Researcher and Researched: The Phenomenology of Change From Face-to-Face to Online Instruction

The sections that follow provide an overview of the two participants. They include a senior science educator who was the subject of the study, serving both as researcher and researched, and a science educator collaborator, a junior faculty person with extensive knowledge, skill, and expertise in developing and teaching online courses and programs. Next, we provide an overview of a face-to-face methods course, the analysis of which depicts the nature of face-to-face “methods” instruction and provides insights into the ways of teaching and thinking about teaching and learning that the senior science educator takes to online instruction. The section concludes with the study's design, procedures, and questions that guided the collaborative interview.

The primary subject in this study is a senior science educator with 39 years of teaching experience, 6 years as a precollege science teacher in two settings and 33 years as a university science educator at two different universities. He holds a doctorate in science education and the rank of Professor. For 35 years prior to teaching online, he taught undergraduate and graduate-level science, science education, or similar courses in face-to-face settings and for the past three years he has taught courses offered exclusively in an online master's degree program in science education, a complete description of which can be found elsewhere (Crawley, 2007). At the time of the study, he was a member of the National Science Teachers Association Program Review Board. This review board evaluates folios submitted by universities seeking initial or continuing accreditation for their science teacher preparation programs (offered on campus or online) with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. In addition, he has published numerous research studies pertaining to science teacher education and professional development. His face-to-face teaching has been rated as “exemplary” (average score of 4.5 on a 5-point scale) based on a 5-year cumulative review of teaching effectiveness by his university.

The colleague participating in this study is a junior science educator with 14 years of teaching experience, six years at the secondary level and eight years at the university level at three different institutions. Her doctorate was in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on science education, and she holds the rank of assistant professor. She has been involved with distance or technology-based education throughout her university teaching and has collaborated with other instructors to examine online venues for evidence of collaboration, community-building, and professional development. She has received notable distinction from students for the quality of her online instruction, achieving an exemplary rating in most recent reviews. At the time of the study, she too served as a member of the NSTANCATE Program Review Board.

The analyses of face-to-face instruction began by videotaping each of thirteen 3-hour class meetings of the graduate-level course in science education titled Advanced Methods in Teaching Science. Thirteen students were enrolled in the course, seven of whom were currently practicing teachers enrolled in a masters of arts in education in science education degree program and six of whom were enrolled in the master of arts in teaching (MAT) program, were seeking licensure, and lacked full-time teaching experience. The MAT program is an intensive, year-long program of study in which students actively participate in a public school classroom and complete on-campus courses.

The methods course focused on current efforts to reform science education beginning with an examination of its content, methods, and outcomes. The required textbook for the course was How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, edited by Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (1999). The book provides a research-based perspective on how students come to learn science, with implications for teaching. Methods students completed a total of five projects to fulfill course requirements including two case studies, one of a public school student's prior knowledge of a core science concept and the other of their success teaching a science lesson in which their students’ prior knowledge of the core science concept served as the starting point for instruction. Other assignments included reports of these graduate students’ prior education experiences, both as a science student and as a science teacher, and the final project was the production of a standards- and research-based, field-tested curriculum unit focusing on the development of understanding of one or more core science concepts that these teachers were expected to teach.

The starting point for this research was results of the analyses of the faculty member's face-to-face instruction in the Advanced Methods of Teaching Science course taught in the fall 2004 and subsequently taught only online each fall semester thereafter. The course served program needs of the two science teacher groups, practitioners enrolled in a master of arts in education degree program and interns enrolled in a master of arts in teaching program, both offered at a large university located in a mid-Atlantic state. Each of the thirteen 3-hour class sessions were videotaped and analyzed by two educational technology faculty members, independent of the senior science educator, using a modified version of the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Analyses sought to identify instructional events, patterns, and processes, which represented the accumulated wisdom, experience, and expertise gained through more than 30 years of face-to-face instruction. It was against this backdrop of experience teaching face-to-face that this faculty member's online instruction and the present research emanated.

This study provides a brief summary of the results of analyses of face-to-face instruction then seeks to identify the events, emotions and transformations experienced as the senior faculty member moved the methods course online. We adopted a retrospective, self-report interview strategy, in which the junior science educator assisted her colleague in exploring the phenomenon of planning for and teaching online. We viewed the transformation as an intellectual, social, and material process in which the object of our research was both subject-related and subject-dependent. In taking this perspective, we straddled the thin line separating researcher from researched and, in so doing, explored the rift and discontinuities that arose during the transition of the senior science educator from face-to-face to online teaching.

