desired. Furthermore, no data were collected from the college or the
VU administrators. Again, such data could have provided triangulation and additional

insight into contradictions and disturbances as well as transformations.

Validity

This was a qualitative study, which evokes issues of limitations such as internal
validity and the generalizability of the findings. Miles and Huberman (1994) refer to
internal validity in qualitative research as “truth value” or whether the findings of the
study make sense, are credible to the participants and readers of the study, and whether
the researcher has presented an authentic portrait of the phenomena under study. Maxwell
(1992) provided a more extensive model for validity in qualitative research that
distinguishes among four types of “understanding” that may emerge from a qualitative
study: descriptive- what happened in specific situations; interpretive- what it meant to the
people involved; theoretical- concepts and their relationships used to explain actions and
meanings; and evaluative, which refers to judgments of the work or value of the

participants’ actions and meanings. Below I address each form of validity in relation to

this study.

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In this study, descriptive validity was addressed by providing a profile on each
faculty member (Appendix C), which also included the voices of their technical
assistants. The profiles were constructed using the words of the participants and thus
provided their own account of what happened. Therefore, readers can refer to “raw data”
to get an understanding of the context, events and experiences from the participants’
perspectives. In this sense, the profiles also provided support for the interpretatiOns in the
case studies since readers can use the profiles as a means for checking my interpretations.

According to Maxwell (1992), interpretive validity can be enhanced by having
participants review the accounts for accuracy. I chose not to do that in this study for a
couple of reasons. First, each case was comprised primarily from interview data, which
included interviews from more than just the faculty members. In addition, there were data
from other sources, such as observations and artifacts. These data sources were used in
combination to produce the interpretations. The faculty members may not have been
aware of the other data sources and providing them with the data from other sources may
have violated other participants’ privacy. Second, the use of multiple data sources for
each case provided me with a side—by-side comparison between multiple cases, which
could mean that my interpretations would differ from the participants’ interpretations.

I addressed theoretical validity in this study in part by employing activity theory
as a framework to guide the development of the research questions, data collection and
interpretation. I used the theory as a tool to go beyond description and interpretation to
explicitly addressing the theoretical constructions of activity theory during data analysis
(Maxwell, 1992; Miles and Huberman, 1994). In addition, I brought my own theoretical

constructions to the study. For instance, I wondered whether changes in contexts might

162

force individuals to confront their tacit thinking and lead to changes in similar activity in
their old context. In addition, I found that continuities also led to reflection,
contradictions, and disturbances and transformations for the participants.

According to Maxwell (1992), evaluative validity is not as important as the other
types of validity because all research is open to such questions and most researchers do
not claim to evaluate that which they study. It was not my goal or intention to make
judgments about the value of the participants’ actions or meanings. My goal was to
describe and interpret their actions and provide explanation via the use of particular
theoretical constructions.

A study of this nature also raises questions about generalizability (Maxwell, 1992;
Firestone, 1993; Miles & Huberman, 1994; Yin, 1994). Researchers readily acknowledge
that the small number of cases, programs or individuals in a qualitative study limits the
generalizability of the findings to other settings or populations. Maxwell argued that,
“Generalization in qualitative research usually takes place through the development of a
theory that not only makes sense of the particular persons or situations studied, but also
shows how the same process, in different situations, can lead to different results” (p.
293). For example, in this study, I wondered whether being confronted with a new
context for course design and teaching would force faculty members to confront their
previously tacit thinking about course design and teaching developed in the face-to-face
context. The analysis indicated that this was the case for the three faculty members in this
study. Although I cannot claim that this finding can be generalized to other cases,
additional studies in different contexts could look at the same phenomena to test the

theory. In addition, several other constructs fi'om this study could be applied to other

163

cases to test their generalizability, such as what type of supports colleges should provide
to faculty members undertaking a project like this.

Miles & Huberman (1994) suggest doing a cross-case analysis in order to enhance
generalizability. In this study, I presented three cases and a cross case analysis to
highlight both similarities and differences across cases. Consequently, the analysis
addresses the question; do these findings make sense beyond one specific case? I think
that the analysis shows that they do because there were commonalities between cases.
Moreover, the findings may have applicability in other institutions that are developing
online programs. For example, the findings in this study may help faculty members to see
what issues they may face when designing and teaching online classes, and institutions
can see what types of supports they could offer to faculty members, as well as use the
faculty development class described in this study as a model for faculty development.

Furthermore, analyzing three cases took the analysis beyond a simple single case
study or evaluation study and it prevented the development of dichotomies (Miles &
Huberman, 1994). It allowed me to focus on understanding the uniqueness within each
case and similarities and differences across cases while avoiding simple conclusions of
“better than” and “worse than.” For example, if I had analyzed only two cases such as
Jim and Juliet, the value and importance of the design groups and how they could vary
would not have been revealed (e.g., Jim and Juliet’s groups were initiated by the college
whereas Mikala formed her own design group). If I had only Mikala and Juliet’s cases, I
may not have understood as well the systemic contradictions that stemmed from the VU

systems’ tools, rules and divisions of labor that were highlighted in Jim’s case.

164

Suggestions for Future Research

The data in this study provided a useful beginning to understanding the issues that
faculty members and institutions may face when designing and teaching online classes, as
well as a springboard for future research. For instance, as suggested by Engestrom
(2000a), a closer examination of the history of the various systems within an organization
could reveal additional inherent systemic contradictions that could lead to disturbances.
Such analyses could lead to additional suggestions for changes in systems that could
alleviate the contradictions. Engestrom also suggested conducting interventionist
research, which means engaging key participants in the identification and analysis of
systemic contradictions. This could be useful because if participants recognized recurring
patterns and types of trouble as manifestations of systemic contradictions, rather than
personal failures it could facilitate a conscious focus on resolving those contradictions.

Future studies could also use the online course design activity as a way to explore
and support the actual Ieaming activity necessary for the participants and the systems
within which they work. The focus could be on illuminating the examples of openings for
learning to occur in the design and teaching activities. This would require more closely
following the design groups by video taping them and doing conversation analysis, for
example. This type of analysis could help to identify specific contradictions and
breakdowns to see if and how these were opportunities for learning. The results could
then be extended to determine what that might mean for faculty development or systemic
remediation.

This type of analysis could also lead to suggestions for how groups can work

effectively together to create a course design. Being too prescriptive about how groups

165

should work together may be difficult due to the inherently unpredictable character of
such work, however, a contribution to the research in this area could be an improved
understanding of the variety of situations that may occur in the design activity. Such an
understanding could be used in the preparation of group sessions, not to impose tighter
steering on the session but to prepare to better handle the most common and important

types of situations that occur (Bodker & Gronbaek, 1998).

Conclusion

This study revealed that designing and teaching online courses presents a
challenge to faculty members’ established ways of thinking about course design and
teaching. An activity theory framework provided a lens through which faculty members’
experiences could be analyzed as they worked within various groups, who had different
goals, tools, divisions of labor and rules, to achieve a new object. The study showed how
continuities, as well as contradictions and disturbances between participants and systems
could be springboards for change in thinking and work processes.

As a result, readers can understand the process by which different groups of
people in an institution work together to create and teach online classes, as well as the
potential pitfalls of the activity. Furthermore, the participants’ activities were captured at
a particularly opportune moment in the diffusion of a new pedagogical technology,
before it becomes the norm in higher education. Consequently, this study provided a fine-
grained analysis and understanding of how technical innovation can lead to changes in

practice, thereby offering suggestions for better course development, as well as

166

contextual and technological changes that could support faculty in online course

development and teaching.

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APPENDIX A

Participant Informed Consent

Written Consent Form — Faculty

Teaching Online and Faculty Transformation

This study attempts to better understand the process of online course design and teaching.
In particular, we are interested in looking at how faculty members (such as yourself)
change in their thinking about technology and pedagogy as they design and teach online
courses. The issues of interest include beliefs about teaching, Ieaming, technology and

course design.

By agreeing to help with this research study you agree to participate in a series of
interviews (one before the class starts; two or three during the semester, and a final
interview at the end of the course). The first and last interviews will be around two hours,
while the other ones will be shorter. These interviews will be tape recorded and later
transcribed. We may use direct quotes from the interviews in the report of the research
study. I would also ask you to set me up with a "guest account" for your course. I will be
an observer and will not participate in the course (through emails or other postings) in

any way.

168

All data will be treated with strict confidence and your name will not be used in any
report of the research findings. Your privacy will be protected to the maximum extent
allowable by law. If you want to know the results of the study (within these restrictions),

you should leave your name with me.

Participation is voluntary. You have complete freedom to discontinue the study at any
time without penalty. You have the freedom to not respond to certain items. If at any
point you feel any discomfort with the questions, please do not hesitate to stop me.

I voluntarily agree to participate in this study.

Name: (printed)

 

Signature:

 

Date:

 

If you have any questions about this study feel free to contact me, Lisa Peruski, or my

MSU supervising faculty member, Dr. Punya Mishra:

Lisa Peruski
Doctoral Student, Learning Technology & Culture

351 Erickson Hall, East Lansing MI 48824

169

Ph: 248.634.2435

Email: peruskil@msu.edu

Dr. Punya Mishra
Asst. Prof. Learning Technology & Culture
351 Erickson Hall, East Lansing MI 48824
Ph: 517.353.7211

Email: punya@msu.edu

If you have questions about your rights as a subject of research, please contact:

Dr. David Wright,

University Committee on Research involving human subjects

Ph: 517. 355.2180

Email: dewrite@msu.edu

170

Written Consent Form — technical advisors

Teaching Online and Faculty Transformation

This study attempts to better understand the process of online course design and teaching.
In particular, we are interested in looking at how faculty members (such as the faculty
members you work with) change in their thinking about technology and pedagogy as they
design and teach an online course. The issues of interest include the faculty member’s

beliefs about teaching, Ieaming, technology and course design.

If you agree to participate in this study, you will be interviewed once while you are in the
process of designing the course, one time while the course is in progress and once at the
completion of the class. The preliminary and final interviews will take approximately an
hour and a half while the other ones will be shorter. These interviews will be tape
recorded and later transcribed. We may use direct quotes from the interviews in the report

of the research study.

All data will be treated with strict confidence and your name will not be used in any
report of the research findings. Your privacy will be protected to the maximum extent
allowable by law. If you want to know the results of the study (within these restrictions),

you should leave your name with me.

171

Participation is voluntary. You have complete freedom to discontinue the study at any
time without penalty. You have the freedom to not respond to certain items. If at any

point you feel any discomfort with the questions, please do not hesitate to stop me.

I voluntarily agree to participate in this study.

Name: (printed)

 

Signature:

 

Date:

 

If you have any questions about this study feel free to contact me, Lisa Peruski, or my

MSU supervising faculty member, Dr. Punya Mishra:

Lisa Peruski

Doctoral Student, Learning Technology & Culture
351 Erickson Hall, East Lansing MI 48824

Ph: 248.634.2435

Email: peruskil@msu.edu

Dr. Punya Mishra

Asst. Prof. Learning Technology & Culture

172

351 Erickson Hall, East Lansing MI 48824
Ph: 517.353.7211

Email: punya@msu.edu

If you have questions about your rights as a subject of research, please contact:

Dr. David Wright,

University Committee on Research involving human subjects
Ph: 517.355.2180

Email: dewrite@msu.edu

173

Email Consent Form - Students (sent by email to the online students).

Hello,

My name is Lisa Peruski. I am a doctoral student in Educational Psychology at Michigan
State University. As part of the requirements to complete my degree, I am conducting
research on faculty members who are teaching online courses. The faculty member
teaching the online course that you have enrolled in this semester at Michigan State
University has agreed to participate in this study. This research is wholly focused on the
faculty member. not on students, and is designed to determine if faculty members
experience changes in their thinking about technology and pedagogy as they teach an
online course. The issues of interest include the faculty member’s beliefs about teaching,
Ieaming, technology and course design. Although the focus of this study will be on
faculty members’ thinking, I will want to view communications between students and
faculty and use it as part of my data collection, analysis and reporting. This would
include communication (email, online discussions etc.) that occurs as part the
communication between faculty and students.

My role is purely that of an observer. I will NOT participate in any class discussions or

activities. In fact, it is most probable that this is the last message you will receive from

me.

All data will be treated with strict confidence and your name will not be used in any

report of the research findings. Your privacy will be protected to the maximum extent

174

allowable by law. If you want to know the results of the study (within these restrictions),

you should leave your name with me.

Participation is voluntary and is in no way connected to your progress in this class. You
have complete freedom to discontinue the study at any time without penalty. If you agree
to participate in this study, please hit the “reply” button on your email and fill in your
name and the date below. If you do not “reply” to this email, mg of your
communications during this course will be used in any part of the data collection, data

analysis or reporting in this study.

By “replying” to this email, I voluntarily agree to participate in this study:

Name:

Date:

If you have any questions about this study or wish to discontinue participation in this
study at any time, feel free to contact me, Lisa Peruski, or my supervising faculty

member at Michigan State University, Dr. Punya Mishra.

Lisa Peruski

Doctoral Student, Learning, Technology & Culture
351 Erickson Hall, East Lansing M148824

Ph: 248.634.2435

Email: peruskil@msu.edu

I75

Dr. Punya Mishra

Asst. Prof. Learning, Technology & Culture
351 Erickson Hall, East Lansing MI 48824
Ph: 517.353.7211

Email: punya@msu.edu

If you have questions about your rights as a subject of research, please contact:

Dr. David Wright,

University Committee on Research involving human subjects
Ph: 517.355.2180

Email: dewrite@msu.edu

176

APPENDIX B

Interview Protocols

COURSE DESIGN ACTIVITY

Faculty Interview #1

BACKGROUND QUESTIONS

1. Can you tell me a little about yourself? <Name, department, courses taught,

research interests>
2. What online course will you be teaching and when will you be teaching it?

3. What motivated you to teach an online course?

TECHNOLOGY BACKGROUND

1. Can you tell me about your previous experience with using computers?
<General experience. 2. What do you use computers for in your everyday life?
>

2. Can you tell me a little bit about how you have used computers in your
teaching?

3. How much experience do you have with the specific technology you will be

using to develop this online course?

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BACKGROUND WITH ONLINE COURSES
1. Do you have any experience with online courses <have you taken any? Have

you taught any? Have you observed any online course? >

BELIEFS ABOUT ONLINE COURSES
I. What are the advantages and disadvantages of online courses for teachers?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of online courses for students?

3. Is there ever a time when one mode is better than another is?

PERSPECTIVES/UNDERSTANDING OF THE DESIGN PROCESS

1. What factors do you take into consideration when designing a course?
<Students, content, goals/educational purpose (knowledge, skills, and
attitudes to be Ieamed), sequence or arrangement of content. >

2. Can you briefly describe how you would go about designing a face-to-face
course?

3. Will designing an online course be different fi'om designing a face-to-face
course?

4. What is your image of what this course will look like when it is finished?

5. Will the technology affect the online course design process? <How? >

6. What excites you most about developing an online course?

7. What are your main concerns about developing an online course?

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BELIEFS ABOUT LEARNERS AND LEARNING:

1. What do you think your students will be like? <To get at how teachers
construct learners and how this construction is being made: who their students
are, their background, life situation, abilities, background knowledge, etc.)

2. How do you think people Ieam? <What is your philosophy of Ieaming? >

3. Will the technology affect the Ieaming process for your students compared to
face-to-face teaching? <How>

BELIEFS ABOUT TEACHING

1. What will be your role as teacher in an online course? <Director, facilitator>

2. Do you imagine that your role as teacher in an online course will be different
from your role as teacher in a face-to-face class?

3. In what ways will the technology affect your teaching online compared to
face-to-face teaching?

4. What are your objectives in teaching this course for yourself and for your
students? <Are there any other objectives you have in teaching this course
such as meeting the needs of the university, college of Ed, and your
department? >

5. What are your expectations in teaching this online course?

6. What excites you most about teaching an online course?

7. What are your greatest concerns about teaching online?

8. Do you think your teaching methods online will differ substantially from your

methods face-to-face? <Explain. >

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BELIEFS ABOUT CONTENT AND HOW IT CHANGES AS IT GOES
ONLINE

1. What content will you be teaching online?

2. What should your students now about the content?

3. Compare how you represent the content face-to-face to how you will represent

it online.

4. How will teaching the content be different face-to-face versus online?

TOOLS USED TO DESIGN THE COURSE
1. What will be your sources of information while you are designing this course?
<People, books, journals, and technology that have informed your work on

this project? > <Why will you seek out these sources? > <How do you think

you will use these sources? >

 

COURSE DESIGN ACTIVITY

Faculty Interview #2

BELIEFS ABOUT ONLINE COURSES

1. Have your beliefs/attitudes about online courses changed since you have been
working on this project? <How? > <Why? > Prompt: < advantages and
disadvantages of online courses for teachers & students. >

2. What have you Ieamed about online courses since beginning this project?

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PERSPECTIVES/UNDERSTANDING OF THE DESIGN PROCESS

1.

Can you describe how you have gone about designing this online course?
Follow up: What factors have you taken into consideration when designing
this course? <Students, content, goals/educational purpose (knowledge, skills,
and attitudes to be Ieamed), sequence or arrangement of content. > <Your role
in course design. >

How did this compare to designing a face-to-face course?

In our first interview, you described your image of what this course would
look like when it was completed (repeat what they said). Was your image
realized? <Why/why not? >

What role did the technology play in the course design process?

Can you describe the structure of the social interactions surrounding this
process? <How was this structure established? > <Were you happy with this
structure? > <Why/Why not? > <Can/will you change it next time. >

Has this social structure had any affect on your thinking about teaching,
course design, technology, content, and students? <Explain>

Has the social structure had any affect on your objectives for designing this
course?

What has been the division of labor among the people working with you on
this project? <How did it come out this way? >

Has the institutional context (university, college, and department) had any
affect on your objectives for designing this course? For the way the course

came out?

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10. How much did you feel in control of this project?

11. What did you Ieam about course design while doing this project?

12. Can you give a specific example of something that you have had to redo

because you have found it to be cumbersome, unsuited to your task, or it

limited your options? <How did you conclude that you had to change it? >

BELIEFS ABOUT LEARNERS AND LEARNING:

1.

In our first interview you described what you thought your students would be
like (provide information) has this image of your students changed since you

began work on this project? <How? > <What changed it? >

2. Has your thinking about how people Ieam in an online context changed since
starting this project?

3. Do you think the technology will affect HOW your students Ieam online
compared to face-to-face? <How? > <Why? >

4. Do you think the technology will affect WHAT your students Ieam online
compared to face-to-face? <How? > <Why? >

BELIEFS ABOUT TEACHING

I. What will be your role as teacher in this online course? <Director, facilitator>

2. Do you imagine that your role as teacher in an online course will be different
from your role as teacher in a face-to-face class?

3. Will the technology affect your teaching online compared to face-to-face

teaching? <How? > <Why? >

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Have any of your goals and objectives for yourself and for your students
changed since completing the design? <Are there any other objectives you
have in teaching this course such as meeting the needs of the university,
college of Ed, and your department? >

Will your methods online differ from your methods face to face?

Have you Ieamed anything new about teaching since you started this project?

BELIEFS ABOUT CONTENT AND HOW IT CHANGES AS IT GOES

ONLINE

1.

Has your understanding of the content you are to teach changed because of
developing this online course? <Has developing this course changed the way
you think about key concepts, changing emphasis due to change in medium,
changes in organization of content?

Have your goals and objectives about content changed over time? <How? >

<Why?

BELIEFS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

1.

