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Educator's Voice

Volume 3, Issue 3
March 13, 2002

Good Teaching is Good Teaching (No Matter Where or When it Happens)

As an Instructional Design Consultant at eCollegeSM, my job is to work with online teachers and courses. When I came to eCollege, I worried a bit that my work in an online educational setting would take me uncomfortably far from my teaching roots. Like many educators, I entered the world of online learning with a degree of skepticism about the role and power of education at a distance. While I had a relatively open mind, I also suspected that I would be anxious to get back to settings where teaching happened in a more conventional mode.

I have been at eCollege for over three years now, and I don't feel that my time in "eSchools" has distanced me at all from the real world of teaching and learning. In fact, what I have come to understand is that while many of the characteristics of online classrooms are different from face-to-face settings, the qualities of effective learning environments are the same in both spheres.

In recent months, I have explored different standards and frameworks for teaching. I have been struck by the degree to which these different models - developed for instruction and evaluation of teachers in face-to-face K-12 settings - apply equally well to high school and higher-ed online classrooms. Each teaching framework or set of standards is slightly different, but they also share common elements and themes.

The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) has developed five propositions that inform all good teaching. As opposed to discussing the range of different standards and frameworks, in this discussion I will stick just to these five NBPTS propositions*. I suggest that these five propositions are as valid in online learning environments as they are in other settings.

Before discussing these propositions, I'd like to provide just a little background on the NBPTS. The Board has created a national voluntary system for certifying teachers who meet its standards. To date, over 16,000 teachers have obtained National Board certification, and this has quickly become one of the most respected and acclaimed credentials for teachers. As the Board attests, "National Board Certification, developed by teachers, with teachers and for teachers, is a symbol of professional teaching excellence."

There is some debate in educational circles about the appropriateness of viewing the standards developed by the NBPTS as THE standard for good teaching. However, educators overwhelmingly agree that the NBPTS, an organization consisting primarily of classroom teachers, has created a serious and rigorous standard for quality teacher performance.

The standards developed by the Board are detailed and extensive and cover a range of different content areas. The Board has drafted the following five core propositions (with supporting sub-points) as "principles that go to the heart of the National Board's perspective on accomplished teaching."

Proposition #1: Teachers are Committed to Students and Their Learning

Whether you teach applied math to graduate students or handwriting to kindergartners, one important part of teaching is noticing and responding to the individual performance of your students. Studying their performance will give you insight to their learning, and help you find ways to reach them with your teaching. In some ways, online teachers need to be especially committed to students, since teachers must revise and supplement established strategies for reaching students.

Proposition #2: Teachers Know the Subjects They Teach and How to Teach Those Subjects to Students

Teachers' expertise with their subject matter helps them understand different ways of presenting material and of leading students to core knowledge and skills. When learning to teach in an online environment, this knowledge of subject matter is especially important. If you know exactly what you need to teach, and how students learn it, you will be better able to use the tools at your disposal in order to reach these goals, whether the tools are Internet-based, or part of a bricks-and-mortar classroom.

Proposition #3: Teachers are Responsible for Managing and Monitoring Student Learning

Many tools are available for communication and interaction in an online class. And, unlike face-to-face classrooms, almost all of the exchanges that take place in your online class are permanently recorded and are easily available for review. This creates both an opportunity and a responsibility for teachers to expand and refine their approaches to assessment, and to be vigilant about keeping their means of instruction and assessment carefully aligned with their learning objectives for the class.

Proposition #4: Teachers Think Systematically About Their Practice and Learn from Experience

The best online teachers, like the best teachers in any setting, are always looking for ways to improve their teaching and the learning of their students. One nice thing for many teachers about to shift to the online setting, is that it encourages them to think in an entirely new way about their teaching. For many new online teachers, each choice is a difficult one, and the challenge of working in this new environment often leads them to seek out solutions that have worked for those who have taught online before.

Proposition #5: Teachers are Members of Learning Communities

While teachers of most online college and graduate courses have no contact with the parents of their students, these other propositions are critical in an online learning environment. Since so much is new to most online teachers, they often feel compelled to work with others, and they are comforted in the knowledge that they are not alone in this new professional endeavor. Online teachers are also often eager to share their own successes with other online educators.

This is one of the great paradoxes for me of online education: it is distance education, but it often encourages people to come together in ways that they don't in more traditional educational settings. Teacher isolation within the walls of a school can be extreme. Perhaps it is the absence of walls in online settings that allows for more open exchanges between members of a learning community.

Taken together, the propositions here create a powerful vision of effective teaching. I'd never suggest that teaching online is just like teaching face-to-face. But, most of the important rules do still apply, and heeding them will lead to the creation of learning environments that challenge and sustain teachers, and serve students well.

       -- Keith Millner, M.A.

* For other frameworks or standards for teaching, you may want to refer to some or all of the following sources (this is by no means a comprehensive list): Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching, by Charlotte Danielson, published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, The Skillful Teacher: Building Your Teaching Skills, By Jon Saphier and Robert Gower, published by Research for Better Teaching, Inc., or the standards developed by The Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium.

TIP

Setting Up the Gradebook for Varying Weights

With eCollege AUSM came an enhanced Gradebook feature, so now it is not only possible to assign points to any of your gradable items, but, in combination with the group functionality, you can also assign different point values to different sets of students.

This functionality might be useful in the case of a mixed class of graduate and undergraduate students, wherein the graduate students might have a extra assignments; or a class where students must choose between different assignments for the final project which are worth different points - both of which would require different students' class averages to be based on a different number of final points.

In setting up your final essay exam areas, you will need to create two separate Exam-type Content Items within the same Unit. You may consider a labeling convention such as: "Final Project A," and "Final Project B."

Now you will assign each Content Item to a different group - which should, perhaps, be named the same as the Content Items (see above). You will be creating two groups at this point, but you will not be assigning any students to these groups until they have indicated to you whether they will be opting for the Project A or Project B option.

In terms of setting up your Gradebook to reflect the varying values, you will first need to add both of the new Exam Content Items to your Gradebook as gradable items - by adding checks to the table on the Setup Gradebook page. Then you will want to enter the points possible for both items in the Assign Points to Gradable Items page.

When you are setting up the grading rubric, you could assign, say, 15 points to the Project A option, and 30 points to the Project B option. The Gradebook will then automatically calculate your students' course percentages based on the group in which they were placed.

This is just one tip for the improved functionality of the Gradebook. I'm sure you'll come up with more ideas on how it may be useful for you and your students!



       -- Peter S Cassidy, MA