Modeling Distance Education Practices for Graduate Students

Graduate programs in education are very traditional in their offerings. It is not unusual to find a curriculum that was created 25 years ago still in place with only minor modifications. Each curriculum has its foundation courses, research courses, teaching and instructional design courses, and an occasional instructional technology course. Students graduate and leave the program prepared to teach, design curricula, research topics and understand the principles of traditional educational delivery. However, with the dramatic changes in the delivery of information and the technological innovations brought on by the telecommunications explosion, graduates may find themselves in a world in which they are ill-equipped to handle.

The world around academia has changed dramatically in the past 10 years and classrooms are starting to change also. Most campuses now have at least some of their courses delivered electronically. This dramatic change in delivery has come about in a relatively short period of time. Less than 10 years ago, most courses were offered in a traditional face-to-face fashion. The term “face-to-face” wasn’t even in use 10 years ago. Classrooms then usually had a screen, an overhead projector, and traditional chalk blackboards. Today’s classrooms are equipped with multimedia computers connected to the Internet to accommodate many types of e-learning, learning accomplished with the use of electronic (e) technology. Less than 10 years ago, students most likely used a library computer and communicated by telephone, fax, and postal (“snail”) mail. Today’s students use wireless laptop computers to download assignments and exams nearly anywhere, chat with other students on cell phones, and routinely use e-mail for communication and to submit assignments. Most students seldom have a need to come to the main campus or study in the university library.

With the convergence of education and telecommunications over the last 10 years, changes have been revolutionary. Sloman (2001) and others have noted that education and training are in the midst of a revolution as a result of these dramatic changes. The impact of this revolution in Sloman’s figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce compares the length of time for various delivery systems to take hold. Radio took 38 years to become established, PCs, 15 years, television just 13 years, and the Internet ... a mere 4 years! It is clear that the Internet has quickly become an integral part of our daily lives and its impact can be readily seen on U.S. culture, especially in academia.

Harden (2005), in discussing continuing medical education, suggests that a strategic vision for medical education today requires a strategic vision with a revolutionary view of the role of technology in the future. He is looking at a new mindset for the classroom and describes the International Virtual Medical School (IVMEDS), an international partnership of medical schools and health institutions. Instructors and students are trained to use the new technologies along with new learning tools that help them rethink learning. The key piece in IVMEDS is collaboration using the Internet.

Neff (1998) looks at technology as a catalyst for reinventing learning in the community college. Neff describes the Center for Interactive Learning at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, created to help faculty members redesign their curricula to meet the new demands of e-learning. The center allows students, faculty, and staff to connect with others in the global community and collaborate on education and technology strategies and solutions.

Because students often prefer distance-delivered classes to face-to-face classes, institutions like Sinclair Community College are scrambling to help their faculty move into the realm of e-learning. The preparation emphasizes that the students should be independent and self-directed learners. McCartan (2000) finds that, in spite of the huge increase of distance-delivered postgraduate courses, there has been little research into student reaction and student satisfaction with this kind of learning.

Graham and Scarborough (2001) and others have found that faculty often deliver their distance courses in a similar manner as they do in a traditional face-to-face classroom. Online faculty must provide handouts and course work electronically well before class, which leads, in their minds, to the conclusion of “extra work without extra pay.” Since the students are not sitting in front of them in the classroom they often develop the mindset, “out of sight, out of mind.” Bumip (2004) says that, to make the distance learning course successful, the faculty member should “incorporate embedded support mechanisms” that encourage interaction with the materials and with other students. These are lessons that are often difficult for faculty members to grasp. Graduate students do not intuitively understand these lessons either, and leave their programs with little thought about these intricacies of distance education.

Burge and O’Rourke (1998) describe the sense of personal freedom instructors feel when they get past “all that jargon” and their fear of distance education and begin to use the technology, often at first with limited department support. Ehrmann (1998) uses a multilevel tower analogy with an ascending complexity of materials, pedagogies, and basic and advanced technologies to help explain the relationship of distance education to traditional education. But easily accessible, working models of distance education and collaboration may be the most powerful way to de-mystify the technology, demonstrate instructional strategies, and encourage innovation and experimentation for both students and faculty.

A course management system is a Web-based portal through which distance instructors and students exchange materials, information, and ideas. Many graduate programs nationwide use Blackboard, a popular course management system to teach courses online in traditional distance education fashion. The master’s degree program, Continuing and College Education (CCE) at Western Washington University (WWU), uses Blackboard in a non-traditional fashion to teach graduate students how to develop and administer innovative and effective distance education and distance collaboration solutions for application in education, nonprofit, and industry sectors.

Blackboard allows the instructor to easily create an online classroom by customizing a prebuilt template. Each course typically has course material areas, discussion forums, and group workrooms for the distance education instructor to conduct class. However, Blackboard has the flexibility to allow instructors to create a “course” for nonclassroom collaborative activities, enroll “course” members as they choose, and recycle this “course” term after term.

