Making Contact with Students in Online Learning (Part 1 of 3):

Is There a Face in There?

Dr. Ken L. Haley, Ph.D
Paris Junior College, Paris, TX
E-mail: khaley@paris.cc.tx.us

According to eduventures.com, the market for distance learning courses is growing at 40% per year. In the 2001/2002 academic year, more than 350,000 students were enrolled in fully online courses/programs. This rate of growth is likely to continue. I jumped into this online environment three years ago after teaching for 12 years in the traditional college classroom. The shift was not an easy one at first. However, the transition has been worth the effort, and I would like to share some things I have learned along the way.

When I began this expedition into the online world, I had very little real experience with online courses. I had a good working knowledge of computers, at least as much as most folks in English usually have, but I had never taken a course online, nor had I even seen one. My lack of real exposure made getting started more difficult, especially since we had little experience in this delivery system at the college. This lack of experience may not have been a disadvantage in the long run, however. We tend to imitate what we have seen others do, but in this case no model existed, or more precisely we had no model of our own. Certainly others at various institutions were already doing what we came to do, but we discovered this later. This lack of a model allowed us to think in creative ways. Consequently, we were able to think "out of the box" to some degree.

Creative thinking and designing becomes a major stumbling block for many instructors, and the students suffer as a result. We, as instructors, often would like to just transfer what we have been doing in the traditional classroom to text and post it online. Some well-meaning folks have resurrected those old yellowed notes and dutifully placed them online along with a list of reading assignments and the course is finished. While this may satisfy the requirements for an online course in theory, it is much less likely to work well in the real world of students. If the course stops at this point, it loses one of the most important aspects of education, perhaps the most important: contact with students.

At present, we have little hard research in this area that is specifically aimed at distance education students. Older models on student retention and attrition--such as presented by Tinto--tend to focus on the more traditional student, as has been pointed out by Towles and Spencer. Many distance education students simply do not fit that traditional model. They often do not live on campus, they tend to be older, and they work--many full time. These students usually have families of their own and all the worries associated with trying to manage work, family, and school. They are not often involved in campus activities, and they have little time to socialize with others in college. In short, many are essentially cut off from most of the traditional experiences of college life, including personal interaction with faculty.

Carr makes a case for personal interaction and advocates establishing "some form of personal contact," considering it "essential" (A39). In the same article, a student identifies her greatest challenge in online courses as "the fact that you don't have direct contact on a regular basis with your instructor." I have heard similar comments from my own students who are enrolled in more than one course online. Some instructors make an effort to establish contact while others do not.

In the traditional classroom, we as instructors normally have a reasonable amount of contact with students: a face-to-face exchange of ideas. A student in this setting knows if the instructor is young or old, male or female, neat or sloppy. Even when the attributes of the instructor are not that appealing, at least some still exist. The student still knows something about the characteristics of the person delivering the course material. A face exists that can be associated with the course. This knowledge at least establishes some point of reference and sense of contact for the student. Contrast this reference with that of an isolated student staring into a computer monitor reading page after page of text. Who really wants to communicate with a faceless computer?

Towles and Spencer studied the impact of contact by telephone initiated by faculty in video-based distance education at Liberty University School of Lifelong Learning. The results were interesting in that this contact by telephone seemed to make little difference in students beyond freshman standing, but for freshmen the contact made a difference. They found that for freshman students who were not called the completion rate was 40%, but for those who were called that completion rate climbed to 80%.

 These courses require a great deal of self-motivation anyway, but if there is no feeling of personal contact, or at least virtual personal contact, some students seem likely to give up, especially first-year students. We should not be surprised to see high drop rates in these courses lacking any sense of contact. We will always have some students drop courses--any courses--but when students feel isolated and out of contact with any real person behind the screen, then these drop rates are likely to escalate. We need comprehensive studies to evaluate the exact impact of contact in distance education, but while we wait for those studies, it seems prudent to find creative ways to establish some sense of contact between instructor and student in an otherwise impersonal setting.

We have a number of ways of making this virtual contact. Perhaps it should begin with a personal web page that makes use of a picture of the instructor. Carr again suggests this as a means of establishing contact. This is not particularly high tech, but at least it does establish some point of reference for students. On my web site, we have a welcome page including a picture along with a very brief introduction to my background and interests. This needs to be brief, but it also needs to communicate something substantial to students. Students are often interested in where their instructors attended college, where their instructors have taught, and perhaps related interests such as writing or research. As an additional service, we have started listing the syllabus for each online class attached to the welcome page. A student interested in the course can click there to see the current syllabus and decide if this course is of interest. Readers may also visit my web page at the following site: http://www.paris.cc.tx.us/users/khaley/. This is particularly useful as many students are still taking online courses for the first time. They need to know what they may be getting into. Since I have an interest in writing poetry, I have also posted several poems there with their initial publication information. This provides a real-world reference so that students can see that my interest in English goes beyond what we might do in the classroom. This personal web page is a good start, and the tech folks at any institution can help set it up very quickly. We can also do much more.