2.

What have you Ieamed about technology since you began this project?
Has your attitude toward technology changed since you began this project?
<How? > <Why? >

Did the technology affect the design of the course? <Your knowledge and
skill with technology? > <Others’ knowledge and skill with technology? >

Did the technology affect what content to include?

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5. Did the technology affect your thinking about how to represent the content?
6. Did the technology affect what activities you have your students doing

<Methods you are using>?

TOOLS USED TO DESIGN THE COURSE

I. What have been your sources of information while you have been working on
this project? <People, books, journals, technology that have informed your
work on this project? >

2. Why did you seek out these sources?

3. How have you used these sources?

 

COURSE DESIGN ACTIVITY
Technical Assistant Interview #1
BROAD BACKGROUND

1. Can you tell me a little about yourself? < Name, department, job title, and
courses designed previously? >

2. What motivated you to take on this project?

TECHNOLOGY BACKGROUND

I. Can you tell me about your previous background with using computers?
<General experience. What do you use computers for in your everyday life? >

2. How much experience do you have with the specific technology you will be

using to develop this online course?

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BACKGROUND WITH ONLINE COURSES
I. Have you designed courses for both online and face—to-face environments?
2. Do you have any experience with online courses <Have you taken any? Have

you designed any? Have you observed any online course? >

BELIEFS ABOUT LEARNERS:

I. How do you think people Ieam? <What is your philosophy of Ieaming? >

2. What do you think the students will be like in this online course? (To get at
how designers construct learners and how this construction is being made:

who the students are, their background, life situation etc.)

BELIEFS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY:

1. What affordances does the technology provide for learners, teachers, and the
course design process, as compared to face-to-face in all these areas?

2. What constraints does the technology provide for learners, teachers, and the

course design process, as compared to face-to-face in all these areas?

PERSPECTIVES/UNDERSTANDING OF THE DESIGN PROCESS
1. What will your role be in this process?

2. What are your expectations for this process?

3. What excites you most about this process?

4. What are your greatest concerns?

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5. What factors do you take into consideration when designing a course?
<Students, faculty goals, etc>

6. What helps the design process?

7. What hinders the design process?

8. How is the design process different for face-to-face versus online

environments?

9. Is it more or less work designing for online versus face-to-face environments?

BELIEFS ABOUT CONTENT AND HOW IT CHANGES AS IT GOES

ONLIN E

1. How does the course content affect how you design in an online versus a face-

to-face environment?

 

COURSE DESIGN ACTIVITY

Technical Assistant Interview #2

BELIEFS ABOUT LEARNERS:

2. Have your beliefs about how people Ieam changed since you began this
project?

3. What do you think the students will be like? (To get at how designers
construct learners and how this construction is being made: who the students

are, their background, life situation etc.)

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BELIEFS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY

1. How has the technology affected the course design process so far?

2. What affordances has the technology provided for learners, teachers, and the
course design process, as compared to face-to-face teaching in all these areas?

3. What constraint has the technology provided for Ieamers, teachers, and the

course design process, as compared to face-to-face teaching in all these areas?

PERSPECTIVES/UNDERSTANDING OF THE DESIGN PROCESS
1. How is the design process different for face-to-face versus online
environments?

2. What have you Ieamed about the course design process?

BELIEFS ABOUT CONTENT AND HOW IT CHANGES AS IT GOES

ONLINE

1. How did the course content affect how you designed this course?

TOOLS USED TO DESIGN THE COURSE

2. What have been your sources of information while you have been working on
this project? <People, books, journals, technology that have informed your
work on this project? > <Why did you seek out these sources? > <How have

you used these sources? >

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THE TEACHING ACTIVITY& POST TEACHING REFLECTIONS

Faculty Interview & Technical Assistant Interview

TECHNOLOGY
2. Has the technology performed to your satisfaction so far?
3. Are you getting technical support throughout the course?
4. Have you Ieamed anything new about technology so far?
5. Has the technology had any effect on your teaching?
6. Has the technology had any effect on students’ Ieaming?
7. Do you feel in control of what is happening in the course?
TEACHING & CONTENT
1. Describe what happened this week in class?
2. How do you think the course is going so far? <The best and worst thing so far
in class. >
3. What methods/activities are working best so far? <Why? >
4. What methods/activities are not working so well? <Why? >
5. So far, are you satisfied with how you have chosen to represent the various
contents you require for the course? <Give examples. > <What would you do
differently in the future, why? >
6. What would you change about your teaching if you were to teach this class
again? <Why? >
7. What would you change about the content if you were to teach this class

again? <What to include, how to represent it. > <Why? >

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STUDENTS

1. Are the students you have about what you expected?

2. How have the students responded so far to the course?

3. Have your interactions with students made you think differently about online

or face-to-face course design, teaching, Ieaming, technology?

EPISTEMOLOGY
1. Based on your experience in this class so far, have you changed your thinking

about how students Ieam online compared with face-to-face classes? <How/>

<Why? >

COURSE DESIGN

1. What would you do differently if you had to design this course again? <What

made you think this? >

 

THE TEACHING ACTIVITY& POST TEACHING REFLECTIONS

Technology Assistant Interview

TECHNOLOGY

1. Has the technology performed to your satisfaction so far?

2. How much technical support are you providing so far for the course? <What
has been your role throughout the course? >

3. Has the technology had any effect on the teaching?

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4. Has the technology had any effect on students’ Ieaming?

GENERAL QUESTIONS

1. How do you think the course is going so far? <Why do you say this? >

COURSE DESIGN

1. What would you do differently if you had to design this course again? <What

made you think this? >

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APPENDIX C
Faculty Member Profiles
Introduction

The following profiles represent a chronology of each faculty members’
experience in designing and teaching an online class for the first time. The profiles are
presented in the faculty members’ own words but at times, it was necessary to add my
words for purposes of transition and clarity. When I added my words, I place them in
brackets to signify that they were my words.

Each of the faculty member profiles presented in this appendix is preceded by a
description of the people involved with the faculty member during the activities of online
course design and teaching. Following these introductions is the profile on the faculty
member, which begins with some background information such as, professional
background, technological expertise and their philosophies on Ieaming and teaching. This
is followed by a recount of their experiences of designing and teaching an online class for

the first time.

SCJim93

Introduction -The Cast of Characters

Jim

Jim was the faculty member on whom this case profile was based. He was one of
two faculty members who took the faculty development class (F AC DEV- 101) to design

his online course. He worked with four students in the faculty development class. His

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group was unique because he formed it before entering the course with students that he
had worked with on other projects and who showed an interest in online teaching and
Ieaming. The group’s goals were not only to design the online class but also to collect
data for their own research projects on online teaching and Ieaming. Below I have
provided brief descriptions of these students as well as the VU producer that worked with
them to get the class online once FAC DEV- 101 was completed. Following the

introductions to these participants, 1 have provided the extended case profile on Jim.

Lena

Lena was a Ph.D. student who was interested in content issues and her primary
role was to create an extensive orientation to the online course. Lena was instrumental in
convincing Jim that the orientation was necessary because students needed assistance in
Ieaming how to Ieam in an online format, in groups and using the particular pedagogical
approach that Jim had chosen to introduce in the online class. Lena also participated in
some of the meetings between Jim and Sam, the VU producer, after FAC DEV- 101 had

ended.

Others

Three other students worked with Jim in FAC DEV— 101. I did not meet them or
Ieam much about them but relied on Jim to supply information about them. According to
Jim, two of the students worked primarily on the technology part of the class and the
other student was interested in instructional design and gravitated towards laying out the

lessons.

Sam

Sam was the VU producer that worked with Jim to refine and ready his class for
online delivery. Sam had come to the university as a student several years before our
interview. He began working with technology as a hobby while he was a student and took
a class or two in design and computing. Upon graduation, he took a position as a web
design director for a small city. He came back to the university and worked in University
Relations for six months when he saw an opening for a producer at VU. Since he was
interested in web-based education and design, he took the position. At the time of our
interview, he had been employed for one and a half years as a VU producer. He had
recently been accepted into a Ph.D. program at the university where he hoped to Ieam

more about curriculum design and pedagogy.

Jim

A Profile In His Own Words

[Educational and Professional Background]

I have a [science] background as an undergraduate. I worked about five years [in
that field] then I ended up teaching. I assumed responsibility for the curriculum so that’s
how I got into [my current field]. I became more interested in [teaching] than the
laboratory. 1 got my doctorate in [the late 19805]. I spent a number of years [working for
the state and did some work for the university beyond... and worked for about a year as a
consultant. My current position here is associate professor. This is my fifth academic

year. Prior to that, I was a professor at [another university] since 1988.

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I Enjoy Teaching

I like it a lot, because it’s intellectually challenging and when things are going
well, it feels really good. The qualifications that I have about it is teaching takes place
within a broader context, which makes the teaching itself more difficult. It’s difficult to
spend a lot of time on one’s teaching because it’s drawing away from other things, which
are considered to be important as well and so that creates a tension which is not very
comfortable. I don’t spend as much time preparing as I should, as I want to. The more I
prepare, the more I Ieam from my own preparation and sol feel cheated myself that way
and perhaps my students as well.

I don’t think I’m as experimental in my teaching as I would like to be. There’s
lots of things I’d like to change if I had the time or the energy so all those things make it
a little less attractive because I feel like I’m being pulled in multiple directions. But when
things are going well, when I have really good students who are interested and I feel like

I’m teaching material that I know really well, it feels good.

My Role As A Teacher...

Is to help people think more critically about their work. I want to foster people
who are reflective in their practice. I want them to think about the bigger picture. I want
them to think about not just what it is that they’re trying to accomplish within the practice
setting but what the broader issues are for the field and how that contributes to the
betterment of society. I’m hoping that they’re developing a more thoughtfirl, critical and
reflective stance towards their work. I want them to understand literature in their

research and theory on which their practice is grounded but that’s not the primary thing

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for me. The primary thing is the content is a means to an end and the ends being for them
to develop this sort of critical, thoughtful stance.

I think I’m more successful at the critical, thoughtful and reflective piece and not
so successfirl at the self-knowledge piece. I really would like my teaching to be more of a
place where people experience the opportunity to wonder about themselves and to think
more deeply about who they are and what they stand for. A place to do inner work
perhaps that they aren’t able to do elsewhere to encounter images and symbols that are
provocative in their lives. I try but again, because of the time constraints, that takes a lot
of work, a lot of planning, that’s not always there so I think I’m less successful at that

piece.

[Teaching Methods/Philosophy]

I do that primarily by putting in front of people interesting work, by creating
educative environments and experiences that crack open things for them, that help them
see things they haven’t seen before and think about things that they haven’t thought about
before. I use short lecture. There are some things that people need the presentation of
information to develop a clear understanding and a more or less common understanding
of the information they’re talking about. I also try to augment the readings, on the
average about 70% in some kind of experiential activity- small group work, and reflective
exercises. We do case work, problem work. A lot of these things, I make up as I go along.
I don’t go to a resource book to look for an interesting experiential activity. I just think

about what it is that I’m trying to do with the material, the ways in which I want the

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learners to interact with the material, then I try to create some kind of experience that
maximizes that.

I believe in driving the students back to the text. I think a lot of students, if they
do read, that’s the question, they don’t understand it very well. They come to class with
one reading, very cursory, and if you ask them simple questions, if they had a really deep
understanding, they’d be able to answer quickly and many students struggle with these
simple questions and so I know that they’re not bringing to the class the kind of working
understanding that they need to go further with that. So, often times, I will create
exercises, case scenarios or problematic situations, which drives them back to the text.
They have to use the text in the context, in the process of doing the exercise so that helps

them develop a deeper understanding of the theory.

People Learn by Doing

That sounds a little cliche. There’s lots of ways in which one can do that and
also, Ieaming happens within some kind of a social context. To really get people to Ieam
effectively they have to be actively involved and they have to somehow be able to
connect the content to their own life experiences. They have to be able to see how it fits
in, how it relates to, how it builds on what it is that they’re already bringing to class and
presumably, the kinds of activities that I do help them do that. Learning is not just
students mastering information. It’s taking information and reconstructing it within their
own contexts, whatever those contexts are. We can all use contexts to make sense of

what it is that we’re leanring and that’s what we try to do. Even students who think

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they’re learning on their own and wanta Ieam by themselves aren’t doing that. The more

social we can make that process; I think the more effective that becomes.

I’ve Used Computers for a Long Time.

I bought an Apple IIE when they first came out... so that was in the early ‘805. At
the time, I was using computers in my work because we did research projects and so we
were entering [data]. The keyboard and the printer were all one piece and they were
hardwired to the computer. The last part of my masters program we did a research
project where we actually had to do the cards, they punched the cards and ran them
through and found out where the mistake was. We were basically compiling statistical
information.

I used computers a lot in my work, primarily for word processing but we also
[produced] information in terms of booklets and things like that. This was before we had
the high powered software that we have today so if we wanted italics for example, we
had to get the codes. If we wanted something bold, the higher case or the lower b. The
commands all had to be embedded. Software became more accessible, more powerful so
I used word processing a lot and then I also used building a graphic database. I used
statistical, SPSS stuff and then the last part of my stint at [another university] we started
to do web based stuff.

I was using email since the early 905 and began to use list serves in classes the
last year or so. I also was involved with distance Ieaming, video. We didn’t do much with
computers but we used faxes and telephones to do small group work and that was roughly

parallel to some of the stuff that’s going on now.

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[Mastering the Technology]

Learning more about the technology... would make it easier for me to do some of
these things. I suppose I could take an idiots approach and say I’m just going to develop
the content and someone else is going to be responsible for the technical design piece but
that’s never been my approach. My idea would be that ultimately I would be able to do
this entirely myself... because it allows me to play more. . .. I’ve got the idea I’m at my
computer... I can go to the software and begin to work with it to see whether it’s possible
or to what extent it’s possible. . .. It’s much more creative that way. I think there is a
tremendously creative aspect to this work. That’s really the exciting part. It’s not just
finding a way to get this stuff delivered but you’re actually creating a new way, you’re
creating your instructional deliveries. You’re actually creating fundamentally different
ways of understanding, potentially, for the students and for yourself too. In the process
of trying to take this information or this issue and trying to create a pedagogical unit
online that would really facilitate an understanding and grasp of the issue I think is really
cool stuff but you need the technology. You need to be very familiar and conversant with
these things. I want to be able to create video... to use video to use audio. I don’t want to
have to ship it off to producers. I want to be able to say Ibok I want to use this clip in this
movie. I want to be able to download it. I want to be able to digitize it and I want to be
able to insert it into my class like for next week. There is a huge Ieaming curve. I’m
thinking when am I going to Ieam to use this... but the way our lives are constructed it’s
hard for me to even imagine when this stuff gets done. . .. Mastering the technology to the
point where I’m comfortable with it and can use it in a creative way. I think the more I

know the better I can be at creating.

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[Current Use Of Technology]

I use blackboard in my teaching for discussion groups, dissemination of class
notes, distribution of assignments. Students in [another class] had to do work in groups
and so we created project teams and they did a lot of discussion in the teams. . .. on line. I
use PowerPoint a lot. I’m concerned about my reliance on PowerPoint. I think it can
structure classrooms. It can create a mechanistic feel to the classroom that I don’t like. It
seems to squash my spontaneity. So, even though I think it communicates information in
ways that are very effective, it sort of structures the sessions for both myself and my
students and [it sometimes feels constraining].

Every once in a while, we’ll use the web. The students were doing a lot of stuff on
line, away from class, and so when we would meet I would go onto the website and pull
some of the information like diagrams up so we’d look at them and talk about them or
lists of ideas that people had generated rather than printing them off, disseminating them,
'cuz everybody had access to it. I used the computer to generate, whereas I would write
on the blackboard, I now use the computer so it’s not uncommon for me to create tables,
to create matrices of information as people are reporting back their group work.

I liked blackboard because [I can] create a forum section and people could talk
together. Blackboards are really a cool way to organize information. I think it’s an even
more powerful adjunct to teaching than PowerPoint. It’s a way of helping organize the
course. It provides an opportunity for students, if they so choose, of having the content
confronting you the entire week not just sort of once a week for three hours. Through the
creation of questions you are much more reflective and engaged with the material in a

more consistent way throughout the week. It also provides a scrolling record. To some

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degree, it generates outcome data. We can begin, as instructors, to see the kinds of things
our students are thinking about, how they’re thinking about it, etc. I could see what

people were participating, what they’re participating in.

[Experience with Online Teaching]

I’ve done a couple of experimental sessions using email when I couldn’t be there.
I basically scripted the session on line through the list serve. I created a very crude sort of
online learning experience so they would have the whole week to do it but I scripted the
content so what I might say in a given lecture, I wrote out and then I would build in
individual exercises and then I assigned the students to small groups and then gave group
assignments and then report back to the large group. I did three or four meetings like that.
They’re very labor intensive. I would spend probably more time creating that one session
than I did for all the others combined. So I got less enamored with it. With blackboard,

it’s a lot easier.

[Exposure to Other Online Courses]

Not intensively. Typically, I’m not a person who learns like that but I looked on
[a colleague’s site] and I’ve perused a few of them just looking at them. I don’t really like
them. I don’t know why. It’s an interesting observation. I suppose it would be the thing
to do but I like to create. I like to take the problem, take the text or the curriculum and
then to come at it in a relatively fresh way. I do that for the same reason I don’t use a
resource book for experiential activities. It’s basically using a canned approach or a

canned structure and I don’t like that at all. I oftentimes go on afterwards and just sort of

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affirm what I’ve done so I’ll create something and then I’ll go look for ideas but I don’t

like spending a lot of time and energy trying to generate... I just go off and do it.

[Description of the Online Course]

I’ve been teaching that forever. It’s a masters level course primarily one of the
core courses in our masters program that’s required for all masters students. It’s also a
course that doctoral students can take. It’s a course that students outside of our program
find helpful as well.

The content will be studied through the analysis of a set of problems that have
widespread application and currency for people working in [field] settings. The problems
are representative composites from actual practice settings. They’re messy problems.
There’s not one right answer. I want students to become part of an online Ieaming

community and work in teams to solve the problems.

[New Teaching Methods Onlinc]

I’m becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the sort of topical orientations to
courses in [my field]. I think [we are] a professions based program and I think we
oftentimes lose sight of the practice setting. One of the ways in which we can change that
is get off a high theoretical topical focus in our courses and make our courses more
directly linked to practice. When I teach a course, it’s like why am I teaching [this]? I ask
this question about [other courses] too. . .. I stopped teaching it because it wasn’t at all
clear to me what it had to do with anything in practice. Since coming here, I started to

have the same feelings about [this course]. It’s very theoretical learning. There’s no

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practice associated with [it]. We’re studying the research, the theory, and the
conceptualizations. It’s like, so? So why does anybody have to know this? That led me to
think about how we might teach this course in such a way as to make it more relevant to
practice. And that’s what... problem based Ieaming is. This is the first time that I really
have been able to implement it in any kind of way so reconceptualizing [this class] in this

problem based format is very important to me.

[Problem Based Learning Online]

I think it’s the online environment, which makes problem-based Ieaming possible.
The online environment provides students with the Opportunities to realize fully problem
based Ieaming in ways that would be more difficult to do face to face. It’s the presence of
the computer which makes problem based Ieaming so much more efficacious because
part of what you’re trying to do with problem based Ieaming is to foster students’ ability
to Ieam. You’re trying to teach inquiry to a large degree and so it’s not so much that
they’re Ieaming particular theories or concepts or ideas and the pursuit of those inquiry
skills is really facilitated by the presence of the computer.

