Guidelines for Web-Based Teaching in Political Science: The Rules of Five

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Conference Discussion

Web-based teaching is exciting because of five factors:

1. Dissemination. Online education has the potential to distribute education more widely than has heretofore been possible in the history of the world. The hope of online education is that it will do for the masses in the twenty-first century what the public library movement did in the nineteenth and the expansion of public universities did in the twentieth. Online education potentially may be disseminated to millions who previously could not have hoped for a college education due to circumstances.

2. Currency Online education is unsurpassed in its ability to provide the most timely information. True scholarship deals with the communication and collaboration of researchers at the cutting edge of their fields, and already online discussion is the preferred mode for obtaining peer interest and support for work in progress. If "staying on top of one's discipline" is a paramount academic virtue, online courses represent a new era in conveying this virtue to one's students.

3. Interactivity. Online education is inherently interactive, and interactive education is far preferable to passive education. Online education builds in interactive research tools as well.

4. Retrieval. Online methods are simply better at handling today's massive flows of information, as reflected in current concepts such as "data mining." With online education, everything retrieved can wind up as a permanent, searchable database on one's own computer -- much more functional than, say, bringing a tape recorder to a traditional class. An afternoon's work at retrieval can amass research that would have taken many person-years of library drudgery.

5. Multimedia. Online education is multimedia education, which is inherently better. It is important to emphasize that multimedia is not a matter of pandering to the "TV generation". Rather, it implements multisensory learning, which has routinely been found to be more effective pedagogically than unisensory learning such as reliance on texts alone.

However, web-based teaching has five major drawbacks, all of which directly affect the quality of education.

1. Time. Quality takes time. Putting quality materials on the web takes significant time. The learning curve for graphics and multimedia is time consuming. Through online education, instructors place themselves open to time pressures vividly described by Noble (1997: 6): "...the use of technology entails an inevitable extension of working time and an intensification of work as faculty struggle at all hours of the day and night to stay on top of the technology and respond, via chat rooms, virtual office hours, and e-mail, to both students and administrators to whom they have now become instantly and continuously available." Having sacrificed no small amount of time to mount an online course, time costs must be captured back, often through low production values, widely evidenced today in slapped-together web courses. Another obvious way is to diminish mentoring of students, which is common in online education. Such problems are not intrinsic to online education, but they are endemic.

2. Teamwork Team teaching can be exciting but it has never become widespread because potentially it can double personnel costs, which are 95% of the cost of higher education. Quality online education requires teamwork plus. Standards will inevitably rise beyond what is reasonable to expect of a single faculty member working alone. Success in the coming future era when universities and corporate trainers move beyond present experimentation and compete head-on in distance education will go to product-oriented production teams who will win over the efforts of individual faculty, even those loosely supported by technology resource centers. Those unable to mount production teams to "play with the big boys" will lower costs by lowering quality.

3. Expectations The costs of quality distance education relate directly to an even more significant cost, that associated with what may be called the "expectation gap.".Perhaps because the web comes via a television screen, students (and faculty!) tend to think graphics is better and multimedia is better yet. Faculty aren't accustomed to implementing the production values of their local TV station, and usually they cannot regardless due to resource constraints. Many distance education plans seek to compensate through use of interactive videoconferencing, for instance, to substitute for face- to-face discussions; to use online collaborative writing software for feedback on papers; to use chat rooms to simulate social aspects of the classroom; etc.. But if distance education incurs these added costs on top of those already mentioned, and one still has to have the same faculty size as well as additional online education teams, then the economics driving online education are shattered. Lowering quality becomes the only way out.

4. Equity It is perhaps too early to gauge the equity effects of online education, but already it is obvious that equity is a serious issue which starts with the fact that online education shifts onto the student and the home a considerable financial burden in the form of technology investment. In another dimension of the equity issue, one of the most common observations arising from the literature on the social impacts of computing has to do with gender bias against women and minorities. It is rare to encounter a funding plan for online education which factors into its budget costs for efforts to overcome such biases.