We utilized five key questions to guide the interview process, modeled after the questions developed by Bender & Weimer (2005).

1. What events occurred or reasons prompted the transition and made it appealing?

2. How do faculty determine the components of previous face-to-face practice most valued that need to be ported to an online environment?

3. How do faculty recognize, accommodate, and organize major change from face-to-face to online instruction?

4. How do faculty determine the resources, options, and alternatives they will use in online instruction?

5. How can faculty adopt a critical, reflective, engaged, optimistic stance toward their newly acquired online practice?

Early on we decided to adopt a “consequential” (Culler, 1980; Young, 1987) rather than “sequential” (Labov, 1967) approach to our interview, a strategy in which one event prompted conversation about another in a thoughtful manner, with the interviewer taking the lead but frequently joining the conversation. We recorded all interview conversations and transcribed the audio recordings for purposes of data analyses. The sequence of interviews ended when we reached saturation, a point in time we both recognized when no new ideas, information, or connections emerged regarding our individual and collective experiences with the shift from face-to-face to online instruction. Saturation was reached after four meetings, each lasting approximately two hours. We then set out to examine the transcripts and notes and identify common threads and themes that might typify science educators undergoing a radical restructuring of science instruction through research, but we also sought to capture and preserve what was unique and interesting about our own transformations.

Presented first is an overview of the findings resulting from the analyses of face-to-face instruction in the fall 2004 methods course. Next, we present the results of our analyses of the transcripts and notes recorded during our four, 2-hour extended interviews, conversations guided by Bender and Weimer's five key questions about the transformation to online instruction, and we identify key themes that emerged from these analyses.

The 13 face-to-face class sessions amounted to 31 hours, 8 minutes and 26 seconds of videotape. An analysis of the videotape revealed that six forms of instructional events accounted for 28 hours and 8 minutes (90%) of the total instructional time. These events included class discussions, in-class activities, video presentations, student demonstrations, in-class assignments, and overviews of course content, the day's lesson, or assignments. The 13 class lessons consisted mostly of student demonstrations of assignments they had completed (35.8%), in-class small group activities (27%), and whole-class or small-group class discussions (19.7%), accounting for 25 hours (82.5%). To a lesser extent, students listened to the instructor as he provided an overview of the day's lesson (4.9%) or course assignments (10.7%) or they viewed a video pertinent to the lesson topic (1.5%).

The nature of the instructor's interaction with students was examined by revisiting the 13 lessons. An analysis of the videotapes revealed nine distinct forms of instructor interaction (8+ hours, 36.7%), which included providing information, asking questions, summarizing events, offering advice, commenting on students’ work, offering examples, sharing experience, making assertions, and challenging students’ ways of thinking. These forms of interaction were woven together in an engaging, spontaneous response to teachers’ comments, shared classroom experiences, and situational constraints—teachable moments science educators experience in face-to-face instruction. Results of the analyses of the face-to-face class meetings revealed that the methods course was highly interactive and that the instructor used questions, examples, information, and assertions to create dynamic, interactive lessons built on teachers’ responses and experiences (Sugar, Martindale, & Crawley, 2008).

Conversations from the phenomenological study helped identify characteristics of the teacher and his teaching that were important to him during the transition process. Results are presented and discussed and themes identified in the context of addressing the five questions that structured the interview sessions, including motivation to teach online, most valued face-to-face practices, making the transition, resources for online teaching, and stance toward online teaching.

Motivation to Teach Online. As more schools, programs, and courses move online, the institution's rationale for doing so will play less of a role in faculty members’ motivation and decision. In this faculty member's case, the choice to move teaching online was his, as an effort to maintain and enhance the existing master's degree program in science education. Waning enrollment prompted the department at the mid-Atlantic regional university to seek alternative means of program growth. Although among the “least excited and technologically savvy” as a senior faculty member, he took the lead on the project. He offered the following observation.

After 30 years of face-to-face classroom teaching experience, the interviewer questions further why a senior faculty member would want to take this risk, be the one to change and try something new, to which he responded, “After 30 years of [teaching] the same way, why not change?” It becomes clear that he views online teaching as something new, offering new personal and professional challenges and new possibilities for “intellectual engagement, reward, and scholarship” with graduate-level science teachers, which he had lost due to low enrollments in the previous campus-based graduate program.