The computer allows you to access very rapidly large amounts of information,
large databases from all over the place to bring into juxtaposition different
perspectives. . .. For example, two very different sort of ways of thinking about [our field]
sitting right next to each other and you may not even realize you did it. You stumbled on
it. Then you say how can this make sense. How can [one person] say this way, [another
person] says that way. So, it puts learners in front of the variegated nature of the field

and the literature in the ways that are more difficult without computer based assistance.

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Problem based Ieaming online is intensively writing so it provides them with the
means to think because I think writing is thinking. When my students write, they think, as
I do, as all of us do. Ten or fifteen of us can sit around talking about a problem, but it’s
not like groups of 3 going off and writing on it all night, telling one another, talking back
and forth with one another. The computer-based environment is very conducive to
problem based Ieaming so it’s no accident that I chose to do this. I think the students have
the potential of developing much richer, deeper understanding of the ways in which folks

think about key problems.

[Imagining Teaching Online]

I think the most important thing for me as I’m beginning to understand this
picture is control. I’m conscious of orchestrating a Ieaming environment when I’m face
to face. It’s how I’m thinking about the use of material, what we should do first that day,
how do we enter into this conversation, this topic, this material? How does it relate to
what we did before and what can we do to make these connections? How do we move
into it in a way which fosters the kind of self-awareness and reflection and the
thoughtfulness that I’m trying to get at so that they master the information as well as
developing a sort of critical stance.

In face-to-face, you have much more feedback and the students are there and
generally speaking because they’re compliant. They’ll do what you ask them to do. You
have very few people who say I don’t wanta do that. It just doesn’t happen but those are
the very things which are gonna happen in online. They can choose not to do that or they

can choose to enter it only partially. They can do that in class, too, but it’s much more

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difficult to hold back in class ‘cuz you can do things as a teacher which invites people if
[they are] reticent to participate.

In online environments, if people don’t come online, they don’t come online. Or if
they come on line, they don’t say anything, well, okay what do you do about that? So
that whole issue of control and management. I envision myself having much less control
over the learning environment; on the other hand, spending a whole lot more time
managing the Ieaming environment than I do now. I think I’m gonna spend a whole lot of
time just simply figuring out where people are, why they’re not participating, what I can
do to get them online, to managing the flow of discussion and making sure I’m
responding to people in an appropriate manner and time and all that sort of thing. A lot of
it’s sort of the problem-based format and the unknowingness of that and how that’s gonna
work.

My style of interaction is gonna be different online. I’m very spontaneous in a
[face-to-face] classroom and I use a lot of humor sort of deadpanning which I exploit in
the classroom. I have trouble understanding how I’m gonna do that online because I
intend to be dead pan, dead panning doesn’t go over, they can’t tell if somebody’s being
dead pan on line very easily. I suspect I’m probably gonna be more serious, I don’t know.
I tend to be more formal in my writing and so I have to Ieam how to be more
conversational.

This whole thing could fall completely flat. It’s either gonna really work or it’s
gonna work not at all. I don’t think I’ve ever really failed at a course and I think that’s a
possibility with this online environment especially with the problem-based aspect. I think

I would feel more comfortable if it was a [face-to-face class]. I would feel more assured

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that we could at least succeed at some minimal level. But because it’s a completely
different way of thinking about it, I think it does raise the prospect of having it
completely fail. Which is okay I guess because that’s the only way to Ieam. That part
doesn’t bother me. The part that bothers me is the frustrations that students might go
through if it gets to be kind of really a frustrating situation. That does concern me.

The emotional affective dimension of teaching and Ieaming is really important to
me. It’s probably the most important part of the Ieaming setting. It’s more important
than the informational piece. I want information to have an emotional impact on people. I
want them to respond affectively and emotionally. I want them to care about whether it
pisses them off or whether they really like it. It’s hard for me to understand how I’m

gonna make that happen online. I think you can but I think it’s harder to do than face-to-

face.

[Imagining Students Online]

My implicit assumption is that they’ll just sort of go off and do it. They’ll figure it
out but that may be naive. They may need a lot more guidance about how to do this than
what I think they’ll need. If that’s the case, it’s gonna take a lot more work, a lot more
vigilance.

I think there’s going to be more participation online. [In a face-to-face class]
when you have 25, you have like five or six that carry the weight and there’s a group
dynamic involved in it. People come to be spokespersons for the rest of the group. That’s

how groups work. I know they’re there; I know they’re thinking, I know they’re engaged.

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I don’t have to hear them. I can see their faces, I can tell by their reactions. You know...
I don’t know how that’s gonna play out online.

The extent to which [students] pick up on conversation threads that are going on I
can tell just from the little bit that I’ve used both email and list serves and discussion
boards whether people are writing for the sake of just writing or whether they’re really
engaged. That’s [how I] get a sense of how well things are going for people by the kind
of tone in which they’re contributing. But I don’t know. Those are scary questions.

Those are scary issues.

[Designing the Course]

There’s four problems that are assigned throughout the semester and they’re in a
sequence too but they’re given a certain amount of time to work each problem. In
retrospect I’ve been thinking about this since last week, I think I have to give them more
guidance. 1 actually have to give them a week by week, not necessarily change the week
allotments for the problem but problem one, I’ve just got a two week time table, I don’t
think those will change, but I think we need to create week by week expectations. I think
I need to structure the expectations but I’m not sure exactly what that means. I think we
have to build in reports that are due every so often sharing what did you find out, what

did you look at, what databases did you use, what concepts did it offer, what theories?
[Working With the Faculty Development Class Design Group]

I brought a vision for the course. This is the way I wanted the curriculum to look.

This is the kinds of learning experiences I wanta create for the students and how I’m

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gonna go about studying the curriculum. I didn’t have a very good understanding of what
that would look like technically. Students have helped me realize that part of it so there’s
been a sort of interaction. I look to them for guidance and I suppose that I will look to W
for guidance, too, in that regard.

I think what happened very shortly, probably over a few weeks, there was a kind of
natural division of labor. They naturally gravitated towards different pieces so this vision
that was in my head became a vision that was in their head so actually most of them were
pretty well versed. I think that was one of the most interesting things is that what was
actually produced was largely their work. They actually did the design, the graphics and
all that stuff but it reproduced the very vision that I had. I did what I could to develop the
content so 1 revised the syllabus and wrote the problems, the introduction to the
problems, the guiding questions. They also relied on me for the overall vision to make
sure that they were adhering to what it was that I wanted and so they were looking to me
for big pictures. Not that the big picture was cast in concrete because they did make
suggestions.

They also looked to me for some direction and approval. Is this the way you want
it? I’d give them feedback and then we’d go back and forth. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to
tell them to do things. They knew what to do. I didn’t give anybody any tasks or any
jobs to do. They figured those things out for themselves. Towards the end, I became a

person who said well, now what’s left? I became the coordinator.

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[Decision Making within the Design Group]

It was very informal, very, very fluid. We’d say should we do this, should we do
that. We’d talk about the pros and cons and have some different perspectives on it. Once
we seemed to settle on something that everybody seemed to like, if I felt strongly about
something but somebody else had another idea, they would defer to my decision.

Decision-making wasn’t tough.

[Considerations in Design]

We were mostly just interested in getting out a structure and then we began to look
at the aesthetics of the structure and the way it was presented. You can look at it and
you’re not bowled over by it but on the other hand, you’re not bored by it. Ease of
navigation, we wanted people to be able to move easily and with minimal number of
clicks so that if they’re deep into the problem and they wanted to go back and read the
original problem again, they’re one click away from that. We wanted the navigation to be
sensible and intuitive.

We were thinking of the curriculum, the pedagogy, and the nature of the
curriculum. What does the curriculum require in terms of key buttons or key navigation
points or key structures? Then in terms of the pedagogy, what does that require? I wanted
to add the lecture piece. That’s a reflection of the thinking of the pedagogy. I think it’s
like how does the pedagogy influence the design? What if a group of people wants
clarification so we want to create some avenue or opportunity to do that online?

There’s a number of decisions that emanated from probing and thinking about the

kind of curriculum we were dealing with and the nature of the pedagogy we were trying

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to foster. We wanted students to be able to interact a lot. We wanted it to be collaborative
Ieaming so that became an important piece of it.

We had to deal with and recognize [that] some people have limitations in
technology and they couldn’t upload and download documents and I might have used
video more if I would have known that people had the technology. I’m not at all sure that
they have the technology to support streaming video or audio so those are some things

that influenced the decisions not to do certain things.

[Other Contextual Factors That Influenced the Design Activity]

I think by and large the college is supportive. The department is certainly
supportive. I didn’t get any resistance at all; nothing but encouragement I think and
interest from the college and the program.

I think my responsibilities as a professor here make the time commitment and the
idea of setting some kind of a schedule for this course difficult. This works well if you
can set aside a certain amount of time every day and do it. It’s hard to do when you’ve
got a schedule that requires you to be flexible and meetings here and there and all over
the place so that part of it makes it hard.

The thing that is probably more important to me than anything is that I’m a little
nervous about this whole thing. I don’t entirely understand those feelings. This gets back
to the question of self and inner knowledge. It has to do with wanting to appear
competent and I know that I know the material and I’m knowledgeable in the literature
but this online problem-based format feels like it has a fairly high chance of failing. It’s

an anxiety that’s partially rooted in reality and partially rooted in irrationality and I

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understand that but I am more nervous than I have been about my teaching in along time.
I’m also nervous about the amount of time it’s going to require and how I’m going to
manage that, then just not being skilled in that kind of pedagogical environment; not

knowing for sure how to be helpful.

[After the Faculty Development Class]

Design and Pedagogy

I can’t just give them a problem, send them off for three weeks and let them work
on it. We have to build in a week to week, I have to find that part of the calendar and I’ve
got to go in and create weekly expectations. I wasn’t even going to do this before but I’m
thinking I need to do this; I need to give them suggested reading assignments. I was
imagining that I would just give them the book and they would find what ever they
needed to find in the book but that strikes me now as a little too loose, too unstructured. I
probably need to tell them what chapters or what pages to pay particular attention to
when they’re working on this problem and I need to give them web sites that would be
helpful to this problem at least in the beginning so they get used to that and then maybe
by the time they get to the third problem I don’t have to do that so much and they can do
that on their own. So, those are some of the things that I have been thinking about since

the faculty development class ended.

[Working With the VU]
We talked about editing the pages that are already there and [the VU producer

has] set up, I’m a little bit uncertain about this part, a process whereby I can just go in to

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the web site and edit or add so if I’m just adding an additional content or rewording some
things I can just go in and edit. He put an edit firnction on all the pages. I’m not sure how
it works yet I haven’t used it. He seemed to think it would be a piece of cake but we’ll
see and then that would save him, of course, the time. Larger pieces however, I think we
agreed that I would just send them to him and he would upload them to the site because
there may be formatting things that don’t get translated appropriately. I probably would
use a fair amount of that. We talked about some other things like I want the opportunity
to do short lectures on demand if the students want that and so we’re going to build that

in.

The VU Producer’s Description Of The Design Process

Jim’s course was done mostly by the other people. Jim’s was a very different
course than we normally do because he had it all done and had his way of doing it before
hand. He had two people working with him throughout the whole thing who had an idea
of how they thought it should be and I always got the picture from them that they didn’t
trust, they didn’t think that I knew what I was doing and Jim was more willing to trust
them than he was to trust me. I think it was just that lack of trust. Normally the people
that I work with, I have worked with graduate students in the past, I’ve formed almost a
friendship with them and that trust has come with that but with these people that didn’t
happen. They wanted to do it the way they thought it should be done. I suggested
bringing the width of the design in so that we had one printable page, printable width.

The design for the course graphic design wise was not a sound design. I suggested

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changes; in fact, I made up a design but got a response from him that they had worked

hard on that design and they wanted to keep it.

Sam’s Changes For The Future

1 would make it clearer in the beginning that they were working through VU for a
reason and that if it wasn’t going to work to work with W than maybe we should
explore some other options such as blackboard that would maybe suit their needs and
wants better than working through the VU system. I think 1 maybe wasn’t as vocal or
open with them about things that I saw as potential problems in the beginning, which I’m
normally not because normally it works easier to just accept what faculty are thinking in
the beginning and then as things go on they come to realize that this doesn’t work or that

doesn’t work but like I said in this case that never came to realization

The VU Producer’s View of the VU System

There are some broader issues VU-wide with the technology we use. The
equipment we use I think needs to be fixed. I think it’s going to have to happen soon. I
think if we’re going to continue to function it’s going to have to adapt to the change.
We’re working on widgets software. The stuff that’s been built for these courses was
built in 1997 or 1998 and so there’s an interesting turnover rate with technology. On
average Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator have had a new version come out
every three months from 1994 until 2000 and so when you think about how that changes
so quickly and we’re still using tools that were created in 1997. Most people would think

that a university would be the most cutting edge but what you find out is that budgets and

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such create a lot of limitations that are more than they are in a corporation. In a
corporation, we would hire one person to maintain the current system and another to
continually develop new versions of the software.

We use a very basic synchronous chat program and there’s much more robust
chats out there that we should be using. The problem is we’re a very centralized
programming and server administration unit that everything has to go through them and
because of that, I can’t use one thing for one class and use another thing for another
class. I have to use one thing for all of them so that does cause some problems. [It]
makes things limited in what you can do like when Jim wanted to track students. I was
able to build a customized thing to work although it wouldn’t work as well as something
that we could have found to use or I’m not a programmer I just know a little bit about it
so, just stuff like that but then it brought up issues about human subject clearance. Was it
okay to do this and was it ethical to collect data about students using these pages and

things?

[J im- The Teaching Activity]
It was like first Ieaming how to swim being self conscious of the fact that you are

trying to stay afloat the whole semester.

[The Role of the VU]
Certainly the VU context and the technological support or lack of it [influenced
the class]. It needs to be much more accessible and much more fluid in terms of their

ability to respond. They were not nearly as responsive, it was the programming piece of it

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and the technology piece that it was just the structure of the web site itself which seemed
antiquated and cumbersome and much more imbedded than it needed to be and then
having to rely on VU to do things that I should have been able to do myself like my
group assignments you know having to go to them and rely on them and then waiting for

that to be done.

[Content]

I think there is a tension between, and this is not in the online environment per say
but it is the subject matter more [in my topic]. There is this tension all the time between
doing what I really wanted to do, which is teach [my topic] in the context of [a certain
setting] and what I perceive to be the needs of most of the students and the program.
That’s an issue that I deal with all the time but it became more of an issue I think because
students were accessing materials online that were [related] materials and we never really
talked about [them]. I never brought it up. They brought it up. I never used the [topic] in
my own writing and my interactions with them. It was something that they picked up in
their reading in the text and literature that they were getting online. It’s a field of study
and an area of preparation just like [my area] is but it’s philosophically different. It’s

historically and socioculturally different than [my area of study].

[Reflections After Teaching]
Overall I Think It Went Pretty Well...
Considering that I thought that it could collapse the first three weeks. There is a

lot of work to do to improve it but it’s the first time out for me and the first time for PBL

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so given the fact that it was so new, I think it went well. It was new for a lot of students
too. . .. There does seem to be appreciation among a lot of the students for the PBL piece
of it at least and the online they got use to. I think they Ieamed a lot. . .. I would say the
majority of the students really did get quite a bit given the fact that I didn’t really teach
content there’s two things I picked up... a theme that came up again and again and one is
that the deep sense of collaborative Ieaming was really a new experience for a lot of them
and it’s not just spending time in a class working in a group but the whole experience was
grounded in being a part of a group so they saw themselves from day one as part of a
team and a collaborative effort so a lot of them I think did begin to appreciate
collaborative Ieaming in a way in which they’ve never really experienced before and the
other part is the self-directedness that they begin to see themselves as capable of inquiry
in a way that they hadn’t understood about themselves before so that’s pretty cool.

I think the content areas they Ieamed as they saw appropriate to their interests and
their needs and I suppose that’s the way it should be. The advantage of this situation is
that they aren’t spending a lot of time trying to second-guess what it is that I think they
should know they’re just [learning] what they need to know so they are weeding through
a lot of stuff that they don’t need. There is a down side to that though because there is a
part of me which believes that I have a responsibility and students have a responsibility to
the literature so they have to know their way around the literature. .. they just have to
have some awareness of it so the downside is that they may take this individualization too
seriously and just pursue what they want and my job as a facilitator or teacher in this kind
of environment is to bring them back which I thought I was doing virtually all semester

long ‘cause one of the things they really wanted to do was they wanted to make this a

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[different] course... and that’s the tension in [my field] ‘cause you teach it in the context
of a task and the reason why you want to know more about [the subject] is because it
helps you do something else better and it was that something else which kept on pulling
them... there was a lot of that, this is what I want to do or it has implications for this and
they would spend a lot of time on [that] and I had to continually nudge them back to
theory of [this topic] and say this is our job here this semester primarily. . .. and some of
them felt I was being too prescriptive and so I got feedback from some people that
drawing the boundary, drawing the scope like that made them feel like I wasn’t letting
them do what they really wanted to do which was true, I wasn’t but you know you can’t
but that’s a problem with PBL within the context of a course and that’s one of the major
limitations. I think it’s better that just teaching a topical course but ideally what you want,
they were pushing in directions which were quite natural in the PBL approach and if this
were a course or a series of courses. .. then all those directions would be relevant and I
think ideally that’s the way the curriculum should be. It should be a series of graded
problems that stretch out like that in increasing complexity but you don’t, when the
students start working on them and they raise questions like that you don’t say well that’s
not exactly in our scope which is sometimes exactly what I had to say so they were
pushing in directions which were natural to PBL but I was pushing back in a kind of
unnatural way which was subject matter based ‘cause I was saying that my course is on
[this topic] and I realize this is all interesting these are quite helpful questions but they’re
going to take us in a direction which in the time we have will keep us fi'om spending time

with the material that we do need to spend time with so that was a tension having nothing

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to do with the online nature of it. It had everything to do with teaching PBL in a course-

based or a subject matter-based format.

The Chat Rooms At First Were Unmanageable. ..

Because... I just had them open to everybody and we had ten or twelve people
signing on it was too much so after we figured out how to do that but that required me to
be online several times a week in order to meet the needs of all twenty six if they wanted
to sign on. I was grading all the time. I don’t think there was ever a time the rest of the
semester that I wasn’t grading something from the class so I was just moving from one
thing to another all semester long. That had it’s down side too because I don’t think I was
able to give feedback to them sometimes as quickly as timely I wanted to so the twenty-
six had the down side for them in terms of what I consider to be a critical piece of the
PBL model which is getting feedback to the students as soon as you can so that was the
downside.

I gave them a grade based on the level of participation in the chats and the
discussion boards. They had their choice of spending their time primarily either class
wide or in their teams now in retrospect that was probably a mistake because the chats
and the discussion board at the team level are required, I mean you can’t do the work
without, although some didn’t really spend very much time in those either but I think in
retrospect what I should have done was graded the discussion and the chats in terms of
the class wide participation. . .. This is an area where VU could have helped a great deal
but unfortunately, they are not able to give me counts, postings. . .. it was a big deal and

after Sam explained to me everything that they would have to do and it was fairly limited

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what they would give me anyway I just said it was probably not worth the bother. . .. I
don’t know why they just can’t keep track like blackboard does. . .. That’s one thing that
VU needs to do quickly is, I think there are a number of areas where VU needs to be
much more supportive to make this whole online thing go. . .. I was talking about needing

the dialogue and the interaction and that was a big deal for them.

