De 24uurs Professor
In his home office wearing a baseball cap, shorts, and a T-shirt, and nursing a strong cup of coffee. He logs on to the Web site for the online course he teaches for Pennsylvania State University, where he is an instructor of meteorology.
His early-morning session is just the beginning of a long day of virtual teaching. He will check in again every few hours, from home or from his university office. Long after he goes to sleep, students will continue to post messages to the course"s discussion board and send him e-mail -- It is just before sunrise, and Lee M. Grenci is ready to start teaching. In what has become a daily ritual, he sits at the computer turning in their assignments, asking about their grades, or just saying hello.
Mr. Grenci has taught here for nearly 20 years, but this is his first semester teaching online. He quickly discovered what has become conventional wisdom at many campuses: It takes more time to teach in a virtual classroom than in a regular one.
Is technology turning college teaching into a 24-hour job? The growth of e-mail, course Web sites, instant-messaging software, and online courses has forced many professors to rearrange their daily routines and has made them more accessible to students than ever before.
Before the Internet, the only opportunity most students had to speak with their professors was during scheduled class sessions or office hours. Now, more professors can be in touch with students at any time -- morning, noon, and night, seven days a week. That is especially true for online courses, which are advertised as allowing students to study at their convenience.
"I have been online every day of the semester," says Mr. Grenci, though he says he tries to limit the amount of time he spends on the course on weekends. "Saturdays I just check in once, sort of like a doctor, to make sure none of my patients are ill. Otherwise my wife would kill me."
Although critics of distance education have worried that virtual classrooms mean less contact between professors and students, many professors say the opposite is true. To compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction, institutions or professors often promise students a quick response to personal correspondence by e-mail -- with some pledging to answer all student e-mail messages within 24 hours.
Technology experts are divided on how available professors should make themselves to students over the Internet. Just because a students sends a message at 2 a.m. doesn"t mean that the professor needs to respond that night. Or does it?
"We"ve had a millennium to figure out how to control workload in a classroom," says Gary E. Miller, who is associate vice president of distance education at Penn State and executive director of its World Campus. "We"re in a phase right now with the development of online learning where we"re trying to figure out what the rules should be."
Response Time
Mr. Grenci says he is a morning person, and he is animated even before his coffee kicks in. One thing Mr. Grenci likes about online teaching is that he can work in the early hours, when he says he is at his best. Today he says he slept in: He sometimes starts as early as 4:30 a.m.
His home office is a kind of shrine to Penn State, which is also his alma mater. The walls and trim are painted blue and white, the university"s colors, and several wall decorations feature the Nittany Lion. Mr. Grenci puts an Eddie From Ohio CD on his portable stereo -- which gets his two mini dachshunds barking downstairs -- and he points excitedly to the e-mail messages he has received from students. About 40 or 50 new messages have come in since he last checked, about 9 p.m. the night before.
"Wow. Let"s see. We"ve got lots of business, lots of business," he says. The course, an introduction to weather forecasting, started out with 270 students, though about 25 percent have dropped out as the semester progressed (http://www.e-education.psu.edu/projects/meteo101). The bulk of the students, nearly 200 of them, are from the university"s main campus here, and the rest are enrolled in branch campuses across the state.
Some of the e-mail messages are addressed directly to Mr. Grenci, while others are responses to a discussion question on the course"s bulletin board, which the students are required to respond to each week. This week they were asked to use weather readings and find a city where they thought it would rain at a specific time.
"I always enjoy the e-mail," Mr. Grenci says as he opens a message.
But the message, like many he receives, is hardly inspiring. The student asks when the grades for the last assignment will be posted. Mr. Grenci taps out a reply using one index finger (he says he never learned to touch-type). Other students have asked the same question, and he answers them one by one -- though he cuts and pastes the same response to several students.
"I would prefer somebody ask a really hard question," he says. "Then I"d really get my juices flowing."
Mr. Grenci also replies to every contribution made to the discussion board, though some of his responses are as brief as "Quality post" or "I can"t argue with that forecast."
"I made a promise to them that I would answer every post within 24 hours, and I haven"t broken that promise," Mr. Grenci says proudly, as the sun rises to light the white picket fence in his backyard.
Promises and Relationships
Such pledges are perhaps the clearest symbol of the way technology has changed the relationship between professor and student.
