Does the Online Course Take More Faculty Effort?
One factor that has influenced the adoption of online teaching in higher education is the perception among faculty that this mode of instruction will demand more effort of them than traditional face-to-face classes do. Two researchers (Hislop & Ellis) recently published a study that measured the amount of time that instructors expended for online courses and their traditional counterparts.
The researchers used time log data from seven pairs (online mode and traditional mode) of graduate-level information science courses that experienced faculty taught at Drexel University in Philadelphia. The five faculty in this study included three men and two women.
Hislop & Ellis made the following conclusions, among others:
- "In looking only at total time expended by instructors for the seven course pairs in this study, the results of this study seem to contradict common opinion which holds that teaching online takes a great deal more time than teaching face-to-face. A closer look at time normalized by class size indicated a slightly larger expenditure for the online sections; however, the difference was slight, and amounts to less than 6 min. per student over the entire term..."[p.29]
- "More support for the notion of increased effort required for online courses emerged when the patterns of effort over time were compared for the online and traditional modes of delivery. For online classes, the number of days with some activity was one third higher than for traditional sections. In addition, the total number of activities logged for online sections was higher than for traditional sections by one half. Finally, for online classes, the average length of each logged activity was shorter by about one-third..." [p.29]
- "All of these differences may contribute to the notion that while teaching online may not take more time, it may actually take more effort. In terms of actual effort, a larger number of shorter duration activities may increase the effort to teach by increasing cognitive overhead. Perhaps, more importantly, the more continual attention required by an online class may increase the instructors' perception of effort much more than the actual time expended..." [p.29]
This study has relevance to researchers and administrators who have interest in distance education. Although the evidence from graduate level courses in information science may not generalize exactly to some other environments, such as undergraduate programs in other fields (including instruction at community colleges), it provides a better picture of the faculty effort in online courses than researchers had previously obtained from traditional surveys of faculty.
Gregory W. Hislop (College of Information Science and Technology, Drexel University) and Heidi J.C. Ellis (Department of Engineering and Science, Rensselaer at Hartford) document their study in an article ("A Study of Faculty Effort in Online Teaching") in the journal Internet and Higher Education (Vol.7, 2004, pp. 15-31). The article includes some statistics for the course time expenditure, 29 references, and a concise review of recent research on the topic.
[Abstract done by Willard Hom, Director, Research & Planning Unit, System Office, California Community Colleges, 2/21/05]
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