January 2007 — News
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What's Full-Time for K-12 Online Teaching?—a Dilemma
At FLVS, for example, where instruction is individualized, instructors provide a welcome call to introduce the virtual course, the instructor and the school. They are expected to call students and parents at least once per month and to make monthly progress reports to keep both informed. The majority of such calls are often made during evening hours and weekends, as most students also attend traditional schools. Instructors are also expected to check e-mail and voicemail at least two to three times a day. They carry pagers for their first year of employment. As most new hires are adjuncts, they also are required to use the Staff Log Database. There is no first or last day of school or summer break. Students can submit work anytime, including weekends and holidays. Completion means finishing a class without a predetermined date (FLVS Instructors—the Real Story, http://www.flvs.net/general/documnets/Pre_Hire_7.swf ).Interactions take a great deal of time. The virtual classroom is a structured environment that features interaction, which is the closest one can come to a face to face classroom in the online world. Teacher-student and student-student interactions play a key role in students' attitudes about online learning, their motivation, course completion and satisfaction and retention in a program. Perhaps the following data will illustrate its intense nature and instructor demands. I just finished teaching two 10-week online master's and doctoral courses with a combined total of 37 students. Note that this number might be typical of just one K-12 online class. Ultimately, students posted the majority of their 2,611 messages, which I read, to 15 graded topics among 27 course discussion threads. They sent another 244 courseroom e-mails to me and several additional e-mails to my personal account. Only one student phoned during that time, as telephone conversations were not required. I sent over 1,300 messages consisting of instructional or facilitative discussion posts, courseroom e-mail with weekly individual feedback to graded discussions, responses to e-mail and individual feedback in connection with iterations and final grading for three projects. There were also periodic communications via e-mail or phone with the department chair and proactive e-mails to students who were at risk for a variety of reasons and similar communications to alert university advising for additional student support. Add time for reading course materials, troubleshooting for errors in posted content and record-keeping, and one can see that these two courses were a nearly full-time commitment. Imagine multiplying this data to accommodate five courses. More than good time management is the issue. The quality of individualization would suffer.
So, there is a reason why "state-led programs usually employ teachers on part-time contracts" (Watson & Ryan, 2006, p.