Motivation and interest influence a faculty member's decision to teach online, but getting started isn't always easy. Each science educator's personal and professional perspectives on teaching and learning become more firmly established with experience, and instruction provides the arena for these viewpoints to become center stage. Knowledge of an instructor's most valued methods of teaching face-to-face serve as a starting point for thinking about the transition to teaching online.

Most Valued Face-to-Face Practices. As planning to move online commenced, this faculty member began with a list of expectations regarding instruction, teaching and learning practices he had acquired from 30 years of university teaching. He expected students to interact with each other and to engage in group work and discussions, all of which he wanted to flow smoothly online. Some assignments he had developed and used in face-to-face courses and these ported well to the new online, electronic environment, but others did not. Regardless of the assignment, he wanted the online courses to be interactive and engaging rather than passive learning experiences reminiscent of correspondence courses. He wanted his first attempt at online teaching to be more than an electronic form of the paper-and-pencil correspondence courses, which he had taught early in his university teaching career.

Lacking an understanding of the electronic learning environment, he feared that his uniqueness, personal preferences and style of interaction, and ways of engaging with students—all perfected over the years—would be lost in the electronic world of the university's Blackboard course management system. He commented, “When you're teaching face-to-face you can see whether students are getting it.” With information regarding his face-to-face instructional strengths and goals, we established our conversations about the transition process.

Making the Transition. Like many institutions, this university supported the project enthusiastically but without fully understanding the needs of online programs, courses, and instructors, especially senior faculty. Central to this senior faculty member's approach to instruction was the focus on teaching as an interpersonal exchange. Beginning with the understanding of teaching as a form of communication that can occur in any medium, this science educator then sought to make explicit the most important characteristics of his face-to-face teaching and maintain those aspects in the transition to an online medium. He talked about and elaborated on his efforts to place the onus for learning on the teachers rather on the instructor, to have teachers engaged with him and with each other, to give teachers the opportunity to observe and evaluate themselves and other teachers engaged in similar teaching practices, and to involve teachers in group discussion. At first he confessed, “I was rather idealistic … and believed that if you wanted to do something online you could make it happen. It just threw me that this was not the way it was and that initial success depended a lot on the resource people available to help you.”

Though the interactive qualities of teaching were valued most, other important personal qualities of the instructor came into play. His curiosity about ideas and interest in new opportunities and directions in teaching, teamed with a willingness to take risks, opened wider opportunities during the transition. Being willing to abandon previous patterns of practice made it possible for him to imagine possibilities, ask questions, and seek guidance. One of the qualities that marked this period of transition, and continues to occur in the revisions of this instructor's teaching is a willingness to gather instructional ideas from any source, forming unique groups to work on problems and develop solutions. In this way, the instructor was able to realize a different vision of teaching in the new online, electronic, Internet-based medium. Accompanying this willingness was a frustration in not knowing the questions to ask of the new medium to obtain the desired results.

Instructional management in an online environment offered this senior science educator his first major challenge. When teaching face-to-face, the process of giving homework assignments, collecting completed assignments, scoring and commenting on each assignment, and returning them to students was a simple and somewhat time-consuming process. Collect, read, respond, return—no problem! For him, accomplishing these simple tasks online was a nightmare. Each student would submit the completed assignment as an attachment to an e-mail message, which he would open, read the message, download and save the attached assignment. Collecting assignments, a task that required a 2-3 minutes at most in a face-to-face classroom with 20 students, now took an hour or longer. His solution to the time demands was to request graduate student assistance.

Retrieving assignments was only the beginning. Reading, scoring, and returning assignments in this new electronic environment presented additional problems and required this instructor to explore new ways of managing communications.

It became obvious from the interviews that there was no one-to-one translation of strategies from face-to-face to the online teaching. The online environment lacked opportunities for the instructor to respond to “teachable moments,” to read a student's body language, or to encourage further exploration of understanding in response to a change in tone of voice. Neither does online teaching allow the instructor or students to get to know one another easily. He realized soon after the move to online teaching that he needed to search out and explore the resources that were available to teach online.

