Our goal in this study was to increase understanding of the process and actual experiences of students in an Internet-enabled course. Perhaps because of the small class size, the students supported each other and developed a sense of belonging. B3002 was chosen because the instructor allowed online classroom observation and interviews of herself and her students.
One of the observations was a special event during the semester that provided an opportunity for students to interact with each other in sync. Four of the six students in the course were observed for one to two hours. In this section we describe some situations that the students in B3002 found particularly difficult.
Before this event, the instructor sent out the instructions for the SchMOOze University field trip and a map of the SchMOOze University by e-mail. Like Kathy, Amy was frustrated by the problem she had with operational orders at SchMOOze University. She felt like she was left out of class because she couldn't use the assignments properly.
The students and the instructor in B3002 generated fairly intensive online discussions through e-mail, and all the students posted well over 5 one- to two-page long messages. I can't catch up with all of you : (." She was one of the students who posted the least number of emails to the online class discussion. John was doing one of the B3002 activities in a computer lab reading e -mail messages.
It would have been helpful if one of the class sessions taught tips and techniques for searching the web). She pointed to three areas of frustration, the biggest of which was with the technology and the inflexibility of the course schedule. Sheryl, for example, did not feel that she was receiving effective instruction because of the ambiguous instructions on the website and in e-mail messages from the instructor.
Some instructions from the summer course did not fit into the distance version of B3002. The instructor knew that the instructions on the Internet were too ambiguous and tried to clarify this.
Conclusions
Part of the reason for the instructor's misconception was due to the students' reluctance to express all their concerns, frustrations, and confusions to the instructor. Because of the frequent power differential between students and instructors in university courses, it is likely that these students did not feel free to express the full extent of their dissatisfaction, or to what extent theirs. Most of the distance education articles written for practitioners (i.e., administrators and teachers) and lay people (e.g., prospective students) emphasize the positive opportunities presented in distance education (e.g., Barnard 1997; Harasim 1993; Yakimoviz and Murphy 1995).
In some of these optimistic studies, students may not have had the opportunity to express their confusion and concerns with web-based distance learning. At the end of the semester, students may make positive comments about the courses due to relief at finishing a course and concern about hurting the instructors' feelings. Triangulating different kinds of data sources enabled us to see distance learning processes from a different perspective.
We recommend that future researchers use this type of multi-source methodology to study distance education courses. It is time to seriously examine the actual experiences of students in distance education and critically discuss the wide range of practices and experiences that support distance. Incidentally, we noticed that many students worked on the course late at night and on weekends.
Unfortunately, little of the practitioner literature and even less of the popular literature on distance education (in any of its modes) effectively identifies the complexities of working and communicating with "new media". It is not impossible to find such accounts, but they have been published in specialized journals such as Instructional Science (Feenberg, 1987) and Semiotica (Feenberg, 1989) which remove them from ready availability to the various faculty and administrators who are involved in teaching online courses. Part of the theoretical analysis would have to examine the socio-technical complexity of communication and computing support for courses, and faculty and students. Another critical part would involve the political economies of the participating universities – for example, the ways in which academic administrators are being encouraged to embrace Internet-enabled distance education as a new source of revenue (Carnevale, 1999).
Other elements would include understanding the conditions under which potential students take such courses and the conditions under which faculty teach them. More seriously, the necessary theorizing would involve the nexus of these conditions, social processes, and practices: the various game ecologies (Dutton and Guthrie, 1991; Dutton, 1995) in which administrators, students, and instructors come together to make the Internet possible. distance education programs. Other game ecologies have sometimes created more satisfying learning and personal experiences in distance education courses.
We have much to learn about the conditions that create the good, the bad, and the ugly in Internet-based distance text education. 34; Computing Movements: The Rise of the Internet and Remote Forms of Work." in John Van Maanen and JoAnne Yates (eds.) Information Technology and Organizational Change.
Endnotes
What are the main concerns you have about teaching this course this way? 1] This article uses the terms Internet-based, Web-based, computer-based, and online courses. In practice, these courses can use such a wide variety of communication tools (asynchronous or synchronous), such as text, voice, video, discussion forums and even face-to-face meetings, in addition to electronic communication that any two courses are possible. are very different in their communicative structuring.
The main focus of this paper is on Internet-enabled courses that rely primarily on asynchronous text-based communication media. 2] This generalization is based on our reading of dozens of professional and popular articles about the Internet. 3] For a review of the literature on the ways in which frustration can interfere with learning, see Hara and Kling (1999b).
4] A colleague commented: "through large student samples and quantitative methods I have found data that support your findings on teacher feedback. 7] Since the class size was so small, if we were to describe the student profiles in this article, the teacher can I .