Some distance-education leaders say that quick responses are key to making students feel part of a virtual class. "The instructor has to have a strong presence, and part of that presence is a 24-hour response," says Heidi Schweizer, director of the Center for Electronic Learning at Marquette University, who wrote Designing and Teaching an On-Line Course: Spinning Your Web Classroom (Allyn and Bacon, 1999).
Some institutions actually require professors to reply to all online student e-mail within a set time.
"Our contract with our professors requires a 48-hour turnaround time," says Robert Ubell, dean of online learning at Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hoboken, N.J. "We thought the students shouldn"t be completely in the woods for more than a couple of days."
He says the institution considered a 24-hour reply requirement, but it decided that such a promise would cut into professors" personal lives unnecessarily. "We thought weekends they should have some free time," he says.
At least one college even asks its traditional professors to "electronically acknowledge all student questions and assignments within 24 hours." That"s part of a set of "expectations" for faculty members at Cleary College, in Ann Arbor, Mich., which offers business programs on an accelerated schedule. "It"s an expectation that we give to our faculty in writing," says Vincent P. Linder, vice president for academic affairs at Cleary. (Such requirements are rare at elite colleges and universities, although some large distance-education operations, such as UNext, do require their instructors to respond to students within a set time.)
But setting requirements for faculty responses could be counterproductive, says A. Frank Mayadas, director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation"s Asynchronous Learning Networks.
"It"s misguided to say you must answer within 48 hours," he says. "I wouldn"t expect a student at 2 in the morning to knock at my door. If he sends me an e-mail, why should I feel responsible to answer every single one?"
Mr. Mayadas worries that some of the best professors will avoid virtual teaching if they think it will chain them to their computers seven days a week. His advice to online professors: Make it clear to students that your time is limited, and spell out which days you will be offline.
The American Association of University Professors has issued guidelines calling for online office hours to take no more time than traditional ones, says Mark F. Smith, director of government relations for the group.
"If we"re not careful, we"re going to have faculty so overwhelmed with answering individual e-mail questions that they don"t have time to teach, research, and deal with the larger concerns of the course," he says.
Mr. Grenci says he decided that a promise was key to keeping students involved in the course -- though it has meant that he can never skip a morning session. It takes Mr. Grenci about two hours to answer all those questions, including composing a message to a student he caught cheating on the last assignment. That gives him just enough time to grab a quick bowl of Wheaties and take a shower before heading to campus.
Teaching Days
When Mr. Grenci arrives at the university, shortly after 9:00 a.m., he drops by the office of David Babb, with whom he is jointly teaching the online course. He and Mr. Babb, who is an instructor at the university, have divided up duties so that Mr. Grenci handles most of the correspondence with students while Mr. Babb tackles the technical details, such as uploading lectures to the Web site and creating simulations to demonstrate key concepts. The instructors did most of that work in advance, before the semester began.
As Mr. Babb pours himself a cup of coffee, the two discuss changes they hope to make to the course before it is offered again in the summer term. Students seemed bored by some of the early material, they agree, so they decide to revise the first few assignments.
"Oh, how did Kevin Trimpey do?" asks Mr. Grenci, noticing the stack of graded assignments on Mr. Babb"s desk. "This guy"s an adult learner," Mr. Grenci adds. "I"m rooting for him." The student had successfully completed the assignment, and seemed to be keeping up with the course well.
At 9:45 a.m., Mr. Grenci heads to his office to prepare for his 10 o"clock class, a traditional course on how to write about the weather for a general audience, the only other course Mr. Grenci teaches this term.
Unlike his online course, the traditional course takes up a set amount of time each week. The 21 students in this course also have his e-mail address, and a few of them write to him, Mr. Grenci says. "Usually I answer most questions face to face, either in office hours or in class," the instructor adds.
Mr. Grenci seems far more comfortable in the classroom than at his computer. He clearly enjoys the contact with students, who joke with him and listen attentively when he goes to the chalkboard to give an example of how to use metaphors to explain weather fronts.
But Mr. Grenci"s online course is still on his mind. At 10:55 a.m., while the students are working on group projects, he sneaks down to his office to respond to a few more online questions. "I don"t know what I"m going to do when the course is over," he says with a laugh. "I"m going to go through withdrawal."
