Technological Advances In Distance Education Mitigate Short Term Instructor Absence From The Classroom

Recent advances in communications technology such as FAX, videocameras and accessories, and videoconference give an instructor freedom to teach class from remote sites effectively. Common low-tech methods such as canceling, postponing, or substituting are briefly discussed. Three possible alternatives employing different sorts of communications technology are presented: videoconferencing, combining videotape with interactive audioconference, and combining FAX with audioconference. Discussion includes advantages, difficulties, costs, and surveyed student reaction. This investigation does not explicitly consider Internet adaptation of its methods. Introduction For professional reasons, an instructor may be absent from class. The occasion may be a conference, to present a paper or to attend professional meetings. Short courses during the semester present opportunities to meet with colleagues in industry and to maintain proficiency in the latest methods. Fundraising time often seems to occur in mid-semester. Even such necessary obligations as military reserve duty and jury duty seriously disrupt continuity in the classroom. Classroom attendance becomes even more of a problem when an instructor is the only one available for advanced courses in certain disciplines. Face-to-face interaction has an important place in education not yet effectively supplanted. If lectures or books were adequate alone, then there would be no need for a resident campus. A good library would put the faculty out of business. Interaction with instructors and peers in discussions, formal and informal, lectures, seminars, demonstrations, and a host of other opportunities enhance the effectiveness of learning. The interaction and opportunity to ask questions, to encounter new opinions, and to gain wisdom are of great importance. The value of human interaction is a reason that distance education by Internet is more complex and difficult a problem than some of its proponents would lead educators to believe. 1 To mitigate their own occasional absence, instructors have employed several low-tech methods. Among the more popular are canceling the class, postponing the class, or hiring a substitute instructor. With the recent advances in communication technology, a wider range of options opens. A creative instructor may now take advantage of a greater range of professional opportunities outside the classroom while disrupting the classroom schedule less than was the case in the past. This paper presents field-tested options to combine technologies to maintain the personal touch, not replace it. Low Tech Methods Traditional low-tech methods for addressing short-term instructor absence include canceling the class, postponing the class, and employing a substitute instructor. Canceling the P ge 201.1 class works well if an instructor absence occurs on short notice, for example, due to illness. Unfortunately, repetition degrades this method’s usefulness quickly. Postponing the class is one step better than canceling it and can work for both short notice absences and for those planned somewhat in advance. Postponing a class at least preserves the quantity of contact time. Finding a time to reschedule a postponed class may be difficult, particularly with engineering undergraduates, who often carry heavy courseloads. In creating academic schedules, the best times are already filled with other classes, perhaps for no more reason that than they are indeed the best times. The unpopular and inconvenient times remain, which makes postponing classes an inconvenient idea. Finding an acceptable time for a makeup class can degrade into an exercise in trying to please everyone. A notable exception to these observations occurs when the course syllabus, distributed the first day of class, schedules the makeup classes: two weeks of makeup classes produced not a single complaint when scheduled as part of the initial course syllabus and highlighted the first day of class , but failing to do so produced over 80% complaints on summative reviews. 8,9,10 When a department chair was recently asked how he addresses his teaching obligations while out of town, he explained, “That’s why we have post-docs!” In this anecdote, he was referring to the substitute instructor, a popular low-tech idea. There is a perception, not without merit, among administrators and faculty that they must occupy students’ attention for the assigned time interval. A human interaction is desirable, hence the substitute instructor. The lower the level of instruction, the more this perception becomes practice. Unfortunately, the substitute instructor finds it difficult in the short time allotted to establish the necessary relationships and to identify appropriate interactions for learning to take place. Neither substitute instructor nor student feels a need to build a long-term learning relationship. The perceptive instructor asks whether a disjoint interaction is preferable to no interaction at all; the answer is not always the same. Consequently, the author of this paper avoids being a substitute instructor unless given the opportunity to attend at least the two immediately preceding class sessions. The most effective low-tech method to mitigate instructor absence may be a full-length in-class written examination. Unfortunately, this method has rather strict limits in both frequency and timing. Each of the methods reviewed above may be best under certain circumstances, but each has significant difficulties. Advances in technology now make these methods merely one of several options, as explained in the following sections of this paper. Videoconference Technology Videoconference technology now exists in most cities and many college towns in the US. Institutional and commercial sources provide fully interactive two-way communication between sites. Because many professional reasons for absence from the classroom (conferences, professional development, fundraising, etc.) are in major cities and most classes are in college towns, this is a possible way to mitigate a classroom absence. The hardware required for this method makes it the most expensive of the methods discussed in this paper. For that reason, its practical availability is likely to be low. At a minimum, each site in a videoconference system contains a main video camera, monitors showing video from both locations, and audio from the distant end. A control panel at each site allows an instructor with little training to control camera settings (for example, camera position, zoom, and audio volume) from either end. Associated software has become fairly userP ge 201.2 friendly, though not always entirely compatible, among the major distributors, reducing the learning curve to a few short minutes. Common options include the following: • several video camera presets (position and zoom with autofocus) • videotape playing • videotape recording • computer port to enable display of a computer screen • document camera, including options to display the main video camera, document camera, or both • high quality, full-duplex audio These options enable a full range of classroom hardware and teaching methods, of which some follow: • chalkboard or whiteboard--shows up nicely and camera locations can be preset • transparencies and documents • handwriting, particularly useful during interactive problem-solving sessions • computer simulations--anything a computer can simulate and display • computer-based instrumentation displays from experiments, even remote experiments • prerecorded videotaped presentations • computer-based presentations from standard (or non-standard) software • computer-based multimedia Anything that can be presented on a computer monitor can be shown in the same form on the videoconference monitor. Usually, the videoconference monitor is more effective for a group audience because videoconference monitors are larger than most computer monitors. Showing and explaining small items to an audience is a strength of videoconference technology, just as it is for videotape. 4 Videoconference technology has obvious advantages in mitigating instructor absence. With a little practice, an instructor and students can interact nearly as if in the same room. Frame rates and compression technology make the video image remarkably sharp and interactive, following motion well with minimal choppiness. Experience shows that an instructor may require a slightly more aggressive initial approach to establish a personal presence the class. Students seem to be, at least initially, less attentive to an instructor’s image on a monitor. It is also more difficult to attach names to faces and voices on a monitor than it is to do so in person. This is particularly true if the instructor is remote from all the students or if it is too early in the semester to know students well. At the University of Idaho, videoconferencing has mitigated instructor absence from time to time for the past two years. Student opinion was recently obtained by survey on the effectiveness of videoconferencing. 6,7,8,9,10 For the same class, several instructor absences were mitigated in each of the several ways discussed in this paper. Students unanimously preferred videoconferencing to all other options presented in this paper, decisively perceiving it as superior to substitute instructors or to postponing a class session or other methods discussed in this