Nationwide, social work faculty have been abuzz about the joys and challenges, pros and cons of online teaching in social work over the past few years...indeed we had a stimulating discussion about this pedagogical approach in our own faculty meeting the other day. In order to further the debate, please check out this extract of an evaluation of an online course targeted at teaching clinical practice skills...Siebert, D., Siebert, C. and Spaulding-Givens, J. (2006). Teaching clinical social work skills primarily online: an evaluation. Journal of Social Work Education, Spring-Summer.
Teaching clinical social work skills primarily online: an evaluation
SOCIAL WORK EDUCATORS have not been among early adopters of Internet-mediated courses; a search of the literature finds very few peer-reviewed articles about this topic prior to 2000, and the small number of articles since that time are primarily about Web-enhanced rather than Web-mediated social work courses (e.g., Faul, Frey, & Barber, 2004). Even fewer articles describe evaluations of Internet-based instruction, and none report on the evaluation of skills-based clinical courses. Skills-based clinical courses that require interactive instruction are frequently regarded as inappropriate for online teaching (Moore, 2004), as the social work discipline's focus on human interaction and hands-on teaching of practice skills can seem incompatible with technology-mediated education. Nevertheless, social work programs are implementing some courses that are partially Internet-mediated (Knowles, 2001), while others are offering entire clinical social work courses online (Siebert & Spaulding-Givens, 2006).
Other disciplines have begun to evaluate clinical courses taught online, and the consensus is that technology-mediated courses (Russell' 1999; Young, 2000) and entirely online courses (Feldhaus & Fox, 2004; Yucha & Princen, 2000) can provide learning that is equivalent to face-to-face courses. Others find that online students can also become better learners and score higher on exams as a result of the online format (Thiele, 2003). However, research in helping disciplines (e.g., nursing) consistently finds that online students express frustration with the medium, prefer classroom interaction, and worry that their opportunities for learning are not commensurate with face-to-face classroom learning (Thiele, Allen, & Stuckey, 1999; Woo & Kimmick, 2000; Yucha & Princen, 2000). Comparisons with specific elements of previous studies are embedded individually in the text of this article because differences in the disciplines, content of coursework, measurement, research design, and sampling make more than the most general comparisons quite difficult (i.e., "comparing apples with oranges").
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