Many other professors who have taught online also report that they have developed something like an obsession when it comes to their online courses -- a mixture of curiosity and a sense that if they don"t keep logging on, they might fall hopelessly behind. Many say their online teaching cuts into other activities, such as research and time with family.
"Faculty are used to having teaching days and nonteaching days," says David DiBiase, who is director of Penn State"s e-Education Institute and is also a senior lecturer in geography. But when a course moves online, teaching can happen at any time. And many professors who have taught online say they have been surprised to find that online courses are more demanding than traditional ones. "The general feeling is that it takes longer when you"re teaching online," says Ms. Schweizer, of Marquette. "I typically say 25 percent more time."
But such estimates are largely anecdotal. One of the few studies on the time it takes to teach online, done by Mr. DiBiase, found that online teaching takes about the same amount of time as traditional teaching, but that professors worked on online courses far more frequently.
"People are confusing frequency with amount," says Mr. DiBiase. "People think that online teaching is more work, but it"s just more often."
That"s not to say that some professors aren"t spending enormous amounts of time teaching online, he says. But he argues that professors don"t have to spend so much time to be successful online instructors. "Perhaps they didn"t know how different a course needs to be online for it to be efficient," he says. "It"s possible to design for efficiency."
Among Mr. DiBiase"s suggestions: Assign well-defined tasks where student work can be graded automatically. And ask students to answer one another"s questions in online discussions that can be periodically checked by the professor.
Office Hours
For Mr. Grenci"s online course, the university hired two undergraduate teaching assistants to hold online office hours several times a week using instant-messaging software.
Zach Brown, one of the teaching assistants, sits down at a computer in a department laboratory at noon and starts his shift. Soon, a message pops up from a student asking for clarification about the current assignment. In a traditional course of this size, Mr. Grenci probably would have had two graduate student teaching assistants, says Mr. DiBiase, but the e-Education Institute is experimenting with peer instruction in its online courses.
Mr. Brown says that students tend to come to him with questions that they might be embarrassed to ask Mr. Grenci -- for instance, if they need to have basic concepts explained. "I also get a lot of complaints about the class," he adds, noting that a common one is how difficult the material is.
Meanwhile, Mr. Grenci has gone home to let his dogs out and to take a short break. He returns to campus at 1:04 p.m. and immediately sits back down at the computer to check on the course.
One reason that messages come in so frequently, Mr. Grenci says, is that students seem bolder in online courses about approaching the professor. That"s not all to the good, he says. Students in the online course are quicker to dispute the grades he gives them, for instance, quibbling over a point here or a point there on assignments.
In fact, e-mail has become a nightmare for some professors and teaching assistants, even in traditional courses. Elizabeth Phillips, a graduate student in English at the University of Virginia, says teaching an undergraduate course has made her dread checking her e-mail.
"E-mails are like Hitchcock"s birds," she says. "They pursue you relentlessly, hover in flocks, and leave you running for cover."
And Ms. Phillips says that e-mail can foster laziness in some students, who feel they can ask their professor how to do an assignment rather than thinking through problems themselves. "You"re basically on call 24 hours a day," she adds.
But professors also report plenty of rewarding moments of online contact with students. At one point, a student e-mails Mr. Grenci saying that even though he botched the assignment, he now understands the material better. "That"s what keeps me coming back for more," says Mr. Grenci.
About 3:30 p.m., Mr. Grenci encounters computer problems that temporarily lock him out of the course.
"Bummer," Mr. Grenci says, noting that he only had a few more questions left to answer. The computer glitch forces him to take some time for other things.
Colleagues say Mr. Grenci is known for juggling many activities. For years, he was a senior forecaster for the university"s partnership with The New York Times; Penn State"s meteorology department predicts the weather and produces the weather pages for the newspaper each day. Mr. Grenci is also a contributing editor for Weather Wise magazine and has been an on-air meteorologist for WPSX-TV, the university"s public television station.
In fact, Mr. Grenci was released from the newspaper project and from the television duties in exchange for developing and teaching the online course. He was also able to negotiate a modest raise in exchange for tackling the online course, though he would not say how much.
Mr. Grenci says he was initially skeptical of online courses when he was asked to develop one for his department, but that he grew excited about the medium as he saw the kind of interactive features that were possible.
