When Overwhelmed by Students, Go Virtual

R. Thomas Berner
Professor Emeritus of Journalism and American Studies
Pennsylvania State Univeristy
E-mail: CoalCracker@psu.edu

About 15 years ago I served on a university-wide task force on distance education. Once our report was clearly written and neatly packaged, we presented it to the provost. Before we got very far into our presentation, he asked: "What is distance education? (pause) If you ask me, the student who sits in the last row of (he named a 400-seat classroom) is getting a distance education." Having taken courses in that classroom myself, I knew what he meant.

Until my last semester at Penn State, I never taught a class larger than 25 students. That's because all of the courses I've taught were what some would call "skills" courses, with a focus on learning professional journalism skills rather than theory. In such courses, students write a lot and instructors are expected to promptly return papers--heavily edited. Individual conferences are frequent, especially with students who are having problems.

It is those conferences where the struggling student suddenly has a revelation and learns something he or she was not grasping in classroom discussion. Clearly, the best form of instruction is one to one but it is impractical in some courses.

The pressure on class size is ever upward, limited only in some cases by the lack of physical space. How long that limitation will continue remains to be seen. For example, my university recently built a classroom that seats 726.

As I look through the schedule for my own college (communications), I see courses that the faculty once vowed would never be larger than 50 students have now doubled, and some departments offer courses that enroll 300 to 400 students. Curiously, my own department (journalism) is offering a one-credit course in language skills. Enrollment has been capped at 200!

This problem of increasing class size is not going to go away, so what can faculty reasonably do in the face of this mounting problem? This is what I did.

In my last semester of teaching, I was asked three weeks into the semester to take over two sections of a lecture course for an ill colleague. One section had 30 students and the other had 60. I had taught the course only as a graduate seminar and could not possibly convert my previous materials overnight to an undergraduate twice-a-week lecture course. So I made it a virtual course of 90 students, a merger that was effected in a matter of minutes electronically.

I need to point out that I could do this because Penn State has a policy that all but requires students to have a personal computer. For those who don't, the university has 50 computer labs and provides a variety of free computer software workshops and online tutorials. No student could beg off on the grounds of being computer-less or computer illiterate. That is not a recognized condition at Penn State.

Thanks to prior experience gained in designing and teaching three courses via distance education, creating a virtual course for residential students was relatively easy. I leaned heavily on assigned readings and bulletin board discussions, which the course management system could track and which allowed me to come up with an easily quantifiable and transparent grading system. Because I was creating this course three weeks into a 15-week semester and putting it online within 48 hours, I did not have time to create credible examinations but would do so if I were to teach the course online again. I know from my experience teaching distance education courses that, given time, I could design a much better course.

I met with the students face to face twice--once to explain how the course, titled "The Culture Foundations of Communications," would operate for the rest of the semester and another time to show and discuss my slides of Chinese rubbings. I emphasized to them that one virtue of the course was participation, and instead of attending lectures in which only two or three students in the front rows interact with the instructor, everyone would participate in required online discussions.

Anecdotal evidence shows that participation was outstanding. I know from their names, the photographs they posted for their classmates or from the comments they made during online discussions that I had international, minority, and female students--students who might normally hold back in face-to-face discussion--engaged in the course material. I can compare that with the day I showed my slides, and despite having prepped everyone with a question for discussion was unable to get much of a discussion going.

Keep in mind that the course management system tracked participation. The system allowed me to parse the list and see who had not posted an original essay or who had not replied. The system enabled me to send them an anonymous reminder. Since I shut down the message boards after a certain period, I was able to keep students on a fairly regular routine. It wasn't perfect, by any means, but 56 out of 90 students did earn "A" grades and only five received a "D."

Anecdotes aside, one can examine my end-of-semester evaluation to see how the students rated various aspects of the course. Questions intended to measure their feelings about participation scored no lower than 5.9 on a 7-point scale. As I noted earlier, this course was basically thrown together, so I am not disheartened that the course and the instructor did not get a better evaluation. But what really pleased me was the response to one question: Would they take another online course in residence? By 4 to 1, the students said they would.

As my evaluations indicate, students saw a value in the course beyond its flexibility. Some commented, for example, on how much they had learned from their classmates. One student even admitted to relying on specific classmates: "There were some students, however, whose names I began to recognize because I respected the answers they made in their posts, so sometimes I would specifically look for their posts because I knew they usually had something interesting to say." I've never heard that admission from a student before, even in my skills courses in which I do peer mentoring.

I am not about to conclude that universities should throw out the classroom in favor of the web. But I do think we need to consider the added dimension the web gives us in our residence courses and what it can do to help with those large lecture courses in which there is little participation and little learning. Why build an expensive 700-seat classroom when you can offer virtual courses using resources you already have?

Not every academic subject is adaptable to an out-of-classroom experience, but as physical space becomes more limited and faculty are expected to teach more students, virtual courses have a place in the mix.

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

Page Viewed:   / Created: 27 June 2003 / Updated: 20 August 2003