How does the instructor's role change between a face to face course and one delivered through distance education?
Unlike face-to-face, an online instructor has to perform more skills than normal because we have other learning tools in online teaching including videos and audio. They are the enhancements to an online course that you might not find in a face-to-face course. Online learners “interact with content in text, visual, audio, animated, and other forms, through graphic and other interfaces” (Anderson & Elloumi, 2008, pg. 268). The learning process presents students with more than just communication through basic text form, but also audio and video. The instructor has a wider range of teaching tools and topics to cover. Presentations, text-based online chat, or webcam/microphone chat, these are some of the things an instructor is expected to be familiarized with when teaching online.
With an online course, it is very hard for the instructor to know what the students are doing because class does not meet two or three times a week but mostly is online. Students also don’t know what the instructor is doing, and most of the time, instructor lives in different places than the students. There is a distance, like a line that is drawn between instructor and students. The communication is there but there lack tone and face expression that would exist in a face-to-face course.
The instructor’s role is no longer just a teacher or mentor, in my opinion, because there has to be a reassurance from the instructor that s/he is there. It’s not just an online course anymore, but the person is available when the students need help. As Kearsley and Moore (2005) mentioned, “although many students can tolerate some delay, most people like feedback to be immediate, and few people find one-way communication with no feedback to be satisfying” (pg. 120). In most cases, that might not work as well as we all hope. Most instructors teach online because s/he is busy with other stuff and wants the convenient of teaching online just like students who want flexibility and don’t want to show up in class.
In a face-to-face class it’s also easier to get help from the instructor because he/she is there to provide you answers to your questions. Most of the time, the instructor might have an office at the campus where you can go and get in-person help. With online, as mentioned before, you could be in Maryland and the instructor could be in Florida. Distance and communication are two limitations for between students and instructor in online course.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Immediate feedback is definitely a plus of the F2F experience; however, we aren't always guaranteed that the teacher will have time in that instance either. How often have you waited after a class to ask a question only to have several others ahead of you?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that the skill set of the instructor of an online class is different from that of the F2F instructor. They really need to have a greater understanding of technology as well as the best way to ask questions to generate thoughtful discussion from the class members.