Resources for Online Teaching. The online environment offered opportunities that extended learning beyond what was available in the face-to-face classroom environment. An online course is available 24 hours a day and enables students to participate at times when they can concentrate without distraction. Web sites, Web-based modules, virtual experiments, and simulated processes can be directly incorporated into an online course and accessed by students on-demand. What became obvious to this senior faculty member, however, is that the Internet offers a wealth of resources, none of which are conveniently organized, categorized, and made readily available to science educators teaching online. To locate appropriate resources required his time. Once located, however, Web-based electronic resources enabled this instructor to make use of many of the same assignments that he valued in his face-to-face classrooms and other resources made it easier for him to assign tasks previously viewed as either impossible or too time consuming in face-to-face classrooms. Concept mapping and selfand peer-analysis of instruction are two examples of assignments he found could be completed online with relative ease.

One of the most highly valued assignments completed by science teachers in this instructor's face-to-face methods course involved concept mapping. He described how science teachers enrolled in the face-to-face course completed in class the task of mapping the core science concepts that they were expected to teach and students were held accountable for learning on end-of-course tests.

Graphically constructing, depicting, and sharing understanding of the organizational hierarchy of teachers’ understanding of the science they are expected to teach became one of his prized lessons. Once science teachers initially identified a few core science concepts and constructed propositional links using paper strips and sticky notes, they immediately began to recall and add other science concepts, rearrange the hierarchy, and share their understanding with one another. When asked if he was worried about being able to offer a lesson on concept mapping when he moved online, he offered these comments.

Porting the concept-mapping lesson to an electronic environment was made easy once he discovered two applications, one commercially available product (Inspiration) and the other a free application (CmapTools). Both programs are easy-to-use and allow a level of complexity and detail unavailable in his previous, face-to-face, paper-strips-and-sticky-notes version of the concept-mapping lesson.

Stance Toward Online Teaching. It became obvious to this instructor soon after he became engaged in online teaching that he had abandoned some of the features of his face-to-face instruction that he valued most. Notably absent from online instruction was his dynamic, active engagement of students with ideas using spontaneous questions, demonstrations, investigations in response to “teachable moments” that arise in face-to-face, bricks-and-mortar classrooms. This shift in teaching focus concerned him and he sought ways to create, capture, and respond to teachable moments online. He described this effort as follows.

The topic of engaging teachers occupied conversations between the two science educators, and they talked about differences in their stance toward instruction online. The junior science educator noted that she tends to ask teachers “to think and then do” and the senior science educator “engages them right off the bat … in the structure of the assignment.” She noted that “your conversation with teachers is laid out very strongly in the structure of the course … and I come across more touchy feely than you do.” We began to reach what we thought was an astounding conclusion as a result of these conversations, namely that regardless of the venue, face-to-face or online, each instructor's stance toward teaching and learning surfaces and manifests itself in his/her practice. The junior science educator provided a very insightful and succinct summary.

We also came to see that teachable moments in face-to-face classes are confined in space and time, restricted to class meeting days and times. Seldom do students engage with one another or with the instructor outside of these formal class meetings. In contrast, when teaching online learning isn't restricted in space and time and asynchronous teachable moments can arise any day any time, depending on the willingness of students and instructor to engage one another in the virtual classroom. Students can have electronic conversations with the instructor on a near on-demand basis, enabling the instructor to have one-on-one interaction with students. The junior science educator reflected on one teachable moment that she recently experienced.

Unlike the face-to-face classroom in which intellectual engagement between students and the instructor is reserved for class meetings, online teaching and learning isn't compartmentalized in space and time. Intellectual engagement in the virtual classroom can take place any day or time in electronic communities where students and instructors can “meet” and “chat” thus permitting learning to return to the classical apprentice model of the university that existed in Greece and Rome.

From our conversations, several themes became apparent. First, the transition online was technologically difficult because of a lack of resources, but those difficulties created a stronger technology base for faculty members. Second, the online medium was more highly interactive than it was ever expected to be and offered more forms of interaction than traditional face-to-face classrooms. Third, we saw that with time we began to distinguish between engagement and activity, and focused more on engagement than activity in an online environment. Lastly, the online medium extended intellectual engagement, far beyond the limitations of a typical classroom environment.

