Thomas J. Tobin
Westmoreland County Community College
14 January 2000
Technology in the Classroom
ABSTRACT: In 1997, our college provided $2,000.00 mini grants for faculty to develop online courses; this met with minimal success. In February of 1999, I was hired on as the Instructional Technologist to help faculty develop online courses. My focus narrowed to five major areas of concern: the scope of the program, our available human resources, what computing hardware we needed, the financial expectations of the college, and the support infrastructure needed for online students. After three months of planning, we offered two pilot courses in the Summer 1999 term; their success led to ten online courses for Fall 1999, and a projected thirty courses currently in development for Spring 2000. In order to further refine our program, we will be attentive to those issues which our faculty and students raise. Between February 1999 and January 2000, we have been able to plan, develop, and implement 27 online courses from a number of disciplines, laying a solid foundation for future growth.
	
	Although you might want to set up your online program as soon as possible, I've found that even under great pressure from one's administration to "show results quickly," and squeezing time constraints, it helps to proceed cautiously.  Our first attempt at creating online courses was to offer a USD $2,000.00 grant to any full-time faculty members who were interested in creating online courses. Two faculty members, one from Computer Science, and one from Accounting, applied for and received grants in the 1997-1998 school year. The Computer Science professor quickly did her research, saw that our Information Resources folks were already swamped, and chose to build her online course using ClassNet software. Her course ran in the Fall 1998 semester, and again in Spring 1999. Our Accounting fellow, on the other hand, began investigating different sorts of course-building software, and soon became lost in the technical jargon and requirements of the competing products. He never developed any course. 
	In February of 1999, I was hired on as WCCC's Instructional Technologist; my sole purpose is to assist faculty who would like to develop online courses. Before I approached any faculty members, however, I sat down with some of the key stake-holders in the college to figure out what resources our college had: 
	Scope: Who are the learners? In our case, we have an entirely commuter population, with evenly mixed demographics; we have many traditional students who attend class full-time, and many adult learners with jobs and families. What services do we expect to provide and to whom? Our online program should, we reasoned, provide equal access for all online students to all services, including the library, academic counseling, and tutoring. 
	Human resources: Who are willing to be front-runners? Instead of waiting for faculty to volunteer (see the low volunteer rate for the grants, above), we asked our division chairpeople who among their faculty would make good online teachers. Armed with this information, it was much easier to say "You know, your chair thinks you'd make a good online prof; can we talk about it some time," rather than "Hey, would you like to teach online?" 
	Computing resources: What capacities do we need? Since our college is small, the staff of our Information Resources department are already taxed to provide just basic care and service for an ever-expanding physical network. We found that contracting with an outside company for space on their servers made sense: we didn't have to maintain any machines, and we wouldn't have to worry about software upgrades or technical service. 
	Financial resources: How can we promote these courses? We decided that our student body comes from a relatively small geographical area, and advertised in local newspapers initially. 
	Infrastructure: How do online students get their course schedules, register, get books, receive counseling, and utilize library services? We should have looked at these questions right off the bat, but we didn't. In our haste to get the course themselves created, we neglected much of the infrastructure needed to support our online students. 
	In order to see how our planning held up, we started with two pilot courses over the Summer 1999 term-not surprisingly, the Computer Science course that had been taught using ClassNet was simply transitioned over to Blackboard, our course software provider of choice. The surprise came when our Accounting fellow of some paragraphs back wanted to develop a financial-recordkeeping course online. I worked with both of these faculty members, but in differing ways. Our Computer Science professor needed little but a few hints as to how Blackboard worked, and she was off. The Accounting prof and I worked closely toward defining what his course was meant to provide for his students, and then we worked together on preparing and posting a set of lecture notes and study guides for his students to follow. Both of these instructors were well prepared by the time the courses "went live," and in class bulletin-board discussion, students often complimented them on their knowledge and sense of humor. 
	Meanwhile, I set about implementing student support services. My primary advice to anyone undertaking an online program is to make sure everyone is a team player! Not including the Information Resource staff and bookstore folks from the very beginning made for rough going in those areas; fortunately, our support staff in the bookstore, student services, registration, accounting, and the library were interested enough in the project that they pitched in to help find solutions; for example, our bookstore had no policy on shipping books, something it had done infrequently in the past. I worked with the bookstore director to publish a policy about online-course-book shipping to out-of-county residents. 
	While our pilot faculty were teaching in the summer, we started to recruit faculty who became interested in the project. The main incentive, we found, was not grant money or release time, but the assurance that I would work with faculty one-on-one to develop their courses; many faculty who developed courses for Fall 1999 learned as they went along how to post documents and make changes online, but there was always the assurance that a professor could, if need, be, drop off a disk with lecture notes on it, and I would perform the "magic" (as one prof called it) of putting the course documents online. 
	When our Fall semester started on August 19, 1999, we had ten courses online, many of which filled up (we had to provide a second online section for one course). Student support services and library services, although not offered wholly online just yet, were in place, and online students were encouraged to browse through a sample course in order to familiarize themselves with the way in which our courses operate. 
	In order to refine our online program, we will reply on our evaluation procedures; our students and faculty are the best sounding-boards we have for gauging the effectiveness of our program. Students are asked at the end of every online course about their experiences, and are asked whether their expectations have been met. We ask our faculty to rate their experiences, as well, and ask them to provide specific responses to the level and quality of support and training we provide for them: were they adequately prepared to teach online? When technical problems occurred, were they resolved quickly? 
	We will pay special attention to the feedback we get from our students and faculty this semester. For instance, many online students have indicated that one initial face-to-face meeting with their professors would be helpful. We have also found that first-time online students probably ought to be required to complete an orientation course before they can begin an online course; too many seem to have questions that are easily answered by referring to our online student guide. 
	Now that we have offered individual courses in a number of disciplines, our next goal is to build certificate and then degree programs entirely at a distance (using online and videotape telecourse modes). Some of the issues we plan to address are the large percentage of adjunct faculty at our college and their role in the online program, and the issue of creative control of materials: does a faculty member hold copyright for online course materials, or are such materials "work for hire" and thus the intellectual property of the college? We come down in favor of creator's rights, by the way. 
	Although it is difficult to go into great depth about the means by which to get an online program off the ground quickly, I hope that I have been able to give a good idea about some of the dos and don'ts of the process. One strong conclusion that I have reached as a result of implementing this development process is that it is much more important to bring together a team of stake holders in the process early on, and to address the issues of student and faculty needs before an institution offers its faculty the opportunity to develop online courses. This said, we are proud to have been able to plan, develop, and implement 12 online courses in six months, thus laying a solid foundation for the creation of distance-education certificate and degree programs in the future.  I would be happy to discuss any aspects of our program.  
	Please feel free to contact me at tobint@westmoreland.cc.pa.us, and to log in as a guest to our sample online course at http://www.blackboard.com/courses/WCCC.

Copyright © 2000 Thomas J. Tobin.