5. Educational content Online education is likely to have substantial costs in the area of educational content. Although properly implemented online education actually costs more, not less, the usually unspoken agenda of online education is cost reduction. Historically, we faculty are at the point where we are being encouraged to experiment with online education. One starts out creating one's online course as a creative, even satisfying endeavor. However, it is not possible for any university to long allow faculty to make the extent of investment in online education a matter of personal, creative choice. The worldwide tendency in distance education is toward performance standards built around written course objectives, but something is lost when the rich complexity of what faculty teach and inculcate is reduced to a printed list of learning outcomes and test items used to assess each outcome. Education is narrowed toward training.

Given all this, if the political science instructor wishes to forge ahead anyway, there are five practical guidelines to keep in mind.

1. Focus It is tempting and, for that matter, appropriate to place online many links to resources related to one's topic and to have online reference libraries of documents, images, and other media. While I myself almost always have such "Explore" sections for each week of my online courses, students overwhelmingly regard such material as "extra," optional, and frankly, not necessary. Even stating that students will be rewarded in their grades on essay questions when they incorporate references to such materials, my observation is that it is the rare student who truly takes advantage of exploratory materials. Instead the focus of a website should be on those materials assigned to all and tested explicitly.

2. Structure Web-based learning is a form of independent learning. While some students have independent learning skills, the large majority benefit from having a very clear structure which compensates for "learning on one's own." Examples of such structure include display of weekly or even daily work/progress assignments, clear and enforced due dates for turning in assignments, and quick feedback to assignments with an eye to improving future ones. In all courses there is a tendency to leave term papers and assignments to the last weekend of the term if allowed, but my observation is that the effects of open-endedness are much more pernicious on the web than in traditional teaching.

3. Contract Web-based teaching involves posting written materials to the web. Students rightly plan on the basis of these materials which become, in effect, a contract between the instructor and the student. In traditional teaching, student misunderstandings are often countered by the instructor with a remark of the form, "Well, in class we said thus and so," and if the student was not listening or even attending, then the blame is placed on the student. Misunderstandings are much more easy and common in distance eduction, and students will hold instructors to the literal word of assignments and test criteria, etc., as posted on the web. That is, the blame in web-based teaching falls on the instructor, who must be careful to assure that the contract with the student is spelled out fully and accurately.

4. Participation I have found that promoting online discussions is very difficult and while some may have had success, every colleague with whom I have spoken has found online discussion to be much more difficult and inferior to live discussion. Many or most of us resort to requiring participation as a grade component, which I recommend, but this does not solve the problem. Certainly, the instructor will have to take an active role in monitoring discussion and trying to enliven it. Solutions like video conferencing are expensive, undermine the purpose of distance education (learning at times of the student's convenience), and still have limited albeit greater success. Holding live sessions at least at the beginning and end seem to be important for student identification with the course and instructor, building peer relations, being oriented toward the course's "big picture," and building course esprit-de-corps. However, this is often impossible in distance education. At a minimum, the instructor should not be taken in by vendor hype that online discussion software will automatically solve the participation problem.

5. Enrichment An interesting finding of my web course evaluations, perhaps obvious in retrospect, is that the best students by definition are those who excelled at traditional educational experiences such as live discussion and, for that matter, taking notes on and understanding lectures. They were good at these challenges and know it and miss them when not present. Consequently, although the best students can easily handle web education, they are apt to be the most critical of it when it does not afford ample opportunity for them to display their abilities. For instance, they are the ones most critical of the absence of lectures and discussions. To compensate for this the instructor needs to identify the best students early on and provide an enrichment program for them which is challenging but not punishing. For example, the instructor may draw such students in as fellow web designers for the course as a whole, or ask they prepare materials for web pages on selected topics in lieu of a paper assignment or the like. Such students may also be invited to discussion lunches or other activities. The specific forms of enrichment will vary, but the instructor should be away that this is a problem to be anticipated and dealt with.

Summary

Given a choice, students are rightly prone to want all that both traditional and online education can provide. Implementation of such a mixed model makes digital education more expensive than traditional education costs universitites and society may not be willing to bear. Institutional inertia suggests the "online revolution" will be slow in coming to most campuses, with most faculty using email and the web for only modest purposes having only marginal measurable effects. The eventual danger, however, is the emergence of a two-tier educational system - a more expensive upper tier with sound traditional education supplemented with the benefits of full online access, and a cheaper inferior tier dispensing programmed training which meets objectives far narrower than the traditional goals of liberal education.