Challenges

Keeping up with all the reading online is a major challenge in two ways one in
terms of just the sheer time that it requires, not so much the class wide postings because
that was pretty nominal but the team postings and the team chats just reading them was
one challenge keeping up with them. The second challenge was knowing when and how
to intervene in those conversations when to make a comment or to say something that
needs to be said. That was hard. That wasn’t always really easy for me sometimes it was
real obvious like oh god I have to get in there and correct that misunderstanding, that was
every once in a while but most of the time it was one of those, it’s just sort of gray as to
whether you should say something or you need to say something. I guess a way to think
about that is to just not to know for sure where the pedagogical moment is in that
conversation not recognizing always or not being able to clearly tell. . .. [Face to face] just
feels much more natural. 1 stay quiet in discussions a lot. That’s my modus operandi is to
remain quiet for long periods of time but I have a clear sense of when I need to and
should say something and generally I know what it is I should say. That’s not always
clear to me online and I don’t know for sure why that is. I drink it has to do partly with

the text is more fragmented. It’s not as continuous in time so you don’t have this kind of

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a history with conversation that you do in a face to face and of course you don’t have the
visual cues going on either so I don’t know for sure why that’s difficult for me I just
know that was not easy for me at all. . .. The class-wide chats were challenging. I always
felt tense. . .. Everything is happening so quickly especially if you have several people in
the room. . .. [The time delay] makes it even more fi'agmented. . .. I sort of got used to that
the idea of keeping multiple conversations in your head at the same time. It took me a
couple of times but I was able to get with the flow and Ieam how to send my messages so
that I could let people know that I was still in the middle of a sentence without staying off
line for long periods of time. So, keeping up with the conversations in the chats was
stressful but the problem of again, what to do in these chats, what are these chats for? I
don’t know if I thought that through enough. I felt often times like I was pulling teeth in
the chats. . .. [To get people to say something] to participate. . .. It’s like they’re sitting
there waiting for me to pontificate so that was uncomfortable. I just didn’t like it at all.
Every once in a while I had a good conversation with a couple students that were really
dedicated. I had a great conversation with one student one night and another on another
night with students who both are seasoned practitioners. Those were fun. Those were
great. You get these knowledgeable people who are talking about their work and I’m
interacting with them from a theoretical perspective. That was neat but there were only a
couple people in the chat room at that time. In retrospect what I will do next fall if I teach
online is to I think I will probably use the chats to do topical conversations. I will
designate conversation topics for chats.

The last challenge is more abstract... a kind of existential concern on two levels

one is I am deeply committed as a teacher to what I would consider the affective

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emotional dimension of Ieaming and I’m really interested in that as a teacher and a
scholar and I really believe that’s where the most significant Ieaming takes place and
particularly if you are able to integrate content or cognitive stuff in with the emotional
but that’s what really stimulates and fosters meaning in our lives. I have no idea how to
connect with that online. It just seems like an ephemeral, like a black hole and so the
consequence of that is that we spend time in kind of intellectual conversation and
supporting and upholding content. There are a lot of emotional issues around each of
these problems that are just, the grouping was sort of emotional affective concerns and
issues and things like that and I just was not able to figure out how to get at that in this
particular environment so that’s one part of the content piece then the other part is just
simply not having a good handle on whether they’re really learning the content. I got
glimpses of that I think in the team products less so in the integrative essays. I think the

capstone was more helpfirl in that regard then the prior two integrative essays.

The Technology Piece Was Just An Irritant...

And that was a constant. It was an on again off again kind of a thing. It was more
difficult in the beginning. . .. but it evened out after a while. There was that one critical
period that we talked about when the whole system went down and that’s where I got a
clear picture that the programmers [at VU] didn’t really understand the way in which this
course was structured because it was no big deal to them that there were new flags on all
the discussion boards and new messages and like you don’t want to spend your time
checking things out that you’ve already read so that was really a major barrier and then

the fact that it wasn’t chronologically ordered, that was a nightmare but they got that

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squared away but I thought they clearly do not understand the importance of some things
that are necessary to make an interactive online course go. The other technical challenge,
which I mentioned to you before is when you are out of town and they, the [VU] support

is not there.

I Learned A Lot About The Technology

I’m still not very knowledgeable about stuff but I think I Ieamed a lot about the
technology by just doing this. . .. Taking the [faculty development class] helped but
there’s nothing like being on the front lines. . .. I want to [edit] for example and I don’t do
it in DREAM WEAVER I just do it right on the page because I don’t know any of the
commands so that limits what I can do so I just cut and past from the previous week. . .. I
Ieamed how to edit a little bit. There is still a lot that’s just a complete mystery to me. . ..
So, I need to Ieam the language or I need to get more facile at editing and the whole web
page I want to be able to go in and easily and freely make changes in my web pages.

So, I didn’t Ieam a lot about the sort of technical parts of the technology but the
parts of the technology that I Ieamed about were abstract. The fact that learning can be
more real in online environments than in face to face, I think that’s a very real possibility.
I think there is a distinct possibility that students are learning more and Ieaming more
that’s real in online environments than they are in face to face. You can hide in face-to-
face groups. You can loaf in face to face groups and get by and learn very little because
the teacher often times does not have a clear sense of what you are learning, doesn’t have
clear evidence of your individual standing and performance. In these online environments

if they are set the way mine was you’ve got, well not a pathway to their sole but it’s

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pretty close and so it’s kind of hard to hide. I know when people are loafing; I know
when people are not doing the reading. I can tell that. I can tell whether they are thinking
carefully about stuff. I can tell when they’re not online the big gaps when their groups
have not met weeks sometimes, and they would suffer as a result of that you try to tell
them but they don’t so those are all things which become much more transparent online
so that was something that I didn’t expect to learn but I really think that that’s true.

Then trying PBL for the first time and wondering about that so it creates a whole
host of questions and issues which I can think about and wonder about which I like to do
and it provides a substrate for my own teaching and my own consulting. I can draw upon
this experience and talk about things, which I wasn’t able to talk about before as

examples of different kinds of things.

I Learned About the Power of The Medium to Support Mode of Inquiry

I think more than any course I’ve ever taught before I was really teaching inquiry
in this course. Most of the time I’m teaching, I’m self conscious about content. I’m
teaching content but this I was really self-conscious about the inquiry the process of
thinking about a problem, the ways to think about and approach a problem, how to go
about thinking about it.

The problem based learning format forces that but I think the online environment
facilitates it because students brought in resources from god knows where I mean I didn’t
give them those links, I didn’t tell them to go there but they found all sorts of stuff well
beyond the curriculum, well beyond the bibliography that I gave them. Once they got

familiar with the environment, they began to see what it was capable of doing. They got

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accesses to national databases... and were able to pull those down and look at them and
think about them in ways that they hadn’t thought about before so the online environment
facilitates that inquiry I think there is no question about that it’s right there. If you’re
thinking and you’re inquiring at the same time when you are online like that it is just a
click away and it takes you right there and it’s just, I’m impressed by the power of that

process. I became a fan of the Internet this semester because of that.

I Thought I Was More In Touch With the Students’...

Level of inquiry in this course and that was kind of a good feeling to be able to
see that develop and grow. I’ve seen them begin to check their assumptions and just
seeing, actually being able to see evidence that they’re doing that [because] more of it is
in writing and more of it is public because it’s collaborative so... a person will come
together in a team chat or a group discussion board and say this is what I’m thinking
about doing what do you think and someone else will say well that’s going to take us in a
whole different direction and that’s not really dealing with the thrust of the problem, etc
and when you assign groups like that in the classroom you’re never privy to that kind of
conversation so seeing that inquiry process unfold is really quite delightful and to watch
it mature. Students struggle with their interpersonal problems and gradually overcome
that, struggle with the nature of inquiry and learning and what it means to ask questions
and not find solutions, so that was pretty cool. . .. Also I think I got to know the students
better than I would have even though I didn’t see most of them I think I know them in a

way that I never get to know face to face students simply because 1 have more data on

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them. They are providing me with information about themselves constantly so I can’t
help but know more about them.

I became aware pretty early on that that was happening. I didn’t realize what I
didn’t know about students until I started doing this. I thought I relate to students and I
get to know them. The truth of the matter is that there are weeks that go by and there are
some students that I don’t remember their name in class... they come up to me in the hall
and I don’t know who they are. I recognize them as part of my class but let alone know
anything about them or how they’re thinking about the course or what they’re thinking
about it so that was pretty cool to realize that and that happened the third or fourth week
that I was aware of how much I was getting to know them and know about them, what
they think about, how they think about this content in relation to their work and other

classes. I was really surprised. I didn’t think that I was that ignorant.

That Will Have Repercussions in My Face-to-Face Classes

I will be much more conscious of trying to get to know who the students are and
more about them so that will have direct implication for that. I will probably be more
self-conscious about creating tasks that allow them to generate information that they will
give to me. I probably will spend more time in the beginning collecting information that I
think is more pertinent although I do that already. I did profiling and stuff like that for
years before it just doesn’t do the same thing that this class did. I’ve come to believe in
more frequent assignments as a result of this course even though it’s murder for us
because it’s more to grade I think the quality of our instruction can be directly improved

by increasing the number of assignments for two reasons one is that it forces students to

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deal seriously with the material sooner and then deal with it in an integrative and ongoing
way and then it gives us feedback as faculty sooner about what they’re struggling with,
what they’re getting and what they’re not getting and we can provide that feedback
before it gets to be the eighth or ninth week in a semester that’s like they’re lost or
something. So, I think smaller but more frequent assignments. I’ve become a firm
believer in that even though it’s more work I think it just directly improves the quality of

the experience for the students.

I Learned About Myself As A Teacher...

But that’s a little bit more ephemeral because I think I was operating in a way in
which I haven’t operated before in a domain, in a medium that I haven’t dealt with before
and so it tested me, it pushed me to the limits in terms of what I thought I knew as a
teacher. It raised lots of questions for me, lots of doubts about whether I was doing the
right thing or what it is I should be doing here in the first place. . .. even still, I mean I
don’t really know for sure what my role is in this medium or what it should be. I think I
raised more questions about that than I did get answers. . .. I think the surprising thing for
me was how it tested and questions my own confidence as a teacher and really what
teaching is all about anyway. What are you really doing when you are teaching? What is
the value of your contribution in the whole thing? I don’t know that. . .. Because students
are not relying on me for content. In face to face I will get; one of the things that
surprised me about this experience was how few questions I got about content. People not
writing to me and asking for clarification on this or that, or I don’t understand what

[some theorist] was saying about this, what did he mean by that anyway? Those are the

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questions that you would typically get in a face to face discussion and you answer them
or turn them back to the class but at least you’re getting those kind of questions and
people are relying on you as a content expert and they see you as a content expert so you
get that sense of identity derived from that. There is no sense, I didn’t’ get that sense at
all from this online class. I don’t doubt that people view me as a content expert but I
didn’t, that’s not imbedded in the interactions, there is really not reinforcement of my
sense of who I am. It was like first Ieaming how to swim being self conscious of the fact

that you are trying to stay afloat the whole semester. That’s what it amounts to for me.

Grading, That’s Another Problem...

‘Cause in some instances when I was computing the final grade I could tell when
I wanted to give this person a 3.5 because I could tell from individual work that it wasn’t
a 4.0 when I would compute the grade based on the weightings and everything it would
come up with a 4.0 based on the group product which carried them so I had a couple
where it was the other way around the people would do really well in the individual
products but the group product was dragging them down a little bit and I might have
made an error there I gave a guy a 3.5 and I think he should have gotten a 4.0 but he
didn’t do the journal and he didn’t do the boards and chats and stuff so that brought it
down and then the group products a couple of them were not quite up to you lmow so
I’ve got to build in some component of individual grading within that team product. I’m
not happy and I don’t think they’re happy either ‘cause I think they felt some of the
groups felt that they were carrying the weight of the other people and they didn’t like

that. Those are some of the issues I think that we need to address.

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I Really Enjoyed It

I don’t regret it a minute. Like I said I think the main thing is that I’m attracted to
the novelty of trying new things and doing things differently. This was very different. It
raises a lot of questions. I’m glad we have the research piece going with it ‘cause there is

a lot to learn from that so we’ll see what happens.

Sam's (VU Producer) Description

During Teaching

I did have a bit of a problem getting all of them to do things the way that they
needed to be done for VU and I think the course suffered a little because of that. There
were navigation problems. The navigation wasn’t super clear to the students. There’s
links that are broken or just weird navigational issues that never got resolved and the
interesting thing about that is that [the FACULTY DEVELOPMENT CLASS group]
worked on that with that in mind for several months and now students are having trouble.
Some of what students are afraid of they’re saying they’re afraid that they’re missing

something [content] I guess because it’s a non-linear format. It’s not streamlined and easy

to use.

Design Problems

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We were not as organized in the beginning as we could have been. Things didn’t
run as smoothly for the first month. I think there were too many spots that things could be
linked from. That was really the navigation issue. I think that students couldn’t get
around easily. It was a confusing navigation scheme. Since the navigation scheme was
not as simple as I would have liked there were actually spots that I missed that maybe a
link went to the wrong place because there were so many times there was a link I never
knew. I would get an email from students saying that page three of week two, there is a
link broken that doesn’t go to communication or something like that.

We tried to bring out some more obvious links but I think the problem was in the
interface as a whole. You didn’t know what page you were on. You didn’t know if you
were on two of three or one of three or one of one and you didn’t necessarily know, a lot
of Jim’s links, Jim was using hypertext in the way that it’s meant to be used where words
are links to the new pages but I think that serves as confusion for students who want to
have a clear idea of where they are. Something that could have helped that would have
been some sort of site map that had links that change colors once you’ve been there or
something but you get into whole different problems with that. That becomes hard to
create.

I think that students adjusted rather than things got fixed and because of that, it
may be good to go over those things with Jim and to try to fix them. The other option
would be he may want to consider using blackboard or web ct to redo the course in a

manner that may fit better with the format that he’s using.

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Faculty Member Profile
Mikala

The Cast of Characters

The second profile is that of Mikala. Mikala was the only professor in this study
who did not enroll in the faculty development class. Instead, she utilized the stipend that
she received from the university to hire several graduate students to help her develop her
online class. She met with her group regulme in brainstorming sessions where the
members offered ideas from different perspectives within their fields of expertise. In an
iterative process that took place over several months, Mikala collected the information
from their meetings and wrote the syllabus, classroom activities and cases. She took them
back to the group to discuss and made additional changes based on their input.

After the curriculum was created, the group disbanded. The group met one more
time when they all participated in an online class meeting with Mikala’s students. During
that class session Mikala’s group members took on the roles of characters in one of the
case studies and interacted with the online students during a live chat. The students
probed the characters about the case for details and clarification. That interaction was
designed to help students understand and analyze the case.

One of the graduate students Mikala had worked with was Bonnie. Bonnie was
one of the members of the original student advisory group who created the class. Once
the student advisory group disbanded, Bonnie became Mikala’s assistant. As a member of
the original group, Bonnie took part in the brainstorming sessions described above to help

develop the curriculum and subsequently was responsible for transferring everything to

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the VU producer. According to Bonnie during the development phase she had stressed
that students should Ieam to use different kinds of software programs such as
PowerPoint, word perfect and spreadsheets. Once the course was up and running she
monitored it throughout the semester but she did not have direct contact with students.
Her role was to provide support and to “Maintain contact with the VU producer to make
sure that students were finding all the links that they needed, that there was a thread to be
followed that was clear and that they were comfortable in that environment” (Bonnie,
interview, April 18, 2001). In addition, she did some research to find new web pages
related to the student’s interests and needs.

Before starting her Ph.D., Bonnie had obtained an undergraduate and a master’s
degree in a field related to the one in which Mikala was teaching her online class. She
had worked. She had developed technological knowledge over the years out of necessity
and job opportunity. She became certified at the local university in the use of technology
where she Ieamed how to use correct terminology, work with hardware, software, use
different types of computers and types of educational environments where she could
apply that technology to the curriculum. At the time of our interview, she was doing web
design of images using photo shop, creating web pages and she had worked with
databases, both implementing commercial software and creating custom databases.

Mikala’s VU producer was Norman. Norman chose not to participate in the study
and thus the only information on him that I have is that provided by Mikala and Bonnie.
Both of them thought that he was very skilled in his job, attentive to their needs and easy
to work with. Once the course curriculum was completed, he transferred it to the virtual

space and managed the technology throughout the course.

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Mikala

A Profile In Her Own Words

[Educational and Professional Background]
I became an adjunct university professor and lecturer in the late 19803. I became a
professor here in the early 19905 and I teach [graduate level] classes and I serve on many

committees.

[My Role as a Teacher and Methods]

1 see myself as a Facilitator. I use some short lectures to introduce students to the
content and I also use a lot of discussions, casework and collaborative learning. I want
students to learn to do inquiry so that they can be self directed in their learning
particularly because when they become professionals they will need to continue their
Ieaming.

Everyone of the activities [in the online class] had Ieaming objectives and what I
would do is that when we were processing the activity I always had those objectives in
front of me to make sure that in fact we’re meeting those objectives and if not then they

need to be changed or is there something that I’m not doing to facilitate the activity.
[Teaching Philosophy and Methods]

I lean toward Constructivism depending on the level and needs of students.

Sometimes you have to deliver some content but I’m big on the reflective practitioner,

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collaborative Ieaming and inquiry. There are lectures, there is information giving but then
there is an opportunity for me to guide a discussion and to take that information apart and
let them massage it and pull it apart and become their own teachers. I like that part of it

and I try to get there in all the classes so they are teaching each other.

[My Experience with Technology]

I started to use Blackboard in my [face to face] classes, list serves, and I have
extensive email experience like sending and receiving attachments. I use software
programs like word processing, spreadsheets and statistical programs. Because my
husband, who is the technology person, has been [away for a while] doing research I’ve
had to do all the technology stuff at our house so I’ve been forced to do stuff at home that
he would normally do and one time when I couldn’t get online I called the [university]
help line and I learned how to get back on. We have [a intemet service provider] at
home... that went bankrupt and we just got back on last night and so I was able to reboot
and do all that stuff [so] I was put in a position where I had to do it for myself otherwise I
can almost guarantee you that other people would be doing it for me.

I required of my doctoral students to develop professional websites. They
presented their websites in their guidance committee meetings and this evolving website
idea has helped me to evaluate their progress as we go. We are extending this as a
requirement to all our Ph.D. candidates. Soon all our PhDs. who have been in the
program for at least the last three years will have a professional portfolio online. We are
even extending this requirement to our MA program on campus. This did mean that I

needed a website, which I have been working on, but it certainly is not where I’d like it

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totally to be. I am hoping that by the spring, I will have a pretty solid professional
portfolio — it’s getting there. As I’ve gotten better at locating effective ways to use
technology in my own Ieaming and teaching, I’ve gotten a bit braver — and so here I am,

teaching this course.

I Have This Zone Of Comfort Around Technology...
That I need to know only what I need to know and when people teach me new
things I keep saying well this is new information that I really don’t want to know because

I don’t want to be accountable and responsible for it I just want to give it to you to do.

I’ve Always Thought that it is a Tool that Enhances the Learning and Teaching
Process

It’s not the venue where everything happens it’s a tool. I’ve always thought that
and so I’ve always been trying to figure out how to use this tool effectively. I think the
other question I was asking as well as I was doing this is how is it that [practitioners] can

think about the use of technology in their practice.

[Exposure to Online Teaching]
None really. I watched others do it. I looked at a lot of examples and I watched
people - that’s really the way I Ieam and I Ieamed a lot from [the student advisory

group]! Oh, the faculty discussion group was great! I Ieamed a lot from [several

professors].

