Editorsâ Note 2007:
Online Teaching and Learning: Preparation, Development, and Organizational Communication
Beth L. Hewett and Christa Ehmann Powers
Online teaching and learning have become common to many academic and business organizations (see, e.g., Aldrich 2004; Driscoll & Carliner, 2005; Schank, 2002, 2005). We conceptualize online teaching and learning, or e-learning, âas the formal and informal delivery of learning and professional development activities (including training), processes, and associations via any electronic methods including but not limited to the Internet, CD-ROM, videotape, and DVDâ (Hewett & Ehmann, 2004, p. xv; see also de Leeuwe, 2004; Stockley, 2006, from whom we have drawn for this definition). Within academia in particular, a growing number of traditional colleges and universities currently conduct academic coursesâsuch as rhetoric and technical communicationâin the online environment. Many times, students need acculturative exercises to assess their readiness for the online environment as well as possible follow-up orientation. In the same vein, those who are teaching online and administering such programs also need orientation and training for their own readiness in the online environment. They need training at the organizational and programmatic levels for more than their technical platform-specific skills development. Of equal if not greater importance, online educators need training for the practical and theoretical transfer of pedagogical principles and practices to online environments. Similarly, nontraditional educational institutions that provide learning assistance to distance learners, for example, also conduct employee training and development. They provide online consumer-based education in common subjects as well. In any of these cases, online training quite often occurs at a distance and engages distance learning principles and processes for online instructors much like those that their distance-based students will experience.
For these educational organizations there exists a crucial concern: What kinds of educational principles and processes address the very real challenges that arise when an institution conducts some or all of its training and professional development online using the Internet and other online modalities? This special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly (TCQ) explores such organizational concerns as well as the needed preparation and development strategies that arise for educators in online teaching and learning.
PRIMARY THEMES
Throughout this special issue of TCQ runs the theme of training and professional development for online instructors who will be or are engaged in online or Internet-based modes of education. Given that the pressure for educators to use technology is greater than ever before, this special issue of TCQ is born out of professional development needs shared by contemporary traditional and nontraditional educational institutions:
- To succeed in online environments and with online media, professionals cannot rely solely on methods deemed successful in conventional, brick-and-mortar situations; rather, they need instructional approaches that address distinctive qualities of teaching and learning online.
- As such, professionals need adequate orientation about online teaching and learning approaches.
- Of equal importance, the individuals responsible for creating and/or organizing orientation for colleagues also must consider training methodologies that are most appropriate for this type of professional development.
Like our contributing authors, we see the fundamental need to embrace the pedagogical implications of online teaching and learning. Understanding how to teach online does not just entail learning new technology, which, of course, we must do to varying degrees; it also involves a deepening knowledge of how students respond to and learn in online settings. Indeed, it requires becoming a student again in the realm of educational technologyâlistening to our inner voices where, as learners in relatively uncharted learning environments, we alternatively teach others and allow them to teach us. Every encounter with online teaching and learning thus becomes a sort of informational interview or experiential research project with the online media, the course work, our own pedagogies, andâof courseâthe students and their learning processes. Although much has been written about online teaching and learning generally (see, e.g., Dabbagh & Bannan-Ritland, 2004; Oram, 2006; Palloff & Pratt, 2005), a gap exists regarding the specific issue of training and professional development for those instructors who will be teaching online. We argue, therefore, for an increasing understanding of professional development and teacher mentorship in online environments via theoretical and empirical research grounded in a practical appreciation of assessing what works in various online settings.
The three articles included in this special issue of TCQ take us a step closer to the goal of more research and scholarship surrounding online training. Readers will find that the pieces here consider implications for both United States and international contexts. Our intention in compiling this special issue is to help practitioners, teachers, and researchers to understand training and development principles specifically geared to such subjects as the delivery and conduct of online educational programs; issues of communication among administrators, online trainers, and online trainees; technologies and organizational dynamics as related to preparing for online education at various levels; and research and materials that students of technical communication might encounter pursuant to these concerns. The primary themes of this issue revolve around offering new insights into commonly held educational principles and practical activities that online training necessitates: investigation, individualization, immersion, association, and reflection into the online training processes and experiences (Hewett & Ehmann, 2004; Hewett & Ehmann Powers, 2005). In addition, this special issue addresses the âsuccessesâ as well as âlessons learnedâ in the development of online programs, such that readers can better understand the implications of applying such principles in online practice, education, and research.
CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF THE CURRENT LITERATURE
With an eye to improving practices and refining theory, this special issue can provide a transitional step toward developing a standards-based conceptual framework for training and professional development for online contexts. For educational institutions in todayâs market, there is an ever-growing pressure to leverage technology to reduce costs, make training and professional development more efficient, and increase retentionâall while maintaining the highest standards of quality (see, e.g., Cheville, 2004; Graves & Twigg, 2006; Johnson, 2004; Schank, 2002, 2005; Twigg, 2003). Such high-stakes outcomes demand that those who use online technologies to do their jobsâwhether for teaching in traditional educational settings or for professional development in nontraditional settings like self-identified for-profit online universitiesâmust develop their practices in robust ways. It is all too often the case, however, that those who teach and train online are thrownâunpreparedâinto the pool and asked to swim the virtual waters, as Kelli Cargile Cook suggests in this special issue, with little to no guidance. Such a sink-or-swim attitude comes from a problematic assumption that teaching and learning online involves skills that are transparently or automatically transferred from traditional settings. Indeed, this attitude also is manifested in an astonishing paucity of published literature relevant to the principles and processes of preparing educators for online experiences. A brief review of the literature confirms that the urgency of our call for critical discussion and research about online training and development is pressing. For example, according to the U.S. Department of Education, 1,680 academic institutions offered approximately 54,000 online courses in 1998, which was an increase of about 70% over such courses in 1995. With about 1.6 million students enrolled in online courses in 2000, it is clear that any trend upward of these figures is significant to educators (Boehle, Dobbs, & Stamps, 2000, p. 34; see also National Center for Education Statistics, 2002). In more recent findings, I. Elaine Allen and Jeff Seaman (2004) of the Sloan Consortium reported that 1,971,397 college-level students took at least one online course in Fall 2003, whereas 2,634,189 were predicted to take at least one online course in Fall 2004 (p. 5). Yet, in the educational arena, instructors are often sent unprepared to teach and train others for online environments. Lester Faigley (1999), for example, juxtaposed the efficacy of educators who undergo training for online instruction with the odds that they âare probably the most poorly supportedâ of all professional technology users (p. 138). More recently, Jane Blakelock and Tracy E. Smith (2006) called for âdeveloping more appropriate and useful assessment of online writing-intensive teaching and learning,â which demonstrates that âquality teachingâ remains a goal that requires ongoing professional developmental support (pp. 157, 159). Highlighting that such support optimally requires educators to meet their trainers online, in Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes (Hewett & Ehmann, 2004), we argued that trainees should be immersed in a replicated distance environment that mirrors the setting and experiences common to their studentsâan argument that both Cargile Cook and Lisa Meloncon proffer in this special issue.
Indeed, even in corporate professional development programs from which educators might adapt training practices, too little training occurs that actually employs the online media through which employees will conduct their work (Hewett & Ehmann Powers, 2005). John V. Moran and Haidee E. Allerton (2000) agreed, citing that in 1999 âonly 2 percent of training was Web-based ⌠[and] 75 percent of that was in information technology. Of $63 billion spent on training, only $1.14 billion of that was over the Webâ (p. 31; see also Barkley & Bianco, 2001). Such statistics suggest that many who use online media to teach and train are insufficiently or nonoptimally prepared for online work settings. Although the development of online learning platforms, software, and online learning objects tend to attract significant financial resources, Hewett and Ehmann (2004) noted that âprecious few dollars are spent on teacher training, particularly on training that supersedes learning how to navigate a specific electronic platform and that addresses, instead, the pedagogy of online teaching and learningâ (p. xiii). Yet as we have indicated in this Introduction, the online education that occurs in traditional, distance-based endeavors is too important and pervasive to neglect. Critical work that addresses professional development in online settings, however, is relatively limited. Others such as Cargile Cook and Keith Grant-Davie (2005) have agreed: âWe are still discovering the implications of teaching with these new instructional media, and we have only begun to discuss how best we should use them and why those uses are bestâ (p. 2).
A review of the literature reveals that prominent professional journals and books tend to have few discussions about online training and professional development for educators. Computers and Composition Online (CCO), for example, has published only a few online training-specific pieces since its launch as an online journal. In 2003, Evan Davis and Sarah Hardy authored âTeaching Writing in the Space of Blackboard,â which addressed some teaching strategies albeit specific to the particular Blackboard platform. Generally, however, CCOâs âProfessional Developmentâ section has presented somewhat esoteric, nontraining-based offerings (see http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/prodev.htm).
Similarly, the print journal Computers and Composition has a long history of addressing issues relevant to contemporary views of student learning and social responsibility in teaching with technology (see, e.g., Smith, 2004) and, most recently, it has published its own special issue (2006) about evolving perspectives on distance learning. This issue usefully addressed such general online education issues as the needs of adult online learners (Blair & Hoy, 2006), software costs (Reilly & Williams, 2006), usability (Miller-Cochran & Rodrigo, 2006), and class power (Anderson, 2006) and dynamics (Kiefer, 2006). Among the few exceptions to the pattern of ignoring online educator professional development, notably in this issue, Kristine Blair and Cheryl Hoy (2006) considered how a need for individual dialogue between students and instructors influences the time and energy that instructors must expend for successful online courses, and they suggested that adequate supervisory evaluation of such roles requires different supervision and peer review strategies like those of training online instructors (pp. 45â47). Also notable in this issue, Hewett (2006) considered the online training issues that emerged from a small-scale empirical study of synchronous whiteboard instruction, which include a need for modeling of strong interactions, simulations, or role play experiences, and âreflective experimentationâ (pp. 24â25). Standing out in its uniqueness of discussions of online training in Computers and Composition, Barbara Blakely Dufflemeyerâs (2003) âLearning to Learn: New TA Preparation in Computer Pedagogyâ specifically addressed the orientation of teaching assistants for online educational settings.
Yet even Web texts for the online journal Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy have not tended to address the general training and preparation needs of potential and new online instructors. For instance, Brown and Elias (2001) considered the sociopolitical issues in the online classroom, but the absence of a discussion about other essential training is notable. More closely aligned with the themes we have targeted for this special issue, Cynthia L. Walker (2001) offered a useful set of guidelines for online instructors that she gleaned from listening to her studentsâ feedback, and Cheryl Greene, Teryl Sands-Herz, Zach Waggoner, and Patricia Webb (2002) considered how students need ample preparation for participating in their online writing courses. Based on their exploration of online teacherâstudent interactions and their professional development experiences, Hewett and Ehmann Powers (2005) provided practical suggestions for online training of professional writing instructors.
In a similar vein, few previous issues of TCQ have tapped the issues surrounding online training and professional development. The Winter 1999 special issue, for example, entitled âTechnical Communication, Distance Learning, and the World Wide Web,â included only one essay on training and training tools relevant to technical writing (Driscoll &am...