In addition to the web page, we try to establish contact by using some multi-media in the course. We have a number of options here. One that has worked well involves using Power Point presentations along with embedded audio. Many people are now using Power Point or similar programs to deliver information in the traditional classroom, but they usually talk over the slides in person. This works very well in the classroom, and it can easily be adapted to the online format. Power Point itself allows for recording voice directly into the computer and embedding the recording into the Power Point presentation. When the student opens the presentation, the screen appears with the slide and the audio portion begins shortly after it if the automated settings are selected. So now the student has a visual component and also has the actual instructor--or some instructor--talking to him or her. When we first began this, many students asked me about these recordings in chat sessions. "Is that really you on the recordings, Dr. Haley?" They were impressed. They were also very curious. This established that point of personal contact between student and instructor.

The format was also different for most of them, so it was at least a novel approach that caught their interest. We have been using this component for three years, and it continues to work very well. One problem many have faced with this concerns the actual delivery of the presentations. Once audio is embedded, the size of the file will increase dramatically. Power Point alone can be downloaded over phone lines to distance education students without much problem. It can sit there as a link in the delivery program. We use WebCT, but the system will be much the same in other delivery platforms. However, when the audio appears in the same file, it usually becomes too large for transmission over normal phone lines. The wait time will be excessive--perhaps hours. This seemed to be a large stumbling block at first, but again we began to think about easy ways to get around the problem. The solution actually was quite simple. We simply burn the Power Point presentations on CDs and send them out with other registration materials for the course. Virtually any computer made in the last ten years will have a CD reader. Students already have these, so there is no additional cost for new equipment. We burn the CDs in house--in my office computer one at a time for now--and since CDs are cheap we do not charge anything for the service. A nice printed label makes these look very professional.

We began with Power Point with audio presentations and progressed from there. These remain one of the most effective delivery methods, but we also wanted to have some variety, and to further establish this sense of contact between student and instructor. We decided to include video clips of me discussing various points related to the courses. Again, these files quickly become very large, so we do not include them in the course delivery system. We did do this at first, but the course file became too large, and we found that students usually could not download them anyway because of transmission limitations over normal phone lines. Again we decided that burning to CD would eliminate this problem. This has worked equally well.

Please don't get the idea that we have just video taped regular classes and transferred the material to digital format. Ours is a different approach directed specifically to this environment. Space limitations prevent taping of entire class sessions anyway, but that was never the intention. These clips are relatively short--less than five minutes usually--and they address some specific point in the course. Five minutes does not sound like much, but when it is concisely done, a five-minute video clip can cover a lot of territory on a limited subject.

Our final product in multi-media now contains a combination of materials, all of which contribute to this concept of student contact. We have regular Power Point presentations with audio, Power Point format with imported slides with embedded audio, and we have the video clips with audio. All of these contain both an audio and video component. Even the movie clips contain a loose transcription of the dialogue at the bottom of the page in addition to the picture. Text scrolls across the bottom so that hearing-impaired students can follow along without a printed transcript. The Power Point presentations do much the same thing with the text on screen and the audio running in parallel. In addition to helping students with disabilities, this also provides double reinforcement to those who both hear and see the materials.

Interestingly, students often seem to feel they get to know me with this approach, and of course they do to some degree. I have often found myself talking to someone either on or off campus and the person will not introduce himself. The student will recognize me from the presentations in the course, but he will sometimes forget that I have never seen him, or I may have only seen him once at registration. I am embarrassed that I must ask the person for a name, but I am glad that these approaches seem to be working well enough that the student can walk up and talk to me as if we had been in a traditional classroom.

All of these multi-media delivery systems require work, of course. They may sound intimidating to many, but they are really not so difficult. Furthermore, these approaches do not require a great deal of equipment or expense. We did this on a shoestring with good results, but that will be the subject of another article. Tech people are usually available to help. In fact, they may be waiting for a call to help develop something. In any case, we can also go a long way toward establishing meaningful contact with students without multi-media presentations. Chat sessions can be very effective at this.