The traditional face-to-face classroom is the setting commonly used to teach instructional design theories and the fundamentals of facilitating effective distance learning. In the past, CCE graduate students supplemented their classroom work with “laboratory” work, designing, creating, and administering distance-learning exercises for fellow students. However, distance education in the real world is quite different from the laboratory experience. A typical learning institution’s first exposure to distance learning is often in a setting where:

• Instructors have little or no extra time or expertise to prepare distance learning material;

• Students have a variety of hardware and software problems and issues;

• Faculty and students are confused about what distance education is and what it isn’t; and

• Course management systems are often difficult to understand and operate without someone to provide guidance.

As part of the degree requirements for the WWU CCE program, students are required to complete an education-related field experience. Each term, a number of students want to learn how to deliver distance education as part of their field experience to broaden their experience and be more valuable in the job market. But many challenges faced them as they:

• Wanted to learn how to deliver a distance education course without taking a full instructional technology course on distance learning;

• Needed to learn collaboration techniques to allow them to exchange distance learning solutions and techniques—to learn from other students;

• Share lessons learned with past field experience students; and

• Lived all over a 600 square mile area, making it nearly impossible to gather all field experience students together in one distance education lab.

A Blackboard course site was set up and named the Adult Education Distance Learning Lab (AEDLL); enrolled in this “course” were field experience students and their CCE faculty advisors. The elements of any physical laboratory are easy to visualize directly, but the elements of this cyber laboratory are easier to visualize as analogies:

• Lab Building (Blackboard course site);

• Lab Resources (URLs, reference documents, and multimedia);

• Lab Equipment (Software and document templates);

• Lab Bulletin Board (Blackboard discussion forums);

• Lab Archives (Electronic archive of past student field experiences);

• Lab Instructor (faculty supervising field experience project);

• Lab Assistant (student volunteer to maintain the AEDLL); and

• Lab Students (students conducting field experience work)

When the field experience started, students were given their own Blackboard course site to develop, using a sample syllabus and several Blackboard tutorials supplied by the Lab Assistant. The students used the tutorials to guide them through the wide array of configuration menus and to get to know the capability of Blackboard. After several weeks of practice and feedback, students set up their own “dummy” course for critique by the Lab Assistant and Lab Instructor. If their development work met certain standards, the graduate student was considered ready to work with a real-life client.

As with other CCE field experiences, AEDLL students researched, proposed, and set up their own field experiences with an area client in the business, education, or the non-profit sector. However, for AEDLL, the CCE student’s field experience had to specifically involve teaching a client how to plan and set up a distance education or distance collaboration system. It was felt that to really understand distance learning, the graduate student should successfully work in a real-life situation with a subject matter expert, teaching him or her to present material effectively online. AEDLL field experience clients included WWU and area community college faculty, directors of nonprofit organizations, and state agencies. Students collaborated on solutions for their individual client’s projects with faculty advisors and other students using AEDLL discussion forums. Distance learning resources and materials as well as the CCE student’s formal field experience paper are archived permanently each term on AEDLL for review by future students. AEDLL is recycled and reused each term so all resources and student work added to the cyber-lab will not be lost.

Often, the CCE student develops a client’s online course or group collaboration site using a separate Blackboard course site or the client’s actual Web site or course management system. The faculty advisor, the Lab Assistant, and fellow AEDLL students provide feedback and advice on the development of the distance technology project in AEDLL message forums; the client provides feedback and material via e-mail directly to the student.

The AEDLL cyber laboratory is self-sustained by the resources and projects contributed by CCE students each term. A graduate assistant, a CCE student taking academic credit, or a CCE student volunteer, handle the cyber-lab maintenance duties as a Lab Assistant each term.

Empowering CCE graduate students to learn to collaborate and share real-world distance learning theory and practice was the major goal of AEDLL. In addition, faculty, and community clients all realize benefits from the cyber lab:

• Student: real distance education and collaboration experience with peer support;

• Faculty: increased university and community exposure for department; and

• Client: enlightened assistance with distance education and collaboration.

The cyber laboratory requires no set-up cost and little faculty effort to sustain once established. The archive of student distance learning projects in AEDLL provides a highly visible showcase for graduate student work and helps new AEDLL students develop more innovative projects with each new term.

Students in the CCE graduate program at WWU attend classes on both the main campus in Belling-ham and a satellite campus in Everett, a Seattle suburb. Students are typically returning adults, busy with family and career obligations, and many take their classes through distance learning. Interaction with other students and instructors on the other campus is often limited to department-sponsored events, electronic newsletters, and informational e-mails.

It is common for a student on one campus to never meet or even know the names of most of his or her cohorts on the other campus. Students from the Everett campus use telephone, e-mail, and postal letter for nearly all department communication and rarely visit the main campus departmental offices. It is a challenge for the faculty to build and maintain a sense of community among this time-challenged, geographically diverse, student population.

The CCE program provides students with academic and learning resources in the form of books, pamphlets, and multimedia in a common department office area. An office bulletin board is available for students to post messages to other students about selling books, tutoring help, and so forth, and for faculty to post photos of new students on the main campus. But because of the satellite campus, DL classes, and electronic communication, the majority of CCE students see the department office just once or twice in their graduate career.

