NCAT: Can Online Education Scale?

On most campuses, the job of a faculty member is seen as monolithic: a collection of tasks that are, with few exceptions, carried out by one person. American higher education remains what Bill Massy and Bob Zemsky have called a "handicraft" industry—in which the vast majority of courses are developed and delivered as "one-offs" by individual professors. In most colleges and universities, this repetitive, labor-intensive approach has been transferred to online education as well.

As online programs have grown, however, the more successful of them have begun to struggle with the pressure of building individual versions of every section of every course. Several like Colorado Community Colleges Online (CCCOnline), the University of Phoenix and SUNY Empire State College's Center for Distance Learning have abandoned the every-faculty-member-for-himself approach in favor of designing courses centrally, which are then taught by multiple instructors. The pre-built course becomes the core for all sections with some faculty customization of individual sections. By designing online courses with a "build it once, use it often" approach, the costs of development for online instruction go down dramatically, especially when the instructors are adjunct faculty.

Almost without exception, however, those online programs that develop courses once continue to use individual faculty members to deliver multiple sections of the same course, each of