SEEDS: CMC Practice
Facilitating the Online Experience

(True tales by Wendy Burton, University College of the Fraser Valley)

FACILITATING ONLINE

In 1995, as part of a project at University College of the Fraser Valley, I went online with a second year research and writing course for business and computer information system students. I had taught this course for fifteen years, and had been part of the team that developed it, so I was quite familiar with COMMUNICATIONS 225. I was unfamiliar with the online environment, although I was taking a course online myself at University of Toronto. The learning curve, as they say, was steep. I had to learn different strategies for the online classroom. With several colleagues, especially Patrick O'Brien, project coordinator and Computer Information Systems instructor, Moira Gutteridge, philosophy instructor, Barry Garner, mathematics instructor, and Don Chapman, adult education instructor, I began to discover online facilitation skills.

The first year I taught online, we used OFFLINE, an offline mailreader with no graphic capabilities. It is a good but minimalist conferencing system, which allowed students to read messages from the course and post' responses. The number of messages was quite high, and the discussions online were very useful for the students who were researching and reporting on current issues in business and computer information systems. The course was conducted entirely online. The students did as well (and as poorly) as the students who were taking regular Communications courses.

The next year, 1995, Patrick O'Brien found FIRSTCLASS, a conferencing system that was offered at Open Learning Agency. This software had graphics capability, and we could use the common word processing functions with it. There was also a great Help Desk provided by Open Learning Agency. We continue to use FIRSTCLASS, although the hunt for superior software is constant.

Based on research conducted while teaching online for two years (Burton, 1996), I have used several strategies to facilitate online learning:

SET-UP

When students logged onto FIRSTCLASS, they discovered on their screen an icon labelled with the course number, CMNS 225. Clicking on the icon opened the "classroom". There the students found a desktop with two rows of icons arranged chronologically and labelled WEEKONE, WEEKTWO etcetera. This series of conferences corresponded to the paper copy of the weekly course outline. The icons had been chosen from a large selection offered by FIRSTCLASS. If the student had an unread message waiting, a red flag would appear at the top left corner of the relevant icon. I set the course up and posted a welcome message and the assignment in WEEKONE and a welcome message in TEABREAK four days before the first students were expected to come online.

I used format devices to enhance readability of the opening message, which also contained suggestions for making an introduction.

Throughout the course, I posted a welcoming message and the week's plan by Saturday of the upcoming week.

EXPECTATIONS

Missing the visual cues students can use to send signals of confusion or uncertainty, I concentrated on posting the assignment or exercise for each week as the first message. I also re-posted these messages in WEEKTWO, so students could check in one place to see what they had to do. Writing instructions is part of the first semester course, Communications 125, so I practised what we preached. I discovered in the transcripts that nearly one-third of the messages from me over the entire course had to do with clarifying expectations. This discovery matched my intuition that students seemed to have a difficult time "getting it." For example, the very first message to the first conference contained this final sentence: "I don't know what you meant by "practice with FIRSTCLASS". And by "reply to at least two other introductions" do you want us to ask questions or just to say something like, hello, I am also taking this course" (Tuesday, January 09, 1996 04:01:17 pm). One of the main facilitative tasks online, unlike face to face teaching, was explaining apparently simply instructions many times.

ASKING QUESTIONS

In a face to face classroom I ask students questions all the time. These are intended to get more information on comments, press to discover how or what they are thinking about their topics, getting clarification, discovering details about research snarls, and so on. Online I discover from the transcript that I do the same; however, the intention of the questions seems to be masked by the online environment. For example, in WEEKSIX, I asked:

If you are encountering folks who don't know what a transition house is, maybe that can be the focus of the section on what, where, how, etc? Is the issue a name confusion? Or what? So this might be a fruitful area to investigate. Why, as you say, in these days, are people so uninformed about the transition house movement. Interesting questions here. (Saturday, February 17, 1996 06:27:17 PM)
This series of questions, posed to a serious, competent student, earned six exchanges with me, four of them privately, as she sought to understand what I "really" meant by these questions and whether she had to conduct primary research to answer these questions. This response was not unusual, but occurred in one form or another at least once with nine of the 11 completing students.

ANSWERING QUESTIONS

The students most often posed and answered each other's questions. If I were offline for more than two days, I would return to discover questions about the assignments had been posed and answered by others. Technical questions, which comprised 35 of the 911 messages, were almost always answered by other students, the exception being my response to "What's Cut and Paste?"

The liveliest exchange occurred while the students were posting errors in logic discovered in newspapers, especially letters to the editor and the sports pages. A debate broke out about whether inferences and value judgments were the "only" forms of logic errors, although the text was quite clear in its list of fifteen further errors. One student persisted in asking "me" for clarification, but I concluded reading the entire transcript that this student did not read messages from and to other students. She read only those messages from me. She missed a lot of good information, and was required to ask me the same question, about Action Closes, three times. See Rebukes and Corrections below.

ENCOURAGING CONNECTIONS

The transcript reveals a tendency on my part to create exercises which require students to respond to each other. I did this in eight of the fourteen conferences. For example, in WEEKFOUR, the students have to post a rough draft, "grab a draft," and provide feedback privately. They have to post three research problems and then vote on their preferred choice, with an explanation. These directed assignments appeared to create a group behaviour that lead to students dealing with each other's work before or instead of me. By WEEKFOUR, the students interacted much more with each other than with me. WEEKFOUR, which had 69 messages, was concerned with creating the progress report and critiquing working outlines. I posted the week's assignment and six other messages.