Blackboard offers several distinct advantages as a platform for cyber version of the CCE department office:

• The software is already in use and familiar to both students and instructors;

• Access to the cyber resource center is secure and limited to the CCE program; and

• The cyber resource center can be easily maintained by CCE students themselves.

A cyber resource collaboration center called “The Student Support Center” was created using Blackboard. However, The Student Support Center Blackboard course site is quite different from a traditional DL course site in two ways:

• Each term the same Student Support Center course site is recycled and reused, and

• Each term all current CCE students are added as members of the Support Center.

“Chat rooms”—discussion forums on a wide variety of nonclass related topics—are in the support center, and help all students communicate much easier; students frequently request new chat rooms with different topics. A “Gallery” of photos, bios, and contact information of all students and instructors in the CCE graduate program help everyone from both campuses put a “face with the name.” An easily navigated “Library” of CCE related electronic resources include:

• Web links to pertinent CCE and education Web sites;

• CCE-related articles and books organized by subject;

• Annotated bibliography of articles covering the field of adult education;

• Help files for CCE course related software and technolog;

• Archive of CCE program forms, pamphlets, and CCE program newsletters;

• Archive of photos and materials from department events and symposiums; and

• Self help files provided by students to help study for comprehensive exams

A single volunteer graduate student or independent study student easily maintains The Student Support Center each term. For virtually no cost, the cyber Support Center enhances the WWU CCE graduate student community, provides easy access to learning resources and serves as a working model of peer collaboration and resource sharing.

Instructors in the CCE program use computers to create a variety of electronic resources for both face-to-face classes and distance education classes, including:

• Word processor files;

• Slide presentation files;

• Audio and video files; and

• Portable document format (PDF) files

However, the organization and cataloging process of these electronic resources for reuse in future courses is not easy for most instructors. Faculty and graduate students developed an innovative department-wide solution using Blackboard and learning objects.

A learning object is any electronic resource used and reused in technology-enhanced education and distance education, differing from their paper-based counter parts in two significant ways:

• Learning objects can be easily distributed to students at virtually no cost, and

• Learning objects can be easily shared between instructors in different courses

A new Blackboard course site, the Learning Object Repository, is different from a typical Blackboard course site:

• Enrollment in the Learning Object Repository is limited to CCE faculty and staff, and

• Each term, the Learning Object Repository course site was recycled and reused

Adding learning object files, with titles and descriptions, to The Learning Object Repository was no different for CCE faculty than the addition of material to their individual Blackboard courses. But there is significant saving in effort by uploading the learning object file to the Learning Object Repository just once, then easily copying it multiple times to future course sites with Blackboard’s copy utility.

To minimize confusion, a few simple rules were established:

• Submission of learning objects by CCE faculty was voluntary;

• Learning objects may be used by any CCE faculty in any course;

• Learning object titles and descriptions should be clear and concise;

• Learning object titles, descriptions and content should contain no specific course references;

• Learning objects should be organized by topic, not course; and

• Learning objects should include author and creation date information.

The wording of the title and description of the learning object is especially important to minimize student confusion when the file is used in future courses. If desired, the learning object author information and creation dates may be hidden in Blackboard metadata fields for future reference by CCE faculty only.

When a learning object in the CCE Resource Center is needed in a new Blackboard course site, the learning object itself, its title, and description are all easily copied to the course site with a menu-driven Blackboard copy utility in one operation. No editing or alteration of the title or the object itself is needed. Entire folders of learning objects in the repository can be copied to Blackboard course sites with this same copy utility. For example, an entire folder containing a rich mix of Web links, documents, and multimedia files on the subject of grant writing could be copied to any CCE Blackboard course site in one step.

The ease of copying learning object files encourages CCE instructors to provide supplemental learning material to graduate students. The WWU CCE program is not a lock-step program, and often students are asked to use education concepts in a current course that they have yet to learn. For example, a CCE instructor can choose to copy an entire learning object folder of sample lesson plans to a Blackboard course site to supplement a related discussion on instructional design. With minimal effort, the instructor has provided a rich mix of support material to support and enhance student learning.

Keeping all CCE course material in one secure location on the WWU Blackboard server system and not solely on individual faculty computers enhances file security; a CCE graduate assistant archives the entire CCE Resource Center weekly for additional safety.

Skepticism of the technology and concerns for intellectual property often punctuate discussions about sharing electronic instructional materials among department faculty. The experimental use of learning objects by graduate faculty can be encouraged with a no-cost, easy-to-use Blackboard-based repository.

If recent articles on distance education and collaboration are correct and we are at the beginning of a revolution in learning brought on by the Internet, then our graduate students need to leave our programs with tools ready to participate in the revolution. By using a course management system to teach graduate students how to deliver instruction at a distance and facilitate collaboration, they can leave graduate programs ready, not only to participate in the revolution, but also to lead it. With a little imagination, some clear direction by faculty, and lots of student effort, any graduate program can replicate and build on these three modeling resources.