At 5 p.m., Mr. Grenci heads home for dinner with his wife. "I make it a point to sit down and eat dinner with her and reconnect after a long day," he says. Then he watches his favorite TV show, Everybody Loves Raymond.
He enters his home office to check in one last time, "to see if there are any fires." It"s about 8 p.m, and he says he knows many of his students are just getting started with their homework.
He says he doesn"t do as much work for the course at night. "I know myself, and I"m tired at night," he says. "I don"t think I have the sensibility to respond at night."
Besides, at dawn, he"ll be back at the computer, with a fresh cup of coffee and his usual enthusiasm.
"It"s rewarding and it"s exciting," he says. "But I think it"s exhausting. You"re essentially teaching every day of the semester."
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6 PROFESSORS DISCUSS TIME ONLINE
Dan Butcher
Job: Instructor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham
Course load: Four courses, two online, two traditional
Impact of technology: "I was totally unprepared for that amount of time . ... My wife and I both were wondering why in the world I was doing it."
When do you log on? "My first semester I was basically on call seven days a week. Not 24 hours a day, but it felt like it sometimes."
Comment: "One of the things I did was I set up my e-mail so when I get a message from a student, they get a message from me automatically that says, ëPlease wait 48 hours." That way they know that I"ve received the message, and it gives me a little bit of time to get back."
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Travis Gordon
Job: Instructor of English at Midlands Technical College, in Columbia, S.C.
Course load: Six courses, all online
Impact of technology: "People who don"t know about computers think that since you"re using the computer, something has been automated. But of course it hasn"t. You"re just allowed to connect."
When do you log on? "I"m a night owl. After Politically Incorrect goes off , I"m ready for another three hours of work, until 2 or 2:30 a.m."
Comment: "All online teachers learn very quickly that one of the big differences is when you"re typing, you"ve got to proof your comments before you send them."
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Dick Healy
Job: Adjunct instructor who teaches management at Canyon College, Daniel Webster College, and Southern New Hampshire University
Course load: Nine online courses. He also teaches an online course for a commercial education company.
Impact of technology: "I think it"s a huge convenience for two reasons. First, I can do it from home. ... And I can always take breaks." He also can set his own hours.
When do you log on? "I"ll put three computers on three different classes. My chair swivels, and I can swivel from one to another -- my wife laughs. I don"t like to work on something for a long time." He stays online as much as 10 hours a day in his home office.
Comment: "I have students volunteer for minor extra credit to summarize each day"s postings . That saves work for me, frankly, and it also gives students a vital skill."
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Kathleen M. Kelm
Job: Assistant professor of computer science at Edgewood College, in Madison, Wis.
Course load: Five courses, three of them partially online. She also teaches a graduate-level online course for the University of Liverpool.
Impact of technology: "I do not have official office hours with course, so I tend to be more available at odd times. Many of my students are in different time zones, and I am trying to accommodate that."
When do you log on? "If you teach in distance learning, the expectation is that you will be online every day checking the discussion threads."
Comment: "It"s an invasion of personal time, and it presses the bigger issue -- which is, to what level are we allowed to be private citizens?"
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Carolyn U. Lambert
Job: Associate professor of hotel, restaurant, and recreation management at Pennsylvania State University at University Park
Course load: Two courses, both of them "hybrid," meaning they blend online and in-class sessions.
Impact of technology: "I would say it"s probably increased the time I spend corresponding with students because they are much more likely to sit down while they"re e-mailing their friends and write you at the same time" than they are to come to office hours.
When do you log on? "It"s sort of continual."
Comment: "In my case, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. I have a large class, 100 to 120 students, ... and you can"t tell if they"re getting the material. When I get an e-mail from one or two students, I know that I need to go back and re-cover some of the material."
***
Tony S. Ruque
Job: Information-systems instructor at Lakeland Community College, in Kirtland, Ohio
Course load: Six courses, two of them online
Impact of technology: "You spend more time. Instead of spending an hour lecturing and a couple of hours working on lab assignments, now you"ll spend a half an hour here, a half an hour there."
When do you log on? "I find myself answering questions after 10 at night, or on Sunday after church. With traditional classes, you get to schedule time and budget time in a little more orderly manner."
Comment: "I think it"s made me a better instructor, because when you don"t have the face-to-face, you"re forced to really focus on what you"re saying to the student or what you"re typing to the student."