Teaching
Growing interest in RutgersOnline indicates acceptance of cyberlearning
Class never ends and the work rarely stops, but Robert C. Evans loves being a virtual professor.
It means never going anywhere without his laptop, constantly scouting for wireless hotspots when he’s on the road, and answering students’ emailed questions at all hours. But Evans, an associate professor of botany at Rutgers–Camden, believes students learn at least as well in the virtual classroom as they do in a lecture hall.
“I get more A’s and B’s, and not as many D’s and F’s, than when I teach in a conventional setting,” he said. “I think it’s because, in the online class, they can have all their course material right in front of them.”
RutgersOnline made its debut in the fall of 1999 with two courses in the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies (SCILS) in New Brunswick. Today fully online credit courses are taught to well over 1,200 students on three campuses. Most are at the graduate level; undergraduate courses like Evans’s basic botany class and his “Facts of Life,” a popular introductory biology course, are the exception.
The SCILS master’s program has the highest enrollment, followed by the College of Nursing in Newark and Rutgers Business School–Newark and New Brunswick. Classes are small, averaging 17 students. Most are part-time, adult students who live in the region, trying to balance work, family, and school.
RutgersOnline’s growth has been steady but slow, compared to other state universities, said Richard W. Novak, associate vice president for continuous education and distance learning. But Novak detects increasing interest among faculty and department deans and predicts future enrollment growth of eight to 12 percent a year.
“We have all the infrastructure. We have the capacity to grow very quickly,” Novak said.
From the start, Rutgers decided to outsource its course management system. It has contracted with eCollege, a Denver company with a long list of educational clients, since 1999. Through eCollege, students receive technical support 24/7. During the last five years the system has proved “near perfect,” according to Novak, with only a few minutes of unplanned downtime.
To the uninitiated, the virtual classroom might be hard to imagine. After all, students and professors never see one another. No one monitors exams. (There is no need. When a student takes an exam, her computer “locks” so she cannot navigate off the screen.) And there is no lecture.
“You replace the 50-minute class lecture by creating smaller modules [of instruction]. You create different ways of addressing the same content – a 10-minute audio, with a PowerPoint providing some visuals, followed by a quiz. Or you ask them to look at articles and then respond,” Novak said. “There’s also a ton of new teaching material, like simulations and games.”
Interactivity comes via the threaded discussion, a form of group chat in which students respond to a question posed by the professor, and then to each other. Students can post at any time of day or night – not the way they text friends, but using academically acceptable language. To build community, some professors set up separate discussion forums for socializing.
Nursing professor Mary Ann Scoloveno said the technology is great at accommodating individual learning styles. Visual learners, for example, do well when videos are embedded in coursework. “The major drawback is not meeting with students face to face, although with the proper software this can be done. I have tried this and found it very useful,” she said, “if my connection is not dropped.”
Online learning enthusiasts say faculty, who receive technical support from the Division of Continuous Education and Outreach need not be computer whizzes. Still, Ross Todd, an associate professor in the Master of Library and Information Science program, said he initially encountered a steep learning curve.
“It does not happen by simply placing a whole lot of materials in cyberspace for the student to engage with and hoping they will somehow learn,” he said. Todd found he “had to be visible in the class, not in one or two large chunks of time as in a campus classroom, but in smaller bites of time, providing input, feedback, provoking ideas.”
The effort paid off, judging from the responses of students surveyed after taking his course last year. All but one said they would choose an online course over one on the ground.
“The personal attention we all received from each other and our instructor is something unique and wonderful about the online learning environment,” one student wrote. “I also liked that I was able to listen to parts of lectures that I didn’t quite grasp the first time around.”