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[Experience With The Technology Used To Create The Online Course]

No, not really, not directly. I’ve watched my husband play around with it. I’ve
surfed the Internet looking at examples of online classes. I have a colleague that teaches
a class from [another university] — I looked at his stuff. My husband has a friend that
teaches half his load via the Internet so I looked at his stuff. I don’t have the technical
capacity to set anything like this up. What I do have is a good sense for learning and
teaching, how to make it challenging and how to make it fun. . .. I can handle the
challenges of new Ieaming styles. I had the good fortune to be a part of a yearlong
faculty discussion around building the On-line MA program, so, I did Ieam a lot about
online learning through reading, discussion, and the folklore shared by professors who

had or were doing an online class.

[Motivation For Teaching The Online Class]

I have been interested in the use of technology as a tool to enhance learning and
teaching for some time. In fact, my husband had been doing quite a bit of work and
thinking on the use of technology with [a project at the university]. So, I watched and I
asked questions, and I began to learn how I could use technology in my own work-
communication, organizing ideas, searching for recourses via the Internet, creating and
using databases, and so on. As I got better, I noticed that many of my students, primarily
graduate students who are professional practitioners were talking about technology in our
classes. How could they use it to become more efficient? What were some of the

pitfalls? How could they begin to look at technology as a tool to help [in their practice]?

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What were some policies that needed to be in place to assure the evenness of technology
resource allocations? What were some policies that need to be in place to assure that it
was a learning tool and not another slide projector or ditto sheet tool that does not engage
or enhance the learning endeavor? There were many, many questions. Of course, none
had the answer. We all had stories, anecdotal, of both successes and disasters but none of
us could really call up any empirical evidence that might help [practitioners] think more

holistically about the diverse uses of technology in the [practice] setting.

[Description Of The Online Course]

The course will be geared at developing ways of thinking, planning,
implementing and assessing technology in [the practice setting]. Students will Ieam about
employing computer technology as a tool [in their work], professional development,
problem solving, management, and strategic planning. We’ll also look at the tensions
that technology brings like pressures by both external and internal advocates for
computer technology use in [professional settings] versus the appropriateness of its use in
[other work] related activities like how does technology enhance learning. We’ll look at
emerging research and what we know about actual experiences. We’ll be doing cases that
are based on real situations in [practice settings]. It will be highly interactive. The
students will work in teams but they will also have individual activities. All the activities
will require students to use a variety of computer programs to do things like literature
reviews on line, search for web-based resources, participate in synchronous and

asynchronous conversations, power point presentations, spreadsheets, etc.

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The Design Process

I Was Very Prepared...

That’s one thing you might hear from anyone you ask about their experience
working with me on this course. I put together a team of professional people [a student
advisory group] —now full time Ph.D. students. Together we talked about the issues
today’s [professionals] face when technology is thrown into the pot. After our
conversations, I went away and thought hard about what they said, then I came back to
them with a proposal of what a class might look like, what it would feel like, and what
questions we would address and how. We talked more taking apart my proposal,
enhancing it in many ways. Then I went away, thought, and planned more. We had
decided on casework, so, I began with this. This process of going to the group then
working something up, sharing it, taking it apart, reworking it went on for about four
months. It is a very dynamic way to work — actually, it is the best way I work.

All the people I asked to be on the advisory team are quite adept on computers so
integrating the use of different programs as well as the important questions that they had
to deal with was explicitly woven into every activity. So, I went to Virtual University
with a fairly solid plan. I just needed them to put it up and to help me further think
through what technology might be added to facilitate the learning, the communication,
and the experience of community on line. Because I work effectively in a collaborative
fashion, VU was able to enhance the work I had arrived with.

I did hire my assistant, Bonnie to work with me on this project and to take a bit of
a lead on the technology work for the course while I was away during the summer. She

did a lot of stuff like provide web links for all the assignments, work with Norman [the

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VU producer] on the finer details of the look and the way the site worked, developing
sample assignments, and so on. I just monitored, got updates, from Norman and Bonnie
throughout the summer. I reviewed some drafts and they finished it up. When I returned
to campus we met, we reviewed the class, and we decided we were a “go.”

I had seen many, many examples and I shared ideas with Norman, but in the end,
he’s the expert and said to him to do his thing. He gave me options on design features
and we went from there. You know, trusting the people on your team and respecting

their work is extremely important. I trusted Norman.

[Factors Considered During Design Process]

Distance, time, and access. I have students who are teaching in international
schools across the globe. Deadlines are within a range of time, for example, between the
21St and the 23”, or I provide a time deadline like Friday at 12noon EST. I have provided
time for communication during the activity as well as before and after the activity.
Instead of cramming my introductory activity into two weeks - which is ample time face-
to-face - I ran it over a three-week period. It was perfect timing. Also, because students
are from different settings the cases are a bit more generic.

I am also big on the reflective practitioner — so, I started off with a self-portrait
type of activity and on top of that build more group/team oriented projects. I also wanted
people to get to know one another — so my first two activities is really built on “getting to
know you” “getting to know myself and technology and where I need to go” as well as
Ieaming how to do some very simple mechanical things via computers. So, I am aware

of different technology capacities, so, every one of the assignments has tutorials attached

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to it. On my front page, we even tell students where to go to get help - not to me that’s

for sure.

[Rewards In The Design Process]

Working with the [student advisory group] and working with Norman [the VU
producer]. And, just seeing our ideas come to fi'uition on line. I approached this with a
good deal of passion to learn what I could do so, I didn’t encounter any problems — or
what I considered to be problematic. I often said — I’d like this or this to happen — can
you make it happen? Or I’d say, I saw this on another online class that I liked; do you
think it makes sense to use it here? Or I’d say, okay, we can’t do it right now, but let’s

think about it and maybe try it next time.

[Major Challenges In Online Course Design]

Perhaps the challenge I faced is that I don’t know very much about what all one
can do — but that’s not a challenge in a negative way, but a challenge in a very positive
way. What a wonderful journey it has been so far; I’m thinking I’d like to teach another

course online like this.

[Working With VU]
I went to Virtual University with a fairly solid plan — I just needed them to put it
up and to help me further think through what technology might be added to facilitate the

learning, the communication, the experience of community on line. Because I work

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effectively in a collaborative fashion, VU was able to enhance the work I had arrived
with. I think that Norman and I did a very good job of setting up this class.

There was always someone [at VU] that could help out and I didn’t experience as
many technical problems as other people have had and I think it had to do with how
organized we were going into this and how quickly Norman responded to what I needed
to have and how quickly I could let things go. It was like well okay this didn’t work
that’s fine we’ll just do it differently later you know why fret about it ‘cause there is
nothing you can do. . .. If we didn’t’ have his technical support I could have never done it.
It would just worry me too much and I just knew that, like the final class evaluations it
was like okay lets do it and for this amount of time.

What ever I asked him to give me he gave me which is very interesting because I
know of a couple of faculty who are creating classes right now and they don’t appear to
be getting as much technical support as I’ve gotten from Norman and from Sam which is
really interesting. I don’t know why that is. I don’t know if it’s because the faculty
member isn’t being precise and organized about it or if the producer is unfamiliar with
the platform in the capacity. It’s always been just very good. I can’t say enough about
him and even when my students had complaints about it and they had to use the help line
I would say you need to call VU or you need to email and he was very good at directing
them or helping them out or explaining why certain things were the way they were so
some of our students were asking all these technical questions and I’d just forward it to

Norman.

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Bonnie’s Role and Work With VU

[My role] was basic monitoring and managing. . .. First, we constructed the
curriculum the content. It was a collaborative creation. Mikala called a group of us to
discuss some ideas and that’s how the class was constructed, the syllabus was
constructed. The construction of cases would be the best example. There was a
brainstorming on the table with the different members of the [student advisory] group
coming from different [professional] perspectives. A lot of ideas were put together and
Mikala would then collect that information, write a case, and bring it back to us so we
could see if anything else was missing that could inform the case a little better. That’s
how the cases were created. It was very collaborative. I don’t think you could detect
where our contributions were in that process because it’s all lumped together in the case.

[In] the actual design of the course like an actual web page [my role was] in
making sure that all the available tools were there, the navigation. Not in the aesthetics.
Mikala did have some preferences on that but basically making sure that as a student I
could work in that environment, know where I was and what I had to do.

In the content areal [stressed] that it was important for the students to use
different kinds of programs because the course was about becoming literate in technology
so if they produced assignments they should do it using different software so PowerPoint,
word perfect, spreadsheets so that was done.

We had the chance to talk to other people who had taught with that medium
before and we heard a lot of impressions and a lot of conflicting ideas about the use of

technology. [We also met with others] either independently or together to experience how

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people were doing this. The VU specialist and the whole VU department had samples
that we had access to and we talked to those people after we checked their web sites.

Professors see a lot more time added into their schedules, a lot more student
contact, individual contact and also a lot of repetition in the information about the
teachable moments that sometimes are not present or the opportunity is not collective.
Sometimes it’s individual and just the whole interpretation of how to reach out to
students to make sure that they were Ieaming in the environment.

After that, I was in charge of transferring everything to our specialist at VU. [He]
had a lot more knowledge into transferring the syllabus to a virtual space so knowing
how the audience for that class would work and the accessibility in remote areas. You get
to choose colors and how you want the page to look but the VU specialist helped us
create the pages and sent it back for approval so some things were rearranged like the
order in the left bar so that the students would follow that comfortably and some
logistical things like how the weeks would appear on the screen so we got a lot of help
with that because it was a brand new idea for us. Also in providing a lot of links; Mikala
already had links to different web pages for resources. I did some research on finding
new pages depending on their interests and needs during the course so those were
constructed along the way too.

I also monitored throughout the class, not in direct contact with the students but
the support of it in checking that everything was always working, in touch with the W
staff to make sure that students were finding all the links that they needed, that there was

a thread to be followed that was clear and that they were comfortable in that environment.

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[The Major Challenges With The Course Design Process]

I don’t know if Mikala was sure about how to address the division of workload
for students. You know how they do it on paper but in accessing the web site and
checking it constantly to check discussion threads and things like that we couldn’t really
measure it how much time or the right balance of hours the students would be spending

but it seemed to all work out well as far as I can tell.

[Working With VU]

When we took it to VU, it was a work in progress. It was very collaborative. We
depended on the VU specialist to tell us how to divide the work on the pages of the web
site. The syllabus was very concrete. Mikala had many ideas about the different weeks
but really; the real structure of the virtual design was done with the VU specialist.

The navigation part was only concrete after we saw what VU constructed for it
based on the syllabus that we took so we had no idea but the needs were stressed by
Mikala: making sure that pe0ple had tutorials to work with spreadsheets or power point.
It was a continuous construction. We had pages available and ideas would pop up and so
that went back to them and they constructed something else and we were adding and
sharing ideas and discussing those ideas. It was a real iterative process where you would
do some work, take it to VU, come back do more work and so on. I believe we spent

about a 6-month period.

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Mikala
During The Class
[The Teaching Experience]
I’ve just been scaffolding one thing after the other and I’m really fortunate that

the majority of people in this class are so adept at using technology.

It’s Like Reading An Email Message

They did their first overview paper and it’s like reading an email message. It’s
like an abbreviated, it’s not the kind of paper that I would expect to get in a face-to-face
class and I’m wondering if that’s okay. It doesn’t feel okay I just have to figure it out. I’m
wondering if I have to give more perimeters. Some of them did a good job of taking a
look at what was the same, what was different, what were some themes around
management or uses, and some of them didn’t. I guess that’s the same thing you get in a
face to face.

This one student, he actually completed his undergraduate degree online. . .. His
paper is the worst. It wasn’t graduate level work at all and so I wrote him back and said
what you’ve done is just review a couple of the [other student’s work] and you didn’t do
any synthesis work. The structure of your paper is not up to graduate level writing and I
expect you to redo it otherwise you’re gonna get a zero. I don’t know if that’s an outcome
of his doing his last two years of work online as an undergraduate. I don’t know. I think
some people still think of online being a correspondence thing. I think some students

don’t really get it that there’s work involved.

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It’s been interesting. I’ve actually taught this class on the road, which is also
interesting ‘cause I’ve been traveling a lot and I will travel a lot. I’ve got five trips
coming up before the end of the semester. It’s so great to be able to hook on but I find
that I hook on every day for at least one to three hours. It’s okay. It’s email. A lot of
people will email me with the different problems that they’re having and I’m constantly
getting on to see if they’re putting up the assignments but the good part of it is it’s just
email, a lot of it is email because the way that I structured the class is week by week. I
gave an amount of time you have to do everything and this time I gave very strict
perimeters, which is very different than what a colleague is doing. He may have five
weeks and in the five weeks the team has to do all this work and he doesn’t have
benchmarks and what I’m finding in his class is that the participation in the groups is
very, in one group I noticed that one person hasn’t even dropped in to help out. There are
two people doing all the work so I guess having these benchmarks and giving them time
parameters is because I don’t have them in front of me to make sure that the assignments
are going to be done on time. I’m glad that I did that. When we do the two case studies,
we still have time parameters. There are things that are due as we go. I’m really glad that
I did that. I like what [my colleague is] doing but you’re so dependent on the student’s
initiative and they’re committed to it. Not everybody is.

One of the things that have been interesting is that everybody is so astounded that
I don’t have texts. My text is the web so I don’t have books that they have to purchase or
articles that they have to read and I think I need to play with it this year because I want to
use the web more as a text but because I haven’t really played with it I don’t know really

what more to do with it so next year I’ll do better.

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The threaded discussions, I need to set it up, it’s for the case study. It’s an
opportunity for us to dialogue back and forth and for me to give them directions and stuff
in a synchronous sort of advisory kind of a thing and it gives them an opportunity to get
in on the chat thing. I’ve never done this before, Bonnie, my assistant, and I played on it.
She sat in one room and I sat in another but we’ve not really done it so we’ll see what
happens. I’ll have a couple of teams on in one day and a couple teams on another date.
There are five teams, there are three people in each team and I tried to break up the teams
so there would be gender equity across all of them, there were some similarities in terms
of [experience] yet there was always someone on the team who was a little bit more
expert in technology. Sometimes it didn’t work out but that’s okay and so we have it set
up where we have a chat room for everybody. Everybody can drop in when we have the
synchronous conversation and then we have lobbies set up for each one of the teams
when they can have their own synchronous conversations.

I’m gonna say to them that in preparation what you need to do is to set up at least
two synchronous conversations between two or three of your group members and tell me
when you do it so I can drop in. I’m gonna require them to set up at least twice this time.
A lot of it they can do over email but I actually want them to get the experience with the
synchronous thing because in the last case they are gonna be able to talk to the actors in a
synchronous space so I want them to get better at it.

[The time delay in synchronous chats] it’s just different. [Bonnie and I] kinda
liked it because you know we think the same that we actually need a little time to think
through before we respond so it gave us some time to think about what I just said and

what she just said and there is time to write something so the delay is actually helpful to

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me with her now other people who are on top of it might be fiustrated by it but for me it
was fine. It will be interesting when we get more people on it. I’m only keeping it to a
small number of people because I’ve been warned about having too many people so I’ll

take it seriously.

[Challenges]

I’m really beginning to think about how to use the web as a text. I think it’s more
learning challenges, how to use this better the whole thing about setting up a web, how to
make it more valuable experience, constantly challenging how I would do this better next

time.

There’s Been Some Interesting Technology Things That I Have Been Learning

One of them is that we have to limit the amount that people put up because we
have people spread out so downloading little problems like that. One of the things we
have to recognize is that, for example, [one student] said it took her fifteen minutes to
download one [assignment]. It’s because of the capacity they have. She’s [overseas] and
so he and I really needed to think about it and we put up an email saying you could only
put up so many megabytes and so on and it’s up there now so there are little glitches like
that that we don’t know about until you start doing it. When we get to the cases when
they have to put up power point presentations and they have to turn in a research paper

with that. It will be interesting but Norman is pretty good, he figures it out.

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I’m figuring out how to navigate the web much better and with Norman’s help
with all these glitches I’m beginning to understand the technical pieces a bit better and

the potential of it which is really important.

I Think We Have A Pretty Good Group
They’ve been communicating with one another on email so they copy it to me.
When they post things they always put little comments in there so there is a real need for

people to communicate.

It’s A Lot OfTime. ..

I’d say 10-12 hours per week. I anticipate it’s gonna be even more when we do
the synchronous and asynchronous conversations like this week with the threaded
discussion I know that I plan on getting on at least three or four times a day maybe add a
comment here or there to push the discussion. It’s a lot more [time than face to face
teaching]. In my face to face class with the blackboard.com ‘cause now I do that in every
face to face class and so I have them do a lot with blackboard but it’s still never as much
as the VU class ‘cause you’re in contact with your students everyday and It’s not like that

in [face to face] classes.

[The Context and Technology Affects Teaching]
When I was grading their papers I started to think now how do I grade this? I’m

gonna grade it the way I would grade any other scholarly piece of writing and I’m gonna

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have to give them clear and succinct comments back so I can explain why they got the
points that they did so that was an interesting challenge for me to think about.

The other thing which is real interesting which has to do with teaching is making
the writing so public you know with all the papers everyone can read it. I think that what
that has done is that it has helped me understand the necessity of having my students
write for a broader audience and not just for me and making it public. That’s what they
do on blackboard.com. They put it in a drop box and I put it in a folder where everyone
has to read everyone’s papers and I think just creating that publicness of writing is an
excellent learning tool and makes people understand that they’re not writing for the
professor, they are writing for a disciplinary area so I think I’m getting much clearer
about that and it’s changing the way I think about how papers are presented and I’m
thinking about how grading can be different too.

It’s ahnost an iterative process like when I get on line [the technology] gives me
some limitations like time limitations, how quickly I can write, there are some
disembodied limitations to that piece but I found that I could do more with it as well and I
had different channels of communication with it as well so even though it might have
been limiting for me it also was somewhat liberating for me too so it was a real reciprocal
process and to give an inanimate thing a life is so unusual to do but for example we had
the chat rooms, discussion threads, email, telephone, fax mail and hard copy and face to
face ‘cause a lot of them live very close and I have actually seen a handful of the
students. Even an international student came here and I saw her so what happened here is

that I had many different avenues of communication and so that was for me a potential

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and so I interacted with that. How can I use all these different threads of communication
to do different things and I like that a lot.

How it really has affected my teaching is that I am using more technology in my
face-to-face teaching. Well, I started to with blackboard.com in all of my classes. Every
class that I teach is a blackboard.com free site but I use it more and students like it so
technology has helped me a lot in terms of expanding the realm of teaching. Instead of it
being three hours one day a week it’s now open for a lot of contact in between classes so
it has I think impacted, it has enhanced.

[Also] it’s an easy way out to do things because this has been a tremendous travel
time for me. I’ve been here three weeks without getting on a plane. Prior to that the
longest period of time that I ever was in town was about three or four days since August
so it has been freeing that way ‘cause I could get online from anywhere in the world and I

have been traveling internationally as well as nationally so it’s been liberating.

The Context Affects Student Learning...

Yeah it does, having to write for a broader audience. The anxiety of having to
write for others is a tough thing to get through and I think It’s good that they try to, I have
to figure out ways where little by little there writing becomes more and more public and
they get better and better at critiquing and scrutinizing each other’s writing in a positive
and constructive manner but how to figure out how to do that online with the class like
this I haven’t yet figured it out. I may ask a couple of questions during the threaded

discussion regarding the style of writing and the clarity and stuff. I might throw that in to

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get us to think about how one writes a paper for classes like this but I’ll have to figure
that one out.

