We are hearing more and more about online teaching these days. The need for it. The push towards it. The pros and the cons of taking this approach. Our own Dr. Shelley Steenrod has looked at differences between an online and traditional approaches to teaching a social work service learning course, for example.
The applicability of online methods for social work education SHOULD be a topic of hot debate for us. I even heard last week that there is a 100% online social work program. Yet, only once in a while, we visit- and revisit - this issue in our School of Social Work's faculty meetings. This year, one of our faculty members is teaching an online/hybrid version of one of our required MSW courses in a hybrid fashion for the first time. It is a course in the human behavior in the social environment sequence. We are anticipating an interesting discussion at the end of the semester...but I often get the feeling that we need to delve much more deeply into this topic, and really make some decisions about how to proceed with "all of this online learning stuff." I think we are behind the curve that is curving on without our input. I heard this when our Dean visited us recently...so, let's think about this more, and make some of the future with our own imprint - whether it is a full-embrace of online learning or not - or somewhere in between (my bet).
Given all of this stuff on my brain's back burner, I was interested to see the results of a recent survey of faculty from around the country re: online learning. Check out these interesting data on faculty views about online learning from around the country...whether you "agree" with online learning or not, still interesting. These charts are derived from a survey of 10,720 faculty members at 69 colleges and universities. I was particularly interested to note that 82% of faculty who had NOT taught an online (or hybrid?) course indicated that they thought this medium was an inferior way to teach as compared to traditional face-to-face teaching. I was not surprised to see that most survey participants felt that preparing an online course required A LOT more work than a traditional course...this has certainly been my experience - and I know I would have been "in the weeds" without some training from SSU's Center for Teaching and Learning. Perhaps most interesting - and compelling - was the fact that 82% of survey participants indicated that their motivation for adopting this teaching approach was to "meet student needs for flexible access." Boy, this sure sounds like SSU to me.
Given my own limited experience with hybrid teaching (part online, part in-person), here are my thoughts on the questions that should guide our discussions:
1) What do we need to change about how WE TEACH and WE ENGAGE STUDENTS in order to feel ok about exploring any positives of online teaching approaches?
2) Which social work courses are most appropriate for online teaching?
3) What do our students think about their online courses?
4) Given the difference in workload re: preparing to teach an online course vs. a traditional, face-to-face course, what incentives are in place to entice/encourage us?
So, once again, as someone that is somewhat in the negative camp on all of this - let's really start to talk about this issue and make the dialogue our own.
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