Faculty remain divided about online courses

The University of California is standing at the threshold of the brave, new world of cyber-teaching with a pilot project to put 25 to 40 undergraduate courses online as early as 2011. But faculty at UCLA remain divided as to whether transitioning to fully online courses is the right move pedagogically and whether a UC-quality course can be delivered online to distant students at a top-tier research university.

 

The UC Office of the President is coordinating the pilot project at the recommendation of the UC Commission on the Future and with the Academic Senate’s approval. The pilot project will allow faculty and administrators to evaluate these courses on educational quality, learning effectiveness, workload impacts, costs and other key issues. The project was recently endorsed by the UC-wide Academic Council of faculty leaders

 

But the UC Academic Senate special committee on remote and online instruction, in recommending the move, added a caveat, emphasizing that it sees no “broad evidence that the nurturing of critical thinking, the teaching of research skills … and development of community and global values can be cultivated outside the framework of face-to-face interaction between student and teacher.”  

 

With questions about whether online courses can deliver on the promise of quality instruction still unanswered, faculty at UCLA “are all across the board on this issue,” said Steven Nelson, associate professor in art history and chair of the UCLA Academic Senate’s Graduate Council, where discussion of this issue has taken place. “We’ve (the Graduate Council) always taken a very cautionary line on this issue, saying that we think it can be a very good idea, but one has to know what the implications are. And we don’t know what those are yet in terms of learning outcomes, labor requirements and overall cost.”

 

Other faculty who have transitioned to online teaching say that it’s worth trying, and that there are always unknowns in using any new technology.

 

“When the printed book was invented around 1450, no one knew then that this new technology would succeed as a medium of education and last for centuries, ” noted Brian Copenhaver, professor of philosophy, former provost of the College of Letters and Science, and the namesake of UCLA’s Copenhaver Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology. In 2002, the Faculty Committee on Educational Technology created this award to honor faculty making innovative use of technology to improve undergraduate education. 

 

This summer, Copenhaver is teaching approximately 120 students in his first online course, Philosophy 3, a historical introduction to philosophy, worth five units of General Education credit. It’s a course he has taught frequently in person and on campus, using the same material and standards used in the online offering.     

 

“As far as I can tell, it’s working well,” Copenhaver said of his online course. “The responses I’ve seen so far — from students taking the course and from the teaching assistants who are working very closely with them — are quite positive. Students’ level of activity has been high.”

Advocates say that online courses will support dynamic new forms of instruction, collaboration and student assessment. Students can interact with each other and their teacher in online chat rooms and discussion boards. Online instruction can provide a rich, immersive environment for learning, enhanced by animated graphics, interactive applications and visualization. At a time of underfunding and oversubscribed courses, expanding course options would allow students to graduate more quickly and better serve those with jobs and families.

 

So far, the UCLA Academic Senate has approved only two online degree programs, one of which has been discontinued. The only online degree program currently is the master’s degree program in engineering, established in 2005 following faculty review at both the campus and systemwide levels.

 

But in 2009-10, 471 online courses were taught at UCLA, 23 of them for credit. Most were offered by UCLA Extension. However, official campus courses that are delivered online with very high production values and robust academic and administrative support remain small in number. Through UCLA Summer Sessions and Special Programs, online courses in sustainability, engineering, mathematics and philosophy are being taught. And the School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT) is offering 13 courses online for credit. Altogether, 15 online courses being offered this summer use a platform developed by a multimedia team at TFT.

 

This fall, UCLA Extension will post 158 online courses. Systemwide, UC Extension instructors taught 1,250 online courses in 2009-10, 78 of them for UC credit. All together, there were 55,229 students taking online courses at UC in the last academic year, according to Dean and Distinguished Professor of Law at Boalt Christopher Edley, Jr., who is working on the pilot project.

 

While some see online education as a potential revenue generator that could help narrow the gap in state funding, others point out that startup costs can be considerable. “The myth is that it’s easy to set up, and that it’s cheap,” Nelson said. “Some point to online education as part of a whole litany of changes that will help make the university leaner and meaner.”

 

Faculty are also concerned that teaching online will increase their workload, requiring them to hold virtual as well as in-person office hours and to adapt to the rapid speed at which technology becomes obsolete. For example, when software programs for putting up course websites have changed, faculty have had to “redo the work we’ve already done,” Nelson said. “What that has meant for some of us is basically reinventing the wheel.”

 

UCLA’s Information Technology and Planning Board (ITPB) is heavily involved in promoting more and better use of IT in instruction at UCLA, but in reviewing the report of the systemwide Senate’s special committee on online and remote instruction, its chair Christine Borgman, vice chair Kathleen Komar and Vice Provost of Information Technology Jim Davis discouraged the wholesale replacement of campus courses with distance education and questioned the notion that it will save UC money.

 

“We believe technology is used most effectively to supplement classroom learning, rather than to supplant it,” the Jan. 14, 2010, letter the ITPB sent to Henry Powell, chair of the UC Academic Council noted. “This is not to say that distance learning may not have value and a place, however. There is a full spectrum of online remote and distance possibility that needs to be carefully considered with respect to objectives, content, situation and conditions.”

 

The board encouraged innovative uses of technology in education, especially cyberlearning approaches that enrich course content.

 

While some subjects can be learned in a series of lessons and tasks, others require “intensive engagement among students and instructors in real time — which is often where true thinking, questions and learning occur. The distinction is not between analog and digital environments, but between isolated and community experiences,” the ITPB letter said.

 

Borgman, holder of the Presidential Chair in Information Studies, professor and an expert in cyberlearning who chaired a National Science Foundation task force on the subject in 2008, is a staunch advocate for the use of networked computing and communications technologies to support learning in a data-intensive, distributed and collaborative environment.

 

“Online learning per se can be very good,” said Borgman, “but it’s got to be done with appropriate pedagogy and planning so that the mechanisms are there to be able to shape and nurture students.”

 

Copenhaver decided to develop Philosophy 3 as an online offering after he worked for months with Raoul O’Connell, Edric Pauk and Kerry Nason, the TFT multimedia team.  The technology they have developed convinced Copenhaver that courses could be taught online “in a very, very powerful and effective way.” 

Nonetheless, said Copenhaver, the best teaching and learning still happens person-to-person and face-to-face. But he said that in classes where he often teaches as many as 200 students, “the teacher is already involved in a different kind of distance education.

“When the technology gets as powerful as it is now,” Copenhaver said, “it makes sense to try it out.”

 

To see some video clips that demonstrate TFT’s advanced platform for online instruction, go here.