They wouldn’t normally have gone to the Internet and done research on the
Internet and take a look at what other [professionals] are doing and find resources on the
Internet. What was interesting with them between the [first] case project which we
Ieamed a lot about how to do the work and the [second] project which went much more
smoothly team work wise than the first one did was when we did the [first] case we
didn’t have a real place for each of the teams to have a discussion and post stuff so we
could actually track it. They were doing it all through email which was really quite
fi'ustrating for me ‘cause my email and my attachments was just bulging and so I said to
Norman what we need to do for the [second] case is each one of the teams needs to have
their own discussion place and they need to have their own little chat rooms and I will tell
them what the expectations are in terms of their participation in those two places and I
also wanted a discussion thread for the class at large ‘cause if there was any big time
questions they would post it to the discussion thread or if I was talking to one group in
their chat room or I read something in discussion thread that was important to everyone I
can transfer it to the big discussion thread.

One of the things that I thought was an excellent design element for this class was
that they had to learn a variety of different programs within the context of making
decisions or proposing something like the power point the excel the word perfect, all that
stuff. They were forced to Ieam those kinds of things for a particular goal and they could
see how knowing these different programs could help produce something that was usable

for them in [their jobs] and they all created wonderful PowerPoint presentations.

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[Students] had to Ieam the technology to do the assignments and so I think for
some people who have communicated with me already it has just brought them up to
speed in terms of the current capacity of the programs and how they can use it in their
own work. I do know that one student who was the technology director for her [job] was
actually using a lot of what she was doing to put a plan together for her [organization] for
next year so that’s good [and] one student was saying to me on email how much she had
learned in her chat room conversations about what she could do with the computer. She
was one of the ones that this was a scary thing and she’s not scared now she can actually
do excel, she can do power point and other stuff.

The other question I was asking as I was doing this is how is it that [these
students] can think about the use of technology in their practice and I’ve asked that
question directly of my students to see okay now after you’ve gone through this process
how are you beginning to think about [this]. People see technology as a venue or at least
online Ieaming and what not as a venue for professional development primarily because
the [people] that they work with don’t have time to take a regular course but creating
professional development opportunities that they can go to at their convenience that’s
online that’s rich and really engaging is an important way to think about the use of
technology as a professional development tool so I’ve been getting to see from them how
they are thinking about the use of technology in [their] practice.

I saw it in their locating information to make decisions. That was a big thing for
me is that [these students] need to have a depth of understanding about a particular issue
before they make decisions. They have to make informed decisions and when they were

doing both the first and second cases I could see that they were gathering information

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from the web, assessing information from the web and making decisions about what site,
what parts of this information they were going to use that applied to a particular situation
so data driven decision making is very important for [these students] and I began to see
them doing that as well.

I also thought it was really important for [these students] to share their knowledge
with other [like-minded professionals] and I think I began to see that building of
community that they were Ieaming to share what they know and to the whole giving and
taking and communicating piece because a lot of [them], the only place that they come to
where they can talk to other [like-minded professionals] is to a class so they were looking
at this as a venue to massage ideas with other like-minded people so using technology as

a tool to bring together like-minded people to learn something I think is a good tool.

[A Sense Of Community In The Class]

The first activity [was] perfunctory and introductory. We spent a lot of time on
that and that was good because it gave people more of a sense of the way people talk to
each other is much more of a comfortable tone. In their emails and what they write it’s
much more comfortable and informal. It is what you would expect in a face-to-face class
and so it was good to spend that time doing that activity. I think any kind of activity that
makes them have to talk with each other or share something about themselves or
comment about someone else’s work so far has created a really nice community.

It was very interesting in the discussion part they would say you need to go and
check this out or somebody would talk to someone in another group and say thanks so

much for sending me this information and then it was funny because in the [second] case

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the [actor] says oh we saw this site and it was a really great site and in the discussion
boards a couple of people said it’s not a great site you know it’s just like boards they get

all hyped up so it was great.

[Managing The Students And The Class]

There is a lot of that teaming thing where you get the one person in the team who
sends you emails or calls you up wining and stuff and it’s harder to deal with [online]
then it is in person because in person you can watch the team working and you can
intervene and even though I was trying my best to watch it in the first case because I
didn’t have the different threads I couldn’t see the progress on a daily basis with the first
case I couldn’t intervene fast enough. The second case, because I was on every day I got
onto every one of the discussion threads so I could see the progress. I could see what they
were posting, I could see what they were saying to one another, I could also go into their
chat logs and see what they were chatting about and I would get onto their discussion
thread and make clarifications [and] suggestions so I could immediately intervene or I
noticed that one person wasn’t getting on so I would email that person and I would say
that I’ve noticed in the discussion board in the chat room I’m not seeing you there is
something wrong with your computer or blah, blah, blah.

I think that’s really important in doing these kind of team projects is setting up
these communication systems so that as the instructor you can see the progress on a daily
or on a every other day basis and you can intervene immediately ‘cause a lot of times the
students won’t say anything until the very end and then they get their grade and they

complain because they got a bad grade and they say stuff like well you know my

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contribution was blah, blah, blah. So, I shouldn’t be penalized for a team grade. It’s a

toughie even though half the projects that they did were individual and the other half is

team.

[Challenges During The Class]

I think the team, the whole team process I think I need to do this one more time to
figure it out but doing team work, group work in this venue I think it is a challenge and I
just need to think about that more. . .. guiding it, not only how to do it but even in an
embodied class just because, people don’t know how to do team work no one ever
teaches us about team work the whole idea of forming, norming, storming and
performing. No one really teaches us how to do it but we’re expected to know and then
we get put in this venue and no one really knows how to do it in person let alone here so
just trying to figure out how to prepare people to do team work and then to do it online is
something I need to think through.

I do this in embodied situations. I can actually teach people how to work in teams
I just haven’t figured out how to do that online and I always do it. I don’t expect people
to know how to work in teams and so I usually do a couple of exercises in sequential
order to build them up to working in their teams. There’s a lot of communication
strategies and opportunities to deal with conflict and conflict resolution in these little
activities that we do but it wasn’t in this online class so I just have to figure it out but I’m
not the only one who is having that problem. Jim is doing it as well and he’s having those
kind of problems too so we just have to think about it more. . .. little different strategy.

You can’t just transfer what you do in a face-to-face class to an online class.

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As the facilitator of the chat room I do type very fast and I do read very quickly
and I think that’s a blessing because I can get it very quickly and then I would tell people
you want to make your statements very short and to the point and don’t go on and on and
then I’d get upset at people I’d say so and so just asked that question so go up.

With the last case, I swear I spent more time in class than I had with anything
else. It was really heavy about a week before something was due and a couple days after.
That was a heavy period and then I had a little down time while they were working on
something but I put more hours into this online class than I would normally put into a
face to face class expect for the dissertation prep classes that is about just as much time as
I would spend with the online class well you know ‘cause writing dissertations and then
if you have twelve to fifteen students in your class you’re meeting with all of them a lot
individually and so that’s what this reminded me of that kind of intensity and that kind of
availability and sometimes I got really frustrated and angry because it always appeared
that people expected me to be there when they were discussing and I got a couple of
emails that said you haven’t responded to our discussion thread and I thought I was on it
all day and so there was this kind of a tone regarding my availability online and I would
get a little perturbed it was like you know I just cannot get on this everyday. It’s like
teaching a class every day even Saturdays and Sundays and I’m not the only one who has
said this others who have taught online have said this too and when I did the [last] case I
had to tell then that I’m only getting on once a day at this time to read the discussions and
spend an hour or hour and a half and I did it every day at the same time and then I said I

would never do this for a face to face class.

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It’s Different From Face to Face Teaching

They are doing a very active communication with each other, a very active
process as opposed to reading something and then writing about it they are actively
engaged in an experiential activity which means that the instructor must be present in that
process and because almost all of my activities were engagement in a process meant that
I had to put more time into it as I would in an embodied situation. That sort of

collaborative or collective engagement was the difference.

I Really Liked...

The chat rooms and the discussions. I enjoyed the communication. I enjoyed the
talking. I enjoyed their discoveries. . .. When they found web sites or they clicked in and
they found some really fascinating stuff online. I noticed that they were finding others
that were just incredible. It was just amazing what they came up with so I enjoyed their

discoveries very much.

[Problems With The Technology]
There were people who were hitting fire walls and they would come in and out

and we could just see them going in and out. People kept saying I’m sorry, I’m back.

I Enjoyed Teaching It
I Ieamed a tremendous amount and the students have emailed me or when they
submitted their reports have said I really liked this project or I really Ieamed a lot they

thank each other and I’ve been talking about the necessity for them to Ieam from each

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other. They are the experts. They are the people who know what’s good and what’s not
good on the web what’s gonna be applicable so I wanted to have them really Ieam from
each other and take me pretty much out of the equation as the person who gives them
knowledge and I think that happened. I think it happened that I was able to just guide the
process, yes provide input but just guide the process. That’s howl like to do stuff like

this so I think that was good.

I Learned A Tremendous Amount

I gathered a good deal of information about what’s available on the Internet.
Almost everyone of their references or when they were sharing references I checked it
out so I Ieamed a lot about the intemet and about different sites, what they offer, how to
locate things so that was something that I was forced to do. I wouldn’t have normally
done that myself and that’s good for me ‘cause when I teach other classes I can refer my
students to these sites.

I Ieamed a lot about myself as an instructor/facilitator on this venue in terms of I
questioned my capacity to do this and to enjoy it because I enjoy the physicalness of
[teaching] and that’s one of the reasons why I did it. It’s different. I remember when we
first talked I had this fear it was like fear factor of doing this and now I’m not afraid of
doing this at all.

I know other things that I can do. I got so excited about some of the things that we
were doing and the discussions that we were having I thought oh I could think of doing
another class online but I stopped myself after that but I could actually see teaching

another subject and doing it a little differently and having some individual and

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collectively engaged activities, having a reading and then discussion threads around the
reading I mean I began to have all these different ideas so I learned a lot about my own
capacity to be effective in this venue. I honestly, I hoped that I would be effective in this
venue but I didn’t know.

I also am beginning to Ieam how to better communicate online. It’s a different
language you know the tenor of what you write. I’m much more careful and cautious
now. I’ve been trying to be very cautious now because how you string words together can
mean different things for different people and you know I’m not the best at it right now
but I’m learning how to do that so that’s kind of... It’s tone; it’s word choice. . .. For
different people you communicate differently. I have to get better at it I just know I do. In
the classes I teach on campus here I don’t communicate the same way with each student.
It’s very different and unique to that. person and so I’m learning how to read the other
person in their talk so to say so that I can communicate with them effectively.

It’s very different from [face to face communication]. I think it’s just how you see
yourself in relationship to other people and how you see yourself as a teacher. I think it’s
important for me to make sure that I can communicate with an individual to help them
help themselves and so I try to do that one on one in person and so I’m trying to do that
online. It’s very different; it’s a nature of who you are and how you communicate. I’m

trying to find my virtual nature so to speak. Online identity has a lot to do with that.

I Think Some Things Affected My Motivation

Getting the support that we got, the 10,000.00 dollars, the lap top computer, the

producer, that certainly motivated me to get off my butt and being on the initial

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committee that talked through the masters online I had motivational factors that got me to

this place to do it.

Having Colleagues Helped Me Out A Lot.

Having colleagues that I know are doing it or have done it and just being in close
proximity so that we can talk about these things I think affected the way I was thinking
about doing it or about what I was doing. It affirmed many times what I was doing, if I
had a problem with a student how would you handle this online I had feedback

immediately, so having colleagues I think helped me out a lot.

I Had A Student Who Got Really Angry With Me

That made me think about how I was talking. She was a fundamentalist Christian,
I think I said something that offended her, and so I had to think about that. I don’t even
know what I said actually but I had to think about that. That highlighted that it was
important to think about [my online communication skills] but I think that there are other
factors that students bring to this venue that you don’t know about that I think affected
me along the way and it would in a face to face class as well but it affected me a little bit
more here because if you told me right now that I feel that I’m physically closer and I
could apologize and I could see your reaction and so on but online it’s like that delayed

kind of thing so I think that affected me just understanding that delay.

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[What Mikala Needs to Change for Next Time]

I might have to do like a mini team project before the two cases. I don’t know
though, I don’t know how I’m gonna construct it. I have some time to think about it so
that they get sort of a flavor for teaming, chatting, and case analysis. I might have to put a
one week nongraded exercise before they start the first case although I think we kind of
set it up I just want to rethink that to make that transition a little easier. I need that
activity where they can be doing chat, discussion thread, analysis, processing as a team.
We did a discussion thread in another assignment we did a chat room in another
assignment so they knew the rudiments of that but they were doing it as individuals they
weren’t doing it as a team so I need that activity where they can be doing chat, discussion
thread, analysis, processing as a team.

I do like the chats and then I was thinking that I might add a chat just one where I
would be available to students where they could just talk to me like office hours. I think I

should do that because I don’t see them in person.

Bonnie's Description Of The Class

[Challenges]

I don’t know if Mikala was sure about how to address the division of workload
for students. You know how they do it on paper but in accessing the web site and
checking it constantly to check discussion threads and things like that, we couldn’t really
measure it how much time or the right balance of hours the students would be spending. 1

think that was a challenge for me to analyze at first sight and as assignments were due

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they became a little intense for the students but I wasn’t sure if they would face some
fi'ustrations because of the medium or chats.

Sometimes when you have a large number of students in a chat everybody needs
to speak but sometimes they don’t all have to speak or have the chance to so
interpretation of what that means it was kind of nebulous to me too. For instance in a face
to face class you might be able to determine via body language whether they are engaged
in it whereas you can’t always tell online if they’re just reading and absorbing you can’t
really tell if they’re there or they aren’t- their level of engagement.

Also, there was some frustration because everybody thought that they had to
speak and they were all speaking or typing at the same time so the line of ideas was not
continuous. I don’t know how much learning there is unless you have the chance to read
it back when you’re done with the chats and at the time, I’m not sure they had the chance
to read what they wrote. It’s so intense and so fast that you don’t really absorb much

during the chat so the learning is really after.

[Problems With The Technology]

Not that I’m aware of. It was so beautifully; I was really impressed. Week to
week there were no problems. The VU specialist was always there giving the support
needed. People had problems connecting even during the chat for instance if a person
couldn’t connect they would call and they were immediately connected. The problem was
solved and they could connect to the chat before it was over so I feel that the support is so

important. There is a lot of back stage work that goes with the virtual class I think that

goes unnoticed.

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[The Technology Affected The Course Design And The Class]

If you had some expectations that we couldn’t do than I’m not aware of it. It was
created from the start as a VU class. It wasn’t an adaptation of a face-to-face class so you
might see limitations if it were an adaptation but in this case I didn’t see any limitations.
On the contrary, I think new ideas were implemented because of the opportunity of
having it on—line. New things came up that added to the class such as the interview with
the live characters in one of the cases or the resources that were at our disposal on the

web instantly. You don’t have to go to the library to get them.

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Juliet

The Cast of Characters.

Juliet

Juliet was the faculty member on whom this profile was based. She was one of
two faculty members who took the faculty development class to design her online course.
She worked with three students in the faculty development class whom she met and was
teamed up with after entering the course. Below I have provided brief descriptions of
Juliet’s group members as well as the VU producer that worked with her to get the class
online once the faculty development class was completed. Following the introductions to

these participants, I have provided the extended profile on Juliet using her words.

John
John was one of the graduate students that worked with Juliet in the faculty
development class. Juliet considered John the most technologically skilled member in her
group. She referred to him as “a god” with technology. She credited him with, “Being
very instrumental in making the site happen and building the site. He’s been the primary
one. He has clearly been the onsite developer of the course” (Juliet, interview, May 2,

2001)
Ken

Ken was another student member in Juliet’s FAC-DEV 101 group. According to

Juliet, his primary interests were in leadership and student services. He was particularly

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interested in Communities of students and how you build communities and had been
doing a lot of reading about that topic. Consequently, this was one of his main
contributions to the group. “He had a lot of good ideas about activities you could do to do
that. Structures you could put in place to do that. So he was instrumental in kind of

pushing that aspect of the course” (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001).

Xu

Xu was another student member of the FAC-DEV 101 group but Juliet did not say
much about her or her contributions to the group other than to include her in the
following comment. “They were the technology guys and gal. They really pushed my
thinking by questions they asked” (Juliet, interview, May 2, 2001). Juliet said that all the
group members were all instrumental in offering ideas on activities that would create

community in her class.

Sam - The VU Producer

Sam was the VU producer that also worked with the other faculty member in this
study. He entered the story shortly after Juliet completed her work in the faculty
development class. They stayed with the original course design that Juliet and her group
had created in FAC-DEV 101, made some refinements, additions and got it up and
running. Sam also provided support while Juliet’s online course was running and met
with her to discuss revisions when it was over.

Sam came to university as a student several years before our interview. He had

graduated with a bachelor degree a couple years before our interview in an area not

 

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closely related to technology. However, while he was getting his degree he began
working with technology as a hobby and took a class or two in design and computing.
Upon graduation, he took a position as design director for a small city. He came
back to the university and worked for six months in another position when he saw an
opening for a producer at VU. Since he was interested in web-based education and
technology he took the position and had been employed for one and a half years at the

time of our interview.

Juliet

A Profile In Her Own Words

Background

I came here two years ago [but] I’ve been a professor for eight or nine years.

Teaching Is The Favorite Part Of My Job...

I mean, I love my research. The research I do is very interesting to me. I
love the intellectual stimulation of being in a university environment. I love the
colleagues in this department but both formal and informal aspects of teaching are
sort of what keep me here. We have an apprenticeship model of doctoral training in
this program, so we do a lot of informal teaching of doctoral students as well and I

love that work as well as classroom teaching.

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[Role as a Teacher and Methods]

[FAC-DEV 101] has forced me to think about this. I’ve always said I see
myself as a facilitator of learning. I tend to be fairly student directed in my teaching.
I try to involve a lot of choice and a lot of applied projects in which people have
authentic materials on which they’re working. I try to walk a fairly difficult line
between theory and practice. We have a scientist, practitioner model of training in
my professional area and in this program so we want people to have the scholarship
base on which the work rests but we also want them to be able to go out tomorrow
and apply this in a pragmatic way so I find it somewhat difficult sometimes, we
have both doctoral students and folks who are gonna be practitioners and really
aren’t interested in that theory stuff. . .. But I try to do that in my courses, provide
both applied based practice, practice of the concepts we’re learning about and also
enough theory so that it makes sense for people who are a little bit more
theoretically oriented or who are going to be scholars in their future life. Given that,
I tend to do some lecture but in the best of all worlds, I’ve got about a third
information dissemination and about 2/3 application of some kind, where people are
either doing small group projects, they’re doing critiques, they’re doing exploration
of materials, they’re doing something with the information. I tend to use a lot of
authentic assessments of people who are actually trying to do something, bring the
work back in, have it looked at, provided feedback, take it back out again. I’m not
one of those lecturers, multiple-choice test kind of [professors] especially because
what we do is professional preparation. We help people Ieam how to learn so that

they can do that for the rest of their professional lives. I see that as a really

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important part of what I do because our knowledge base is changing so quickly and
you can’t just impart information. It’s not gonna carry them, even through the next

five or ten years in practice. So, I try to be more a facilitator than instructor.

