ALN Teaching as Routine Faculty Workload

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ALN Teaching as Routine Faculty Workload

Greg Hislop Mike Atwood Drexel University
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Environment

• Drexel University
• Private, non-sectarian, about 10,000 students
• Technology focus, career-oriented degrees
• College of Information Science and Technology
• About 1,100 students
• Five degree programs
• Library and information science, information
  systems, software engineering
• MS in Information Systems (MSIS)
• Working I/S professionals
• 15 course structure 8/4/3

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The Online MSIS

• College level initiative
• Regular faculty participation and control
• Motivation for the College
• Market expansion
• Fit to the College
• Fit to students
• Abilities and usefulness
• Motivation for faculty
• Research interests
• Teaching load and compensation
• Faculty expansion
• Performance appraisal

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Degree Program Status

• Integrating online and traditional program
• Administration
• Faculty teaching assignment
• Online students are over 35 of total MSIS
  program
• Faculty teaching in the online program
• 18 have taught at least one course online
• Almost all full-time MSIS faculty have taught
  online

ALNephant
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Online Faculty Characteristics
One faculty members perspective...
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Some Preliminary Facts

• Faculty satisfaction is not a unitary dimension
• My background
• Completing first ALN course and first year at
  Drexel
• Not new to education or asynchronous
  communication
• My frustrations with ALN
• Communication bandwidth
• Communication delays
• Terseness of communication
• Uncertainty of message delivery
• My goal
• Provide students with a chance to acquire and
  demonstrate competency

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How Satisfied Am I with ALN?

• The quick answer not very
• Battling pitfalls detracts from the real job
• Extra time and effort go to fight the pitfalls of
  bandwidth, delay, terseness, and uncertainty
• And this gets even worse!
• Students have to battle these same pitfalls!
• Parity in education comes at the cost of greater
  effort
• At some point, loss of efficiency has to mean
  loss of effectiveness!
• Is this universal or related to the topic?
• Is system design special?

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But, Some Positive Factors!

• Outreach
• Universities should have an obligation to reach
  into communities to provide educational
  opportunity
• Research
• Facilitating communication is the goal both of
  research and teaching
• Outreach and Research outweigh the cost of using
  ALN
• The bottom line
• Personal satisfaction with ALN? could be better.
• Is ALN worth doing? definitely!
• Is ALN as good as it could be? no, but I can make
  it better!

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Getting a Broader Perspective

• Need to get a sense of faculty opinion
• Depth of support
• Where do we go from here?
• Faculty Survey
• Anonymous, short
• Response scales and comments
• Open ended questions

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Status

• Good general faculty support and willingness to
  participate
• With some areas of concern
• Opportunities for expansion
• Other degrees
• Certificates and continuing education

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Issues

• Administrative
• Integration with traditional programs
• Faculty development
• Remote and distributed faculty
• Instructional
• Will ALN teaching interest decline?
• Becoming more efficient
• Course materials
• Maintenance and development
• ALN materials for traditional classes
• Mixing ALN and traditional students