AVOIDING TEACHER-CENTRED BEHAVIOUR

This category is characterised by absence. I sense, from a preliminary investigation, that if I did not respond immediately to every comment directed either at me or toward me, the students would begin to rely more on each other. Unlike a classroom where I am there even when I am silent, when I am offline I am definitely not present. So the transcript reveals students directing a question to WEEKFIVE, which is then answered by a student who did not, perhaps, realise the question was really directed toward the instructor. The instructor becomes, in some odd sense, WEEKFIVE. Some students began to use my name, when they were addressing a question to me, but by then students were adept at answering each other no matter who the question was originally aimed toward.

Two students persisted in demanding an answer from me, often by sending me a private message, which was a copy of the message posted to the public conference. Two students (different students) expressed chagrin that I was "silent," "not always there," "not providing enough feedback," and "not adding something even when others have said something."

I received eight private messages, from eight students, asking a version of "How am I doing?" I responded, by WEEKTHREE, with a weekly tally of student work and online participation, which appeared to satisfy students' concern I notice and record their work.

One student persisted in teacher-centred responses, ignoring and apparently not reading anything written by anyone but me. This was interesting to me, because, as Rebukes and Corrections will note, this student also challenged me online far more than any other student over two years of teaching online.

HUMOUR ONLINE

I was surprised to notice how often I used humour in my online notes. I posted 132 messages to CMNS 225 and 118 (90%) had some humorous undertone or overtone. From the first week, these notes were met with similar tones from students who persisted. Indeed, the tone of the course, overall, even in the "heavy" conferences, is light and playful.

REBUKES AND CORRECTIONS

Reading the text of the course, I did note two incidents where I feel I stepped over the line in the critical tone of my notes. In both cases, I was responding to students who seemed to be unable to understand what I felt at the time were simple concepts: action close and the difference between a research report and a sales pitch for Registered Retirement Savings Plans. Reading the two notes now, however, causes me to consider the impact of such notes in the public conferences. I wonder why I didn't post them to the student's private mailboxes? I wonder if that would have had a more negative impact? I don't know. But I do know that if I spoke in a face-to-face classroom the way I wrote these two notes, the atmosphere would have been seriously undermined, as students over-hearing such interventions are usually not clear on the entire context. I also note that both messages were written very late (11:15 pm and 11:28 pm) on two separate evenings. The stiff, formal language and the stark departure from my usual online style underscored the rebuke in the notes. When read in a continuous stream, they both stand out as anomalies.

Morgan's Case

This case is a composite, although the elements reflect an experience in our classroom. Morgan is a pseudonym. "Morgan" would recognize himself if he were to read this, and he has agreed to allow limited use of this case. Please do not re-produce this story without contacting Wendy Burton

On February 10, as the class was preparing their first progress reports and critiquing their research proposals, I received a private message from Morgan. He first commented on the course, and how challenging he found it to learn online. He suggested some students be encouraged to write more descriptive subject lines, rather than simply selecting reply. He then wrote:

On a more personal note, would it be possible to get more feedback on my assignments. I really miss the guidance. I don't know if I'm doing good, bad, or otherwise.
Morgan is a mature student, capable and highly motivated. He has advanced computer skills, and a supportive online personality. I replied:

I'm a bit at a loss here, because your first real assignment, the report plan, comes in on February 15. Up to that assignment, all the work you've done on the course has been tentative, preliminary, or practice. I have responded when I had something to say in the way of criticism, but if others have come on before me to do that, then I say nothing. When I get your proposal, and your progress report, you will get feedback from me.
He replied within a day:
I guess I was being a bit premature here. Looking at the work we've done, I realize that they have not been the 'real' assignments. And I guess they were necessary to get the bugs worked out of the system. Personally, I would prefer it that you do say something, even if other have said it. This course has been a bit different than I imagined, so I will put more effort into it. I suppose that it is closer to real life in many ways than a regular class is.
What I find interesting here is that the month of work I would describe as peer consulting is chalked up to 'working the bugs out' to Morgan. They were, indeed, 'real' assignments, so why did I introduce the phrase "your first real assignment"? They simply were not evaluated (marked) by me. I was also surprised that he did not feel he had put effort in to that point, because he had performed above the average. The most telling comment, however, was his request that I "do say something, even if others have said it" (Tuesday, February 13, 1996 09:10:56 PM).

A colleague, Don Chapman, when consulted about this situation, suggested the following:

In the final analysis, however, I find [Morgan's] "dependency" a bit disturbing, especially if, as you say, he appears to be more than competent in his own right. I suspect that he needs a "delicate touch," one directed at assisting him to begin to strengthen his internal locus of control. The trick is, I don't know whether or not this would be accomplished by "starving" him of your feedback or by engaging him in a more rich and supportive discourse. (Wednesday, February 14, 1996, 09:09:41 AM)
My conclusion, expressed thus to Don, represents a facilitation:
He's asking for more contact with me. Do I respond with less? Sounds grim to me. So -- I asked him what he thought about it all. I explained my dilemma. I offered some solutions. He sent me an e-mail message off course, thanking me for -- get this -- taking his request seriously. He said he felt honoured that I had obviously thought about his request/feedback, and felt doubly honoured that I would consult with him. We made a deal that he would ask me directly in messages-on-conference if he wanted feedback. I agreed to answer to direct questions. Isn't that neat? (This is a pedagogical term, very technical, very hard to interpret :) (Thursday, February 15, 1996 07:29:57 PM).


last update: October 29, 1996