I’m Very Respectful That Everybody Learns In A Very Different Way

I think that’s something that I’ve grown in my teaching over the eight, 9 years
I’ve been doing this. I was trained to think in a fairly constructivist paradigm about
people having to interact with knowledge and work with it and I’ve come to realize that
some people don’t Ieam that way. A lot of the folks that we get into this program are very
good traditional learners. They learn through interaction with text so I’ve tried to be very
respectful of the fact that people learn in very different ways. I try to accommodate that
in my instruction. . .. Very often, I’ll have multiple options for how to complete an
assignment. But I do think people Ieam by being exposed to information in some way.
For most of us, I think that’s facilitated when there’s some sort of authentic, meaningful
interaction with the idea. Then I think they Ieam by working with it in some way, so
making active, getting performance feedback, accuracy feedback of how we’re working
with those ideas or materials or whatever it is that we’re doing being challenged, if it’s
conceptual and theoretical, to think about things more deeply or from a different
perspective.

I think that I really value the interaction in teaching as well, so we tend to do a lot
of group discussions. It’s a little difficult because I’ve been teaching classes of students
fairly young in their programs, first and second year students, and they don’t challenge

each other very well in group based discussion. They are a little too politically correct

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and real nice to each other. But by the fourth year, we get away from that and they yell at
each other and I like that I value that when people are really challenged to look at what
are the paradigms I’m using in my thinking, where am I situating myself in this problem,
what’s the world view I bring to this problem, how do I conceptualize it from that

respect? Those I think help people really stretch.

[Experience With Technology]

All of my work is done on a PC. I bet I spend 80% of my day right here [at the
keyboard] and I have for years. We have computers at home. We use them; my children
use them instructionally and recreationally. I don’t tend to use them as recreationally as
other people in my family do. I’m not on the net a lot, shopping or downloading things

like other people do but I’m comfortable with those applications and do that.

[Philosophy on Technology]

I don’t know a lot about the technical stuff of the computer. I don’t feel like I
want to know that, or need to know that. I don’t need to know how to compress stuff
other people can do that. That’s not what I wanta do. I don’t know how the telephone
works either. Nor do I care.

I’ve done a little bit of [programming and setting up web pages]. My husband
does this professionally. I don’t think I’ve ever set up a web page all by myself but I’m

familiar with that and would feel comfortable doing that.

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[Technology in Face-To-F ace Teaching]

[1 used] Web CT [as] the online course support [at another university]. All of my
courses have an online, I use blackboard as the online supplement to my courses. I’ve
really used them as just support for the course. I haven’t really used blackboard
instructionally. [The faculty development class] has helped me think about how I might
do that. I’ve mostly used them to post assignments, the syllabus, and form groups, to
have email readily available for people, that kind of thing. And I use them for
enrichment in my courses so I might say here’s a new site. I want you to visit this
because we’ll talk about it in class on Monday.

I played with the chat discussion this semester for the first time. For one of my
courses, I required a threaded discussion based on the class topics so people had
responsibilities to post a reaction to the class and then they were supposed to visit and
respond so many times during the semester. That was the first time I had done that. I
wasn’t very pleased with it because it wasn’t a central part of the course. I didn’t nurture
it well and so we had some nice discussions but people didn’t contribute as much as I had
hoped they would so I have to think about that more as a central part of my course. I’ll
give it more emphasis in my own instruction, my own grading and I think people will use
it. They had a very nice discussion after class one time that helped me understand they
didn’t get something. That was really valuable because I wouldn’t have known based on
the discussions we had in class that they didn’t get it in the way I wanted them to get it so
it was really helpful in that regard.

I’ve used blackboard when I do presentations for students, I always have the

projector set up and some people use PowerPoint or they use a web based demonstration

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kind of thing. They all had to do a presentation so they used that so I’m comfortable in

that regard using the stuff in class.

[Exposure to Online Education]

I’ve had exposure to it because my husband teaches online courses so [certain]
nights he’s in the basement, teaching these courses. So I’ve seen that and we’ve talked at
length about his struggles as he’s been learning to do that himself but I’ve never done one

before, never participated in one before so this was virgin territory.

[Motivation for Teaching Online]

This is a required part of our curriculum so in terms of why I would do this course
online is purely for my benefit, for the fun of it. I was intrigued by this possibility, to
allow flexibility in the summer and because it was a course that could go up readily. So
there really wasn’t a good sort of pedagogical reason to put this course online. It was
really more a choice of convenience. I think this one works fine in an online environment
but there really wasn’t like oh, I need to put this online so it would be optimized. I could
teach this face to face just as well.

[Another reason] we wanted to have a course online for our students is that
increasingly, as in all professions, technology has become part of the accrediting
standards so that people are supposed to have competencies in [technology] so we want
them to have this as a tool for their own lifelong professional development experience as

consumers of an online professional development seminar so that if they decide to do

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this, they’ll know what it’s about. I’d like them to experience it but if they hate it, that’s

data for us to think about.

[Description of the Online Course]

It’s a six week summer course so it’s an intensive, accelerated kind of course to
serve the needs of both [scholars] and [professionals]. It’s set up so that each week of the
class, they’ll have three units, or three days in the class. The first day will be content,
information based, so they’ll have reading associated with that. They are gonna have to
buy some texts. There’ll be online sites that they’ll be required to visit.

The whole first part of the week will be information dissemination. The second
day will be a small group format. We’ll put them into groups of three people and they’ll
have stuff they have to work on together, so it’ll be applications of that information.
Those will be predominantly case based. These will be very structured exercises and
they’ll have to develop a group product as a part of that. Then they’ll post all those group
products back to the whole class and the last part of the week, day three, involves
individuals looking at what they did in groups and looking across groups at what the
other groups developed and thinking about reflective learning. What did they think about
this topic? What similarities and differences do they see across the product? That will
come individually to me. I’ll then provide a group feedback via voiceover to the whole
group.

The last thing they do in the week is send me a personal reflection paper that’s
one to three pages about the week’s activities and the products and all that. Then they

send me a feedback about how the group work went this week.

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In terms of how I make contact with them, that’s all structured as the course
content. Every week they get an audio slide show of me previewing the week. It’s a little
3 or 4 minute hi, welcome back. Here’s what we’re gonna do this week. So, they’ve got
at least my voice, if not pictures of me. I’m gonna try to have fim with the pictures.
We’re gonna superimpose me in different parts of the world. This is summer. We’ll tell

them I’m on vacation.

[The Faculty Development Class]

I don’t know a lot about the technical stuff of the computer. I don’t feel like I
want to know that, or need to know that. I think that’s been a real strength to this course,
actually that we focused on the human elements of how to do this stuff a lot. We talked
about HTML and some other stuff but we really spent a lot of time thinking about what’s
the human computer interface like and that’s really more of what I’m interested in in
terms of teaching online.

[The faculty development class] has been invaluable in helping me think through
[the course design] ahead of time. Had I not had this course, I would’ve made so many
mistakes and done this so badly that I might not want to do it again. I really think that
because my thinking has changed so much about what’s required to do this well. I would
not have given myself the time that I got in FAC-DEV 101 to articulate, to map my
philosophy [on teaching and learning] onto a web-based practice. I know what it looks
like in a face-to-face class because I have a lot of experience with that but I’ve never

done this before. I didn’t even have a working model in my head of what this could look

like.

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In [the faculty development class] they purposely didn’t show us models because
they didn’t want to foreclose our thinking in any way so I really had no idea what is web
talk I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t know the possibilities for an online
conversation. I didn’t know what the traps were. We actually played around in class with
some technologies. I’d never used a chat online so I might have tried to do a bunch of
synchronous chats without knowing that that’s a bad idea because of the time delay but
that also helped me to think about what size group did I need. I wouldn’t have limited it
to three necessarily but I knew that I wanted them to do a little bit of synchronous chat
and I knew I wanted it to work really well so I used my knowledge about what and how
people Ieam really explicitly in this course whereas before in a face to face class I might
have said, okay lets get into groups of four or five, whatever, so I think that I would not
have understood this medium without the faculty development class. I would not have
thought about it.

I would not have done the reading that I did in instructional design. We had such
good discussions about both the technology aspects and the learning and teaching online
that I would not have, the product would have looked quite different. I probably would
not have used the web to the extent that I did. I would have probably done more of a
closed model where I supply all the content. It would have probably have looked a lot
more correspondence like I’m sure.

Well, I would have tried to do groups but I’m not sure I would have done it with
any level of sophistication. I feel like I did sort of a good run through some group process
because I really thought about what is it gonna take to make this work online because I

had that luxury to do that. We spent about three or four weeks in 882 talking about those

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very issues, so I know I wouldn’t have done as well without the 882 course. It really
jump-started my thinking in that respect.

In terms of my own process in the course, I started out as really a complete novice
in what could an online course look like. Even though I’d kicked these ideas around with
my husband, I never really thought seriously about how would I teach online. This was
my first opportunity to really do that and I didn’t have a clue, not a clue of what was
possible. So, I felt like I lost about 5 weeks at the beginning of the semester because I
was clueless.

I had very few expectations [going into the faculty development class] actually
because I had so little knowledge going in. I really wanted what it gave me, which was
an opportunity to think about the teaching components of this. I didn’t wanta Ieam how to
do any of [the technology] because I knew I had VU support so I knew I didn’t have to
know how to make a web page, how to compress video. I didn’t do any of that and I
didn’t wanta Ieam any of that. It’s a byproduct, that’s fine, but that’s not my goal. My
goal was to really give myself, force myself the luxury of thinking critically about
teaching in, in this format and in any other format. That was really a luxury of the course,
that’s what I wanted, and that’s what I got. I made that happen for myself.

I would’ve benefited, I think, had I had some exemplars or models earlier in the
course. We talked about this with [the course professors] and they made a design decision
not to expose us to that because they didn’t wanta limit us, our thinking, too early. But I
didn’t have a framework to think about it in so I would have, doing it again, and I’m an

experiential Ieamer, I need to look at something, need to muck around with it to have an

27.4

idea about what’s possible sometimes. So that would, I would’ve done that, had I done

that earlier, I think I could have been more active in the group early.

I Learned About Technology in the Faculty development class...

Oh, absolutely. There were applications I hadn’t seen before. Again, I’m on the
web a lot so I see stuff. I’d seen streaming video but I’d seen how it could be linked, used
in a course so I kinda thought about them concretely for the first time. We spent some
time almost every week talking about something technical and those were very
interesting to me. What’s a server? What’s HTML, what’s that stand for? So, all that
stuff, I Ieamed. That was pretty interesting and that was a nice byproduct of getting to

think about teaching.

The Design Group

I have tried very hard not to be in control of that process because I know nothing
about the web course development. I can step back and talk a little bit more broadly about
that. I am blessed in my group. I have a wonderful, wonderful group, a very diverse
group, including [John] who’s been doing this forever and is a god at this and who just is
at the end of his program but does a lot of the stuff anyway and has been very
instrumental in making the site happen and building the site. He’s been the primary one.
As it’s evolved, we’ve shifted; we’ve sort of fallen out into roles and [John] has clearly
been the onsite developer of the course and that met his needs.

I felt badly at points because I thought he did all of that and other people weren’t

as involved in making the web pages but that’s what he wanted from the course so I feel

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okay about that. He was so good at it and I was so novice when we started that we sat
down and I did some storyboarding one day in class and we kinda brainstormed some
ideas about what it might look like and I said things like it should have a nice, light feel
because it’s a summer course and then he went away with it and did a mock up that was
fabulous and it’s just been... I think we showed you the sort of iterations of the course.

It’s been evolving across the semester, under the aegis of [John’s] creative genius.
That’s really what’s been the driving force of the web site. Then what the group has
really been instrumental in doing is... thinking about what should be in the site. So, the
group’s really worked to think about how to structure this, how to do community
development, how the content should be structured across the week. I’ve tried to think
about what does the content need to be across the six weeks and what exercises and
things I want them to do. But they’ve been really wonderful in helping think about all the
things we talked about in [the faculty development class]. How do we forge community
in this class? All those things the group’s really worked on this as a team. It’s been
terrific.

Clearly, my group was miles ahead of me. Especially two members of my group
are finishing technology degrees. This is their last course. These guys know so much
about how to do stuff that they were kind of waiting for me to give them direction and
this is where I tried very hard not to control the group because I didn’t feel like I could
provide direction early on in the course. I was clueless and so they were really
instrumental in going, well, let’s try this. Let’s play with this idea and see how it works.
And so, they pulled up to the table and contributed in a really powerful way. And so the

site started to develop, the technical stuff, with really very little input from me.

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They’d say how would you teach this in a face-to-face class. And I would go
here’s what I would do. And then they’d go, oh, we could do streaming video. They knew
this techno stuff and I’d write it down. I didn’t know what they were talking about. Then
we got to some of that throughout the [faculty development class]. We did a night on
streaming video and we did a night on this, that, and the other thing. So, they translated
for me and that was really helpful.

We had one person in particular in my group [Ken] who’s very good, his area’s
leadership and he’s very interested in communities of students and how you build
communities and had been doing a lot of reading about development of community. So
he had a lot of really good ideas about activities you could do to do that. Structures you
could put in place to do that, etc. So, he was instrumental in pushing that aspect of the
course. They all were, actually. That was a very dominant theme in [the faculty
development class] and so we all took that very seriously. So, they really pushed my
thinking by the questions they asked. I didn’t feel like I controlled the group. They kept
looking at me to do that. I looked around the room and I thought I saw my colleagues
doing that. I thought how can they; do they know something I don’t know? But I was
very happy to have us be a real team and have it co-developed because I really didn’t feel
like I could contribute to that aspect of our group’s function. I was the content deliverer.

They were the technology guys and gal. So, I was very novice when I started.
[The Online Course Design Process]

One of the challenges is I’ve been developing this course as if the audience is

slightly different than I’ve been used to teaching it. I’ve been teaching aspects of this

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course for graduate students for years and years so teaching it for [professionals] is very
different.

The course looks a little playful ‘cuz it’s summer. You’ve gotta look playful with
[practitioners] in summer. The topics... they’re shifting as we speak. I laid it all out and
then realized I don’t like that, so I’m reworking it a little bit now. When you’ve got a
semester, you’ve got plenty of time to play around with concepts and applications. In six
weeks, I’m not gonna have time to do as much conceptual stuff as I do in a regular
course.

As I realized this, I looked at, I’ve laid out the first two and one half weeks pretty
extensively and then I looked at what am I gonna be expecting these people to be able to
do at the end of six weeks and I realized it was way too conceptual. So, I’m having to
kind of rethink application and integration and that’s why my timeframes are shifting a
little bit. It may be that they get only the briefest cursory introduction to some of this stuff
squashed into the first week and a half to two weeks and we spend four weeks on more
applied stuff. So that’s what I’m struggling with now is really how to make it a little bit
more pragmatic because the [practitioners] don’t wanta do concepts you know, show me
something that I can use tomorrow in my [work setting]. So I’m a little concerned about
the dual audience and trying to think about how do I really frame this so that I can
provide enough conceptual background so the stuff we’re doing makes sense, but not
overwhelm these [practitioners] with theoretical stuff that they don’t wanta get involved
in. So, that’s my current struggle.

I’m trying to think about how to manage the stuff so that I’m still involved in

providing a lot of feedback but I don’t have to grade 25 papers a week and turn them

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back. So part of the challenge of my thinking about this course was how to really manage
it from an instructor’s perspective so that it doesn’t turn into 25 tutorials.

The design decisions that I’ve made, I’ve had to think more carefully about how
to build in the kind of collaborative community oriented aspects that are just a part of
[my] face-to-face instruction and I’m not sure I needed to do that. I’m gonna play with
that idea this summer. One of the things that I’ve been going back and forth with, I think
it’s inevitable because it’s the way I think about teaching, I would do that in a (face-to-
face) course, try to build in some group components, etc. But I’m not sure it’s required
for this format. If you don’t do it, you do a lot of tutorials though. That’s the downside of
that but I’m not sure, I guess some people do this in face to face as well. You can go into
a lecture hall and the professor will just talk at you for three hours as well. So I guess
that works, that’s the in-class equivalent to a tutorial but I tried to think about how do you
provide instruction and provide directed practice and authentic experiences in an online
format? That’s been the design challenge for me.

I tried to think about what would I want the students to be involved in in any
format. I want them to have best practice ideas and theories and concepts. I want them to
have directed practice and I want them to have some reflection about their own practice.
So, I tried to build that in. Then I tried to make it fit and I tried to think about things that
would be interesting and how to engage them and how to coerce them to do that. In a
classroom, you coerce them by your social persuasion skills. You say okay, now we’re
gonna introduce ourselves and they all go okay. In an online format, you say now we’re
gonna introduce yourselves and your grades are tied to this because they won’t do it

unless you provide some sort of incentive to do it because there’s more anonymity so I’ve

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tried to think that through. What do I use social processes in the classroom to do? What
do I do instead to get them to do the same thing online? What I’ve done is imposed
grades. I’ve attached grades to things. I would never think to do that... I mean, I do, I
give them a little break for participation but they participate, they’re graduate students. I
know that’s not a problem but it’s a part of their course here. I’ve given them timelines
that are inviolate. You don’t meet this timeline, I’m docking you 20% of your grade.
You can’t get it back. So all of that, I’ve built in. I’d never do that in a face-to-face
course, especially at the graduate level.

So, some of that has been a design issue that’s different in this environment. So,
I’ve tried to think about best practices. Tried to think about best practices and how to
make them applicable and that’s really pushed the way we designed the structure of the
course because I knew I wanted some interactivity, or a high degree of interactivity. So
we spent a lot of time in our small group kicking around some ideas about what might
that look like.

I’ve listened to colleagues very carefully across the semester. The college has
been having a series of seminars for faculty about teaching online. I’ve gone to a fair
number of those and I’ve been trying to listen to what my colleagues who have done this
before have told us. And [another faculty member] in our [faculty development class],
taught [an online] course previously so she has some experience about what works and

what doesn’t work.

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I’m Concerned About...

Student participation. [That] has been sort of a theme that I’ve heard emerge
across issues that my colleagues have talked about, trying to get them to participate at
deep levels. I’m concerned about cohesion and cohesiveness of the course because I’m
teaching it in a six-week format and I’m sort of teaching it in chunks. There’s a chunk of
content here and then a chuck of content there. I’m a little concerned about it because of
the compressed timeframe. I’m concerned about, whether the way I’ve arrayed topics is
logical and whether it’s efficient for a six-week period. I’m expecting a lot from them in
six weeks and they’re gonna get three graduate credits for this so they’re gonna get the
same kind of content but they’ll get a lot of content.

I’m concerned about how I manage the workload. What I hear colleagues say is
I’m online a lot. You know, you work more in this than you do in a face to face course
so I want to monitor that and as we designed this course we tried very, very hard to think
about that. We spent inordinate amounts of time trying to think about how to manage that
and how to really do something that’s pedagogically very sound and meets [student’s
needs].

Quality, whether or not this format works for students. They’re paying consumers
of this. They’re the reason we’re doing this and if it doesn’t meet their needs, if it doesn’t
provide a really rich, worthwhile experience, it’s not worth doing. So, I’m concerned

about that, whether they Ieam something, whether they are satisfied with this.

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[The Teaching Activity]

One of the things I’ve tried to do in my course was be very responsive to
[student’s email inquiries] and structure my feedback to them so that it was supportive
and helpfirl. I paid a lot of attention to that part so I think that’s one of the reasons my
course is working as well as it is and I think it is just really going great guns because I
paid a lot of attention to that early and didn’t let them linger on email for two days. I was
checking my email two and three times a day that first week just to make sure that they
were comfortable.

