A dozen years ago when I completed all the required courses and prelim exams for a doctorate, my dissertation chair, Dr. Jerry Summers, said to me, “Congratulations, Sharon! You are now on your own!”
He was alerting me that on the dissertation journey, no one else would be holding the reins for me.
Frightened by the notion of being on my own and the rumor that only 20 percent of the ABDs who left their program end up finishing their dissertation, I declined a few “outside” job offers and took a position within my alma mater. Since there wouldn’t be any reminders from my dissertation committee, I rallied up what I called a “butt-kicker committee” to check on my progress on a regular basis. It includes a mentor who ran after me every Wednesday for more chapters, a boyfriend who threatened to break up if I didn’t finish, and my parents who pressured me by cooking super nutritious meals.
Today, when I think of that process “metacognitively,” I see that the fear of being “on my own” that triggered me to do something about it was an essential reinforcement for me to complete my degree. The danger of being on one’s own is immense—it can make a disciplined person procrastinate and a procrastinator drop off. When work and life keep presenting mini deadlines day in and day out, it is so easy to neglect the big, long-term deadline you’ve set for yourself—like getting a course ready for online delivery.
Like writing a dissertation, this “on-my-own” syndrome has been a major road block for online-course development. When a professor’s day is constantly filled up with teaching, meetings, and researching activities, that deadline for putting together a carefully designed course will likely be pushed, rushed, or expunged.
To beat the odds, a professor from DePaul’s College of Education came up with the idea of opening his course development schedule and experience to the world. On January 5, Dr. Chris Worthman published a blog post on the Center for Educational Technology’s website called . Developing a Hybrid Course: In the Beginning…. In his blog, Chris announced that he will post a weekly update on the progress of developing his hybrid course. The content, in his own words, will include “what I have done, experienced, and been thinking about; what excites me, scares me, and leaves me scratching my head; and, generally, just what this means to me professionally.”
Chris’s idea of blogging his progress strikes me as such a brilliant idea—more brilliant than my butt-kicker committee (even though there were no blogs back then). I see that by turning a course-development project into a reality show, Chris sought out 1) an effective motivation strategy for himself, 2) a professional-development example for his faculty peers, and 3) a model for his students, which is the most important and cleverest aspect of it.
A Motivation-through-Visibility Strategy
As Chris mentioned in his blog, he is “in the enviable position this quarter of developing a new course for a new program that will be taught for this first time in spring 2012 as a hybrid.” Everything about this course was new—including he himself to the experience. Chris was put on a schedule by his instructional designer and initiated the blog to “hold himself to it.”
If making my dissertation visible to my mentor, boyfriend, and family helped create an audience that trigged me to contribute and deliver for their readership, Chris’s action of blogging about his course surely has pushed this “audience effect” to a much higher level. Researchers have found that motivation generated through visibility has been a driving force for the success of online systems such as Wikipedia. Knowing the existence of an audience, as they found, may be sufficient to trigger contribution on its own. So, for Dr. Worthman, having to present his progress every week makes moving his work forward an inevitable action that he now owes to his readers like me. This motivation-through-visibility strategy left him no room to fall back.
A Professional-Development Example for Faculty Peers
In his blog, Chris wrote, “This will be an exercise into the unknown for me because I am not used to spilling the details of a new experience in this way. I hope, however, that it will provide others—like you—with some insight into my professional development and invite others—like you—to share your own experiences, particularly as it relates to digital technology use.”
As the director of his school’s Center for Educational Technology and the associate dean for Curriculum and Academic Programs, Chris has the responsibility of leading faculty into the new era of teaching and learning, which is heavily influenced by the use of digital technology. When it comes online learning, faculty may have been exposed to sample courses or bits and pieces of stories shared by online-teaching veterans, but very rarely do they have the opportunity to observe the whole process and almost never do they hear the pains and gains associated with each of step of development.
From an initial pledge of doing his work openly, to toiling with Softchalk, to a metaphorical analysis of online-course development, to juggling among elements within a course, his blog brought faculty members a real picture of what it is like for a faculty member to develop a new course in a new modality under a very tight schedule.
A Role Model for Students
I always feel that higher education—as it is now designed—seems to position its faculty and students into two very discrete groups of “knowledge providers” and “knowledge seekers,” or the ones who know and the ones who don’t.
If the process of learning was a race, the only ones who are running are the students; the professors are merely standing on the side to advise and to make some judgments. Those who belong to the professor clan never get to show the ones struggling on the track how they had approached the finish line and never get to rejoin the race—well, not until they begin to learn something new—like teaching online.
When it comes to building technology competencies, online teaching provides faculty members a unique opportunity to meet their students at the starting line. Not only does it put professors in the students’ shoes but also offers students an opportunity to observe how professors conduct the race. The latter can be achieved through a very careful design, like the one Chris Workthman is trying to accomplish. By implementing project-based learning, Chris, tried to develop an authentic learning experience for his students—by letting them experience what he is experiencing. As he said, in his January 19 blog, A Few Thoughts on Process, “To a large degree, what I am experiencing in designing my course is what I want my students to experience when they develop modules on different components of the English language arts.”
Besides teaching them the way of learning, it is even more critical for a professor to cast a spiritual influence on the students, such as the attitude that one should carry in dealing with the unknown. “I want them to jump, with no fear of failure but a level of realism that suggests they are going to have to work hard,” Chris wrote. “I want them to envision themselves as teachers doing actual teacher work. I want them to have a certain level of frustration that forces them to think at a meta-level not only about what they are doing but about teaching and learning in general.”
Lee Shulman once said, “Only when we have something to value, will we have something to evaluate… and we cannot value something that we cannot share, exchange, and examine.” Yet, it takes a lot of “guts” for one to be totally open to that action of sharing, exchanging, and examining. Chris Worthman’s blog reminded me of a comment George Clooney once made on using social media: “I would rather have a rectal examination on live TV by a fellow with cold hands [than use social media].” Although it’s meant to be a celebrity’s act to defend his privacy, it also showed how hard it is for people to open up their thoughts. For this, Chris’s idea of sharing your course development stories is more than brilliant—it is very brave! I am looking forward to seeing his hybrid course lead, inspire, and transform his students into online learning troopers in the coming spring quarter.