Teaching College Courses Online vs Face-to-Face

Experiencing a huge demand for college courses taught over the Web and not wanting to be swept aside by competitors from the commercial sector, universities are often pressuring faculty to teach courses online. Many faculty members have never taught online, and therefore wonder what they are getting themselves into. What are the differences between teaching online and teaching face-to-face? What can faculty members expect from the experience of teaching college courses on the Web?

Other faculty members have some experience teaching online, but haven't shared their experiences, nor have they read the literature on distance education. Their knowledge remains fragmentary. Are faculty experiences with teaching online specific to their content areas, or representative of the larger experience of teaching over the Web? This study seeks to integrate the experiences of professors currently teaching online into a qualitative description.

Literature Search

Before embarking on the research, we were aware of and influenced by a number of research-based notions of distance education. The first was that it requires a considerable amount of time to design and develop an online class. The instructor must shift from the role of content provider to content facilitator, gain comfort and proficiency in using the Web as the primary teacher-student link, and learn to teach effectively without the visual control provided by direct eye contact (Williams & Peters 1997).

Moore (1993) suggests that there are three types of interaction necessary for successful distance education: 1) learner-content interaction, 2) learner-instructor interaction, and 3) learner-learner interaction. Distance learning instructors need to ensure that all three forms of interaction are maximized in their course structure.

Peters (1993) criticizes distance education, saying that it reduces education to a kind of industrial production process, lacking the human dimension of group interaction, and even alienating learners from teachers. He compares distance education to a mass-production assembly line process where a division of labor (educators and communications specialists) replaces the more craft-oriented approach of traditional face-to-face education. However, Peters' article predates the current Web-based boom in distance education. His notions, like the computer themes in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, sound slightly like industrial age paranoia toward computers. The personal computer and the Internet have probably been a greater force towards individualization than mass production.

Method

We interviewed 21 instructors who had taught both in the distance and the face-to-face format. The instructors ranged from assistant professors to adjunct professors. Fifteen of the 21 instructors taught in the context of the SUNY Learning Network, a non-profit, grant-funded organization that provides the State Universities of New York (SUNY) with an infrastructure, software, Web space and templates for instructors to create their online course. The Learning Network also provides workshops on developing and teaching online courses, a help desk and other technical support for Web-based distance education. The remaining six informants taught Web-based distance education courses in similarly supported situations at state universities in California and Indiana.