One complaint we sometimes hear with regard to online instruction is that students cannot ask real-time questions and get immediate responses as they do in a traditional classroom. Chat sessions are an answer to this. The typical delivery systems available today will allow for chat sessions--a real-time exchange between instructor and student on line. We find that many of our students already are familiar with chat rooms. The instructor may need to do a bit of preparation here, but it is mostly just a matter of orientation. Here is a place where the instructor/student exchange is immediate, with allowances for typing of course. We are not far from real voice chat rooms, but for the moment most are still conducted by typing. Some instructors use this as a place for lecture in the traditional sense. Instead, I have used these as places for questions and answers over the course and/or materials. Either approach may work well, but I do think that the chat room needs to be a little more relaxed. If a student is afraid he will be penalized or even reprimanded because he types in a word wrong, participation in the class will suffer. My own approach here is that this is a place where we can discuss anything related to the course or to college in general without feeling like everything is monitored for a grade. It is informal, more like standing around in the hallway between classes talking about things. Even though my classes are in English, I never correct their entries in chat. I sometimes make typos myself simply because I try to respond quickly and I am not a great typist. My students find this most humorous. English teachers, after all, have a reputation. We write flawless prose, or so many students think. I am sometimes tempted to make an obvious error intentionally early in the course to loosen things up for the students, but fortunately I make enough unintentional errors so that this is not needed. Those purists who feel they must be absolutely in complete control of everything at all times may not be comfortable with this approach. So be it. But remember, this is not the traditional classroom. This takes the place of those informal office visits, those momentary meetings between classes in hallways, and those chance encounters on the college grounds. My goal here is to establish meaningful contact with students, not to lecture them. They get that in other portions of the course.

Discussion postings are also a fairly effective way of making contact with students. My students are required to make a discussion posting on each reading assignment. The key here is that the instructor must respond to these postings individually. Does this take time? Well, yes, but not as much as one might expect. My students typically make a single paragraph entry for a discussion posting. In response, I may write one or two sentences. I really do read the postings, and this is reflected in my response. Students notice this as well. If I have gotten behind a few days, I may get an email from a student asking if everything is fine. The posting has been sitting there a couple of days and I have not responded to it yet.

Discussion postings need some sense of direction, and I try to supply this to the students by first posting a brief question under the title of the reading assignment. This gives the student a place to start and a good sense of the expectation. I also suggest that they read the postings of others, which they are free to respond to as well. As this secondary response is not required in my classes, some do and some do not participate in it. Whether or not they respond, the discussion postings allow them to see what other students in the class are thinking and writing. The discussion posting system can work very well, and this asynchronous approach has been adopted by some of the largest online universities. The key here, as always, is that the student must feel that someone on the other end is really reading and responding to his writing.

Course delivery systems such as WebCT provide a number of contact possibilities beyond what we have considered here. The important idea is simply to establish some sort of contact. While using these more high-tech approaches, we should not overlook some low-tech approaches that also help. When students register, we provide registration packets with everything they need to get started in the course. We include a welcome letter, instructions on getting into the course, the CDs for the course, and contact information in case the student encounters problems. We have found this to be a great help in getting off to a good start. Students can leave registration and be online that same evening. I also make use of some decidedly low-tech items such as snail mail (the regular postal service to the uninitiated). We must remember that these courses are very easy to ignore. All the high-tech materials will not help if no one logs in on the computer. Each semester I send out at least two reminder letters to every student. I encourage them to continue with the course and catch up if they fall behind. I also advise them to drop if plans have changed and they no longer wish to complete the course. An official-looking letter in the mail can be a very effective wake up call for some.

How well do these efforts at contact work? Is there a payoff for the additional work involved? Certainly the contact--real or virtual--will not solve all problems. Students still encounter personal problems at home or at work, things unrelated to the course. I can only offer my own experiences here as an indication and a point of reference. This past summer (2002) the college offered four sections of my online English courses, two in 1301 and two in 1302. In the four courses we had a total of 70 students. I did not count students who dropped before the official counting day, so this is our official number for the courses. Of these 70 students, 56 successfully completed the course with a passing grade. This gives us an average rate of 80% completion for the summer term. These figures were consistent for all four sections with completion rates of 81%, 82%, 77%, and 78% for individual sections. Since it is not too unusual to hear of attrition rates of 50% or so, we feel pretty good about the numbers.

Although online courses have been around for several years now, we are still in the process of learning. Instructors need to approach these courses differently. Things that work well in the classroom may not work well online. We need to be less concerned with time and control and more oriented toward fulfilling goals and objectives. Why should every student progress at the same rate? Why should we be concerned with whether a student finishes the course in eight weeks or sixteen? Why do we expect students to just sit in front of a computer and read old notes? We have to rethink these things.

We are in the midst of an education revolution, and we will hardly recognize the world of education in 20 years. However, I am confident that no matter the delivery system, students will still want some form of contact with instructors. We are, after all, still people.

Works Cited

Carr, Sarah. "As Distance Education Comes of Age, the Challenge Is Keeping the Students." The Chronicle of Higher Education 46 (2000): 39.

Tinto, Vincent. "Dropout from Higher Education: A Theoretical Synthesis of Recent Research." Review of Educational Research 45 (1975): 89-127.

Tinto, Vincent. Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Towles, David E. and Jay Spenser. "The Tinto Model as a Guide to Adult Education Retention Policy." Catalyst 23.4 (1993). [http://scholar.lib.vt.edu.ejournals/CATALYST/V23N4/towles.html]

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

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