April 2001 — Features
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Teaching College Courses Online vs Face-to-Face
Four of the interviews were conducted over the telephone and 18 were done via e-mail. The four telephone interviews occurred first and were used to develop a set of open-ended questions for e-mail interviews. Since e-mail interviewing did not require the laborious process of transcription, the e-mail interview process allowed the gathering of data from a much larger number of participants than was possible from telephone or face-to-face interviews alone.
By reading over the transcriptions of the telephone interviews, the investigators found emerging themes that were converted into 27 open-ended essay questions comprising the "e-mail interview." The e-mail interview, as it is used in this study, is differentiated from a questionnaire on several counts. It uses open-ended, essay-style questions as opposed to the Likert style, fill-in-the-blank or multiple-choice items common to questionnaires. The informants averaged approximately 45 minutes to complete the e-mail interview. The initial questions included some "chit-chat" and informal questions designed to put the interviewee at ease. It also involved some degree of interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee. The interviewers sometimes e-mailed participants follow-up questions to particularly interesting responses.
The investigators read over all the interviews at least two times, looking for trends and consistencies and generating 39 categories of responses and mnemonic codes to symbolize these categories. Some typical coding categories include ">WK," meaning that the online classes require more work, and "N FUNNY," meaning that humor was problematic in the online environment.
Three investigators coded the interviews and then counted how many times each type of response occurred (not the number of informants who said or wrote a particular response). So if one informant wrote at three different times in the interview that online classes required more work, that interview contributed three occurrences of the ">WK" category, not one occurrence. The coding system was not done to be objective (this type of ethnographic research is by its nature non-objective), but rather to uncover trends in the data.
Data Sources
Some of the most important, most emphasized and most frequent responses made points we had not directly asked about. A lot of issues related to bandwidth limitations and the dominance of text in Web-based classes. Some instructors feel as if a lifetime of teaching skills g'es by the wayside. They can not use their presence and their classroom skills to get their point across. Nor can they use their oral skills to improvise on the spot to deal with behavior problems or educational opportunities.
Because of the reliance on text-based communication and a lack of visual cues, every aspect of the course has to be laid out in meticulous detail to avoid misunderstandings. Every lecture must be converted to a typed document. Directions for every assignment must be spelled out in a logical, self-contained way. Therefore, Web-based distance classes require considerably more work, often including hundreds of hours of up-front work to set up the course. On the other hand, the development of an online class, especially one that began as a face-to-face course, makes the instructor confront and analyze the material in new and different ways.