In transitioning online, resources and support were not well organized or available. Interview conversations explored the efforts involved in setting up simple organizational processes or resolving software problems. For example, in the first semester the senior faculty member taught online, he was overwhelmed with correspondences and grading for the course. Realizing his need for organization, he initially contacted the Computer Help Desk. Unsuccessful there, he continued calling people and was passed along until he found someone who could solve his problem and create an automated delivery system for course assignments. The time spent in pursuing such solutions or attempting to develop original solutions developed a strong sense of confidence and a willingness to press on and experiment.

Other situations required searching the Web for applets or sites for information or instruction to resolve problems or find ways to illustrate concepts. Often, hours upon hours of time were spent looking for suitable substitutes for classroom lessons. Because the senior science educator did not know what resources were available, or where to look for them, identifying and locating materials was a major challenge. Since many favorite lessons could not be moved online, new lessons needed to be located and/or created. This search required reconceptualizing content to find new means to teach concepts in engaging ways. What these Web searches located were applets much more capable of demonstrating simple and very abstract, complex science phenomena than could previously be observed with equipment available in a face-to-face lab.

Though initially frustrating, these technology hurdles have moved this faculty member from a reluctant technology consumer to a willing participant in technology workshops and a leader in the department's use of technology innovations. This faculty member now engages his students in video editing, explores the use of iPods, YouTube, and Facebook, as well as Web design for course interfaces. The obstacles that arose from lack of face-to-face access forced creativity and familiarity with a broad variety of electronic, Web-based tools and programs in order to be fluent and engaging in the online classroom. What began as a handicap became a strength in the transition process.

Second, the online medium was more highly interactive than was expected and offered more forms of interaction than did traditional classrooms. One of the initial concerns of this professor with such a long tradition of face-to-face teaching was the loss of the “teachable moment,” “the intimate engagement and abrupt turn of events that activity creates.” Though the online format removed the ability to “read” students’ visual cues and respond immediately to opportunities, greater frequency and variety of interaction helped create other opportunities for learning. Since students had access to the class on demand throughout the week, they could engage with the course material, other students, and faculty at any time. Often, students would find themselves online simultaneously, creating live conversations about topics of interest. Students who would otherwise be hesitant to participate in a face-to-face class conversation could reflect and compose their thoughts, joining the virtual conversation, in which their thoughts matched the conversation without being left behind. The faculty member could engage with students individually, in small groups, or as a whole class, having different levels of conversation as appropriate using course management partitioning.

In addition to instructor/student interactions there were opportunities for students to interact with each other. This faculty member engaged students in evaluating each other's work in small electronically formed groups. Small group work created student-to-student interactions around specific ideas. Also available were discussion boards for independent whole group discussions, unguided by the instructor. These forms of interaction allowed the senior faculty member to understand his students’ thinking and to monitor, observe, and chronicle their intellectual engagement with the content over time. These opportunities exceeded those of the traditional classroom where a student could participate in activities without engaging intellectually with the lesson content.

The move to the online medium brought into sharp contrast the distinction between being active and being engaged. For example, in the traditional face-to-face classroom, students might participate in an activity (such as circuit building) using batteries, wire and bulbs. Another student, online, participates in a simulation of circuits using a Web site. The simulation allows students to manipulate and view power, circuit design, and current. The online student engages with the material more intensely and can “see” more clearly what the effects are of circuit changes than the student in the face-to-face classroom, all because of the quality of the applet. The electric-circuit applet does not allow physical manipulation of real circuit components, but rather encourages active intellectual engagement in exploring the multitude of possible connections and arrangements using Web-based circuits. The use of the highly advanced technology modules replaces many of the physical examples and dramatically increases students’ ability to manipulate and visualize characteristics of an experiment.

Through our conversations, a picture began to emerge of the online venue as an example of the classic Greek university learning environment. Dubbed the “pajama effect,” it grows from the casual, comfortable relationship students feel toward their classmates and professor as they sit at home, late at night in their pajamas writing e-mails to people they quickly feel they know. Conversations around intellectual topics stimulate others to think intellectually. The frequency of these conversations creates a sense of belonging to a group and an urgency to know what others think. Individuals become familiar with each other's personal lives in addition to their educational ones. We have created, in cyber-space, a classic community where professors and students live together and talk at will about topics of intellectual interest. In this world, all aspects of the self are important and relevant to learning. This is an unexpected valuing of complete individuals. This kind of relationship seldom occurs with master's degree students enrolled in face-to-face, campus-based programs.