I think they got over being scared [of the technology] because they didn’t get
punished when it didn’t work. We tried to fix things pretty quickly. We tried to be very
responsive and I tried to be pretty transparent. If I sent something over to [the VU
producer] I always copied it to the student so they knew I was following up and Sam
would often email them directly back so I think they got a sense that we were trying to be
helpful and it wasn’t too scary. By week two, they had really settled down. I just did the
week three reflections and I got almost no comments about the technology, like this is a
piece of cake now but in week two they all commented that this is so much easier this
week, the technology wasn’t so burdensome this week, I feel like I’ve got a better handle
on this, so I’m seeing that change as well which allows them more time to focus on
content which is what I’m more interested in.

Here’s the other thing I do for them, this is kind of fun. If they find a glitch on the
site, ok so here’s one fiom a student from week two, “I just listened to your audio
introduction and. . .. Where’s activity two?” If they could find a glitch on the site, I’d send

them a prize. So again, one of the things I was seeing in week one was “oh my god this

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isn’t working!” I was seeing that panicky thing so I said lets just make this fun. If you
find a glitch, you get a prize. So they get a little cutie thing from me that reinforces it and

makes it ok for them to find something. So I think that helped.

I’m Teaching Some Technology Along With The Content

What I think I’m doing in terms of teaching them technology is helping them just
get through it so that they’re having success experiences with it. We had some problems
early where things like the page would scroll across too far, things just didn’t look good.
Everybody survived it. They had little traumas here and there; some people missed
something and such. It was fine, nobody died. So I think they’re having that kind of
experience and we tried to think about how to structure activities so they’d have

experiences that were successful.

Here’s the problem that I’m having...

It doesn’t log the chats. I think that is something that VU can make it do and I’ll
ask them to do it for the course next time, but I don’t get a running record, I can’t look at
these chats afterwards. So, this is the equivalent of having them talk to each other in a
small group and here is where I would get another marker of the quality of the discussion
they are having. So one of my students just told me that in another VU course she just
had this was all logged to a web talk. I haven’t set that up correctly or I haven’t figured
out how to do that. I just thought last week that that would be kind of cool to be able to

go in and look at them retrospectively ‘cause I’m not going to necessarily be online when

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they are so that’s something that I would like to think about how to look at those

differently.

Web Talk is No Problem
I can go in and look at all their web talks and I just get such a rich feeling for what
they’re thinking about and they’re wonderful. They are just wonderful. We’ve got lots of

experienced [practitioners] who are telling great stories, I mean it’s just super. So I think

‘flnfi
.. .,, ____ _<_

the satisfaction there, that’s a surprise and the satisfaction that it seems that one of the
concerns I had according to other faculty was that people don’t really participate and it’s
hard to get them talking to each other and I just haven’t seen that. I’ve seen that people
are really engaged and I think it’s a function of the small groups and all the interactivity
that we built in and I wouldn’t have known to do that had [the faculty development class
professor] not talked to us about that and spent 4-5 weeks about what is online
community and how to do that pedagogically, like what does that look like and how do
you structure that. So, that’s been really gratifying to see that. You know, you take a

gamble, is this going to work, and it seems to be working so that’s really gratifying.

I’m Enjoying it More Than a Face-To-Face Course...

Maybe ‘cause it’s new, the novelty is kind of fun. But I just feel like I’m getting a
richer picture of them. I like being able to do it from home, I’ll log on when the kids are
watching a movie or something, I’ll log on and read stuff. I’m often the first one up in my

family so I’ll have a cup of coffee, I log on, and I look at me email.

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I think I missed [the face to face contact] more at the beginning than I do now
because I feel like I’ve got relationships with these students that I didn’t have in week
one and two and week two I think many of them said, because we talked about
relationships this week, some of them said to me I miss interacting with you as a faculty
member face to face, I enjoyed that as a graduate student and I felt it too. I felt like I
didn’t’ know them very well. I feel like I know them much better in week four. I’ve had
two more weeks of looking at their work and I distinguish them as individuals. I can
count on certain things from certain people, I mean I know I’m going to get a really good
quality answer from this one ‘cause that’s the nature of her work, she really thinks deeply
about these things. I know I’m going to have to stay on this one ‘cause she’s late in her
work. So, I feel like I know them all as individuals and I didn’t have that sense the first
week.

The other thing that I’m aware of is that, because I’ve structured the
accountability of this, that everybody must participate in order to get points, everybody is
participating and I would bet given this cohort of students that in a face to face meeting
I’d have four I can name, I know who they’d be, I’d have four students dominating these
conversations because they’re powerful, persuasive, smart, articulate students with wide
experience and they’re older, two of them are older, who would have my students on the
floor and my people would be going I’m not a [practitioner]. But I’ve got them in groups
with these people so I’ve eliminated some of that problem that you’ve got when you’ve

got some experts in the room.

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[Major Challenges]

It was a six-week summer course so it was intense, it was three graduate credits, I
didn’t cut them any slack, and they worked very hard. I didn’t know how much work to
give them. I didn’t have a sense of the scope so the first week I gave them way too much
and then I cut it back slightly in the second week, then by week three we had the right
amount of content so in weeks two and three I made some things optional rather than
required as a way to cut back on what they were doing and by that time I had
substantially reworked weeks 4-6 so I just deleted some content so I think the primary
challenge for me was the six week intensive course.

I asked [my students] for that feedback. I said let me know how things are going, I
have never done this before so I’m gonna wait to hear from you about whether this is too
much or what. I ended up cutting the number of activities in day two and then I made
some of the readings optional, I tried to use the web as much as I could so I did a lot of
linking to other sites and linking to texts on other sites that I wanted them to read and I
made, I said some of those, you know, skim this one, so I didn’t make those all, I told
them to be flexible in how much they, I required them to read the text, I didn’t change
any of the text requirements ‘cause I used two texts but I made some of those other
readings optional and I where I cut back was the amount of activities they had to do so
for example they had to work with two cases in the first week and that was just too much
so I changed it to only one case per week.

I did have one group that continued to complain, actually one student in one
group continued to complain all the way through week five and I asked her for data about

that, I guess it was week four, and by that time everyone else had settled down and I

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asked her for data about how much time she was actually spending and that went away
after that so she may just have been someone who was looking for something to complain
about.

Because it’s not a typical 15 week breakdown and I wasn’t sure how to chunk the
information and then given the fact that it was online and I had never done that before I
wasn’t sure what the content flow should be so that was the biggest challenge that I faced
in terms of the time frame for the course was just trying to decide how much to give

them, what the requirements should be.

[Most Enjoyable]

I liked the flexibility, I liked being able to do this at home in the evening,
especially in the summer. That was really a great thing not to have to be on campus a lot
this summer. That was really nice. I liked the novelty of it. It was a real intellectual
challenge for me to develop the course and then to teach it and to figure out how to
manage my time, manage my interactions with students, all that was new in this format,
and that was really very intellectually engaging to think about my teaching in a different
way. That was really a lot of fim.

I liked the accountability in the course, that the way I structured things, some
groups used a chat and we didn’t have any way to record those, but most of my groups
used web talk so I saw everything that they did in terms of response to questions, how
they were processing the cases, all of that was very accountable. It was all right there on
the web for me to look at so that was a real surprise to me that I had a sense going in that

I wouldn’t know these students very well and I thought I knew them extraordinarily well

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by about week two or so because I saw everything they were thinking and I don’t see that
in my face-to-face classes so that was really surprising and fun. I hadn’t expected that at
all.

I liked the fact that I continued to develop relationships with these students and I
didn’t think I would do that as much as I did and I feel like in any course that I teach
that’s as large as this one was you get to know four or five students really well and I felt
like I did that. Those were students that sought out extra time with me, emailed me about
stuff or made personal comments to me in their reflections that helped me to know them
as people and I was able to do that back with them, so that was a little surprising, it was
nice.

The other thing that I thought was really nice about this format that worked better
than face to face is the fact that the playing field is pretty even that in a face to face
course I could tell you who the three or four students were in this course that would have
dominated the class discussions and because of this format they didn’t get to do that. I got
to hear everybody’s voice and I don’t hear that in face to face. I mean I try to structure
that with a lot of small group work so that people are really engaged but the engagement
in learning to me is important in my philosophy of teaching and this format made it
happen. Nobody could slack off in the format that I had, well, they could have and in fact
one person tried to and her group landed on her, but it just worked so that everybody had
sort of an equal voice and that was really really nice ‘cause I can also tell you who the
three or four students were in this course I never would have heard a peep from in a face

to face course but here I heard from them every week and that was really nice.

288

One of the other surprising and wonderful things was that the groups self-
corrected and they taught each other, which is ideally what you want-, a collaborative
group arrangement. There was one instance in particular where a student had posted and
it was just a little off the mark. It reflected a slight misunderstanding of the content that
we were covering but the next person on the list had responded and corrected the student
in a very generous way and so, because I was thinking to myself that I need to send an
email to that student correcting this idea and I didn’t have to ‘cause there it was and it

was really nice in that regard.

[The Context]

The support of the college for sure which provided the financial incentives, a lap
top computer and the 882 course. I don’t know how people could do this without [faculty
development class] because I don’t know how you just get ramped up to think about this
on your own. I think it was a statement of commitment on the part of the dean to make
those resources available. I think it says something about the importance of this and
teaching doesn’t often get a lot of attention so the support of the college, my department
chair and the dean in doing this was helpful. [The college] pulled together last year a
series of noontime talks for faculty on technology issues and I went to a few of those,
again, it’s another indicator of support for these kinds of activities in the college.

My husband does this professionally. He works on line so there is a lot of
technology in my house and a lot of appreciation for the medium and online stuff and

he’s quite knowledgeable about that stuff [and] we had those conversations. We didn’t do

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much fiddling with the course but I asked his opinion a lot. We talked about more issues,
global sort of issues.

VU really worked for this course. Sam was there. He was available, he was
helpful, he was creative, he made stuff work, he solved problems and he was timely.
When students needed help, they could get help on the help line. Sometimes I ferried the
message to Sam and he would get back to the student and me. It just worked. They were
just very flexible and easy to work with and it was terrific. That was something that was
new for me in teaching. I had never worked with, I had worked with teaching assistants
but I’ve never seen them as co creators of the course and although they didn’t do any
content they did all this making it happen which was fun. I hadn’t worked like that with

anyone before and so that was fun. It just worked.

[Rethinking Face To Face Teaching]

I think I get a better sense of they’re thinking in this format in terms of the way
they’re working with the material. I saw that more explicitly [online] and I don’t make
them write [in my face to face classes]. I haven’t used journals for my graduate students.
I know a lot of people do that. That might give me more of that weekly look at their
thinking if I could engage them in a journal-writing piece. I might do that [in my face to
face classes].

[Accountability]. I would say it is the major one, the accountability for their
learning because I’ve been thinking for the last year in particular, I had a student for just
one course last year in the spring and she was in this (online course). I never heard a

word from her in my face-to-face class. If I would pick her out, I’m not one to call on

290

people that don’t have their hands raised, but when I was able to elicit something fi'om
her in class, it was very insightful. She was consistently insightful in class, in the online
class; I was very impressed with her contributions. I actually wrote to her and said you
know as part of my feedback I really want to here this more fi'om you when we get back
to fall, the face-to-face I’d love to hear this fi'om you because it was really super so that’s
made me think a little, again the accountability and seeing what people can do has helped
me to think about the need to do that more in face-to-face. How do you get those people
who are always going to put their hands up to sit down a little bit more and get those
other people activated and the way I’ve typically done that is with small group work but I
don’t get to see that.

When I go back to a [face to face] content laden course, or just a content course
I’m going to think about that more about what should be the outcomes of those small
groups and as I think about what I did in that course last year that I will teach again in the
spring, half of it was just pure group process, have your group kick this around and about
half was do something and I might have them do more things because it gives them a
goal, a super ordinate goal to shoot at. It forces them to be on task in a different way and I
might structure those a little bit more. I’ve been pretty open with graduate students. I
expect they come with the readings under their belt and they don’t need much structure
from me but I might structure those a little bit more, make sure you look at these key
ideas for discussion and I think about how to process those after we all come back
together as a class so that everybody represents what they did in the group in a different

way.

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Our students are very good students and they usually want to get things right and
my experience has taught me that, and maybe it’s a lack of skill on my part, that when I
become overly structuring they start to think about what’s the right answer so I want to
structure it enough so that they’re on task but I don’t want to be so structured that they’re
only looking for one answer because I really want them to do all that divergent thinking
that gets them to really start thinking about what all the issues are surrounding what
we’re trying to cover so the more didactic I become the more our students, because
they’re so trained by the time they get to us to get the right answer. They slip into that
you’re the teacher; I’m the student, right answer thing. I think It’s walking that fine line
for me that’s going to be a challenge as how I think about how to do that a little bit more
and perhaps those are always flip sides of the same coin, you know, accountability versus
freedom to think. Those seem to be; they’ve got to be in tension I think. The
accountability was so high [in the online class] and it was unexpected and I think I got
them to think really well so again it helped me to think about the idea that maybe I can do

more of that in some of these [face to face] courses.

The Technology...

Forced me to be much more explicit than I would have been in a face-to-face
class. I mean I’ve got a new lecture tonight and I’ve got a bunch of materials prepared for
them but I probably have a half a page of notes to myself about what’s going to take me
three hours because I know what that means and I know what I’m gonna do to structure
this and that so building an online course you just work in a very different way so that

affected my teaching just the shear demands of the space, the front loading of content,

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structuring, thinking ahead before I even knew these students about what might work for
them, I didn’t know how to group them, like I’ll have a good sense tonight [in my face to
face class] ‘cause I know this group pretty well, I have a lot of ideas about what’s going
to work best and what’s not going to work that you get after knowing a group and I didn’t
have that with the online class. The frontload piece was difficult and it’s not the style that
I like. I’ve never worked like that so that was new.

What I didn’t want to do for this course was have it be self-contained. I didn’t
want to have the only thing they interact with be my stuff in my site. I really wanted to
make use of the web by sending them out to other resources that were on the web and I’d
never done that in my teaching before. The previous semester to teaching this [online
class] all my students were reporting on a project. They had a project to talk about and
almost all of those sites had web sites so they ended up showing us the web sites in the
class so to some degree that was technology infusion but I’ve never required it to teach
with before it always had been supplemental and so instead of me typing up what is
intrinsic motivation I sent them out to a site to read about that and then they came back
and I liked that. I thought that was a good use of the technology.

I Ieamed a lot about the web. I bumped into some really cool resources that I’m
continuing to use in my teaching. I’ll bring [the web] up in class. I can do that and I don’t
think I would have been so fluid in doing that before [the faculty development class] so

this course really helped me think about using the web as a resource for my teaching.

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I’ve Learned...

To not make any assumptions about what people could or could not do on the web
and Sam and I talked a little bit about trying to do some sort of preview in which they
would actually use the tools before the course starts so post something to web talk or kind
of move around the site a bit before having to use it to get familiar with it. I had a couple
of people who, again none of it was prohibitive of their getting through the course but if
there was a little glitch they were more panicky about it than others and they were the
folks who told me straight out the first day that I’m a technophobe and I don’t like this so
when they ran into a problem they really didn’t like it and I just provided support and
helped them work it through and they got help. The VU help line was wonderful and Sam
was so responsive that we just solved problems for people so I don’t think the technology
hindered much accept for those people for whom it created more anxiety and I don’t
know what you can do about that. They signed up for an online course and they stuck
with it so it was manageable for them or they would have dropped it I assume.

It’s interesting, Sam taught me how to do all this stuff so I now can record all my
own audio, compress the file and load it up to the server. That’s cool. That makes me feel
like a real techno geek, I like that. And I’m working on, I think these two weeks I did in
word and then I used dream weaver to do these. It still looks like a word file. I’m not very
fancy with it but I’m getting a little more comfortable with HTML and he’s given me all
of them I can go in and edit the course pages and content exchange.

This course really helped me to feel much more comfortable with technology
more broadly speaking. I used technology and the web before like for shopping, I’m not

afraid of it in any way but I think to be more comfortable with it as a teaching tool is one

294

thing and also to be more comfortable with the stuff you need to do to get it to work like I
was recording and uploading my own audio files in this course, [Sam] taught me how to
do that. I screwed it up a couple times, then I got it to work, and then it was fine so I feel
more competent in that way. I feel like my competency has really grown. I didn’t know
how to FTP something over to somebody. I didn’t even know what that was before but
now, not that I care what the language is, but I know how to do that for my course so
that’s a cool thing so I feel much more comfortable in my technology skills as limited as

it is.

I Changed My Thinking About The Content Of This Course Absolutely

I hadn’t ever taught this course. I had taught components of [it] for years but I’d
never taught them to [practitioners] and I was a little worried about my capacity to teach
[them] anything they didn’t already know. People get this stuff in their preservice
courses. Not as much, I’m finding, as they should but they are supposed to know this and
so what I had was these experienced [practitioners] coming back to this course and being
very reflective about their practice. That helped me think about the content in really
different ways because with my [regular] students, unless they’ve been [practitioners],
they don’t interact with this content in the same depth. They just don’t have the
experience to do it but boy these [practitioners] sure do. They can enliven it with stories,
they can talk about their philosophy of [practice] and whether it does or doesn’t support
practice. They did all that for me so it really helped me think about it. It was really great
so I realized going through that what [practitioners] don’t get or what knowledge they

have based on their own experience but they don’t have a frame to hang it on yet. They

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don’t have words for it and so they’ve got lots of experiences but just helping them
articulate them and putting them into a perspective was a benefit to them and I was
worried that they might not find the course very challenging or very interesting and they
were able to take some meaning from it and I was very pleased by that but it helped me to
think about the content in a different way and about it’s importance because I kind of felt,
well as [practitioners], once you've got this you’ve got it but it changes over the course of
your experience and the kind of [work setting] you are in and so on. What was really nice
was having the interdisciplinary conversations so that we had [different disciplines] in the
same groups talking with each other about how they saw these issues and I think that was

really helpful.

I’ve Thought More About How People Learn Based on This Experience

As the weeks [progressed] I guess I was aware that there was one person, I guess I
give lip service to the fact that we have individual differences in Ieaming and everyone
has a unique learning style and so on but I’m aware that I just teach in one way so if you
want to do a correspondence course with me I don’t offer that option and I had one
student who wanted to do that. That was her model of how she wanted to Ieam. She
didn’t want to be bound up by these other students she wanted to go through the content
at her own pace and interact with me about the content and she was very nice about it but
she said to me in her feedback have you thought about giving opportunities for
individuals to move forward at their own pace and we had a nice conversation online
about my philosophy of teaching an why I chose to do things the way I did but I don’t

think I hear that from students in a face to face class. If they don’t like what I’m doing,

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I’ve never had anyone come up to me and say I don’t like what you are doing. I typically
do survey students a mid term to see how they are doing and what is the pace like for
them so I may make some adjustments based on that feedback but I don’t think I’ve ever
had someone say do it differently next time. I guess it was highlighted for me in this
course ‘cause I guess this student came in with the expectation that this would be more of
an individual one on one sort of experience.

If anything it taught me, it helped reinforce my ideas that I do think, especially in
this format, that people need active engagement with the material and with each other. I
saw such a good quality of thinking in the work that people were doing and I know that
some folks in the college have been very gracious about sharing the fact that some things
didn’t work as well in their courses so we really tried to think about how to structure a lot
of intergroup dependence and I think this really helped this course and that’s consistent

with what I think about Ieaming.

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