Penn State World Campus faculty helps dismantle barriers to online teaching

University Park, Pa. -- A Penn State faculty research team has worked to dismantle two common barriers to teaching online and has been honored for its research with the 2004 Bill Murphy Barrier Buster Award from the American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC).

"Two frequently mentioned barriers to teaching online are a perception of increased workload and concern that online teaching takes time from research and publication activities," said Melody M. Thompson, outreach director for planning and research, assistant professor of education and director of the American Center for the Study of Distance Education at Penn State. "The perception of increased workload has been based almost completely on anecdotal evidence."

To find out if online teaching takes more time than teaching in a traditional classroom, the Penn State World Campus developed an innovative research project and selected six faculty members to conduct self-studies of their experiences teaching online. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided support for the Penn State World Campus Faculty Workload Research Team.

Thompson served as the research project coordinator. Participants included Richard Arteca, professor of horticultural physiology; David DiBiase, director of the e-Education Institute and the Peter R. Gould Center for Geographic Education and Outreach, and senior lecturer in geography; Barbara Grabowski, associate professor of education; Margaret Lyday, associate professor of English; J. David Popp, senior project associate in Adult Education/Instructional Systems/Workforce Education; and Al Turgeon, professor of turfgrass management.

Four researchers directly compared the categories of tasks and the time involved teaching and administering online courses to their classroom versions of the same courses, and two researchers evaluated the implications of online administrative and instructional tool choices on workload and how these choices affected instructional quality. They documented their objective findings and provided reflective analysis and recommendations for improving the online teaching practice in their project reports.

"Of those directly comparing online and classroom workload, three researchers reported that the actual time spent teaching their online courses was somewhat less than in the face-to-face environment, while a fourth reported a comparable workload," Thompson said. "The four researchers who compared their online and face-to-face teaching experiences reported that while the time spent teaching online was not actually greater, the flow of tasks online was quite different, often resulting in a sense of less productive time available for other responsibilities. All six researchers reported that their work resulted in identification of strategies that either they or their Penn State World Campus instructional designers have implemented or plan to implement to decrease the workload."

Team members have shared their findings with colleagues at Penn State, as well as made presentations at national and international conferences. One article about the project has been published and several others have been accepted for publication. The World Campus Instructional Design and Development unit now is using the new insights and tools resulting from the project to help faculty members in other programs improve their experiences and increase their satisfaction with online teaching.

The American Distance Education Consortium presented the Barrier Buster Award to the World Campus Faculty Workload Research Team during its annual conference. Headquartered at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, ADEC is a nonprofit distance education consortium comprised of state universities and land-grant colleges.

The Penn State World Campus Faculty Workload Research Team project also received the 2003 Sloan Consortium Effective Practices Award in the faculty satisfaction category.

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For information about Penn State World Campus, visit the Web site at
http://www.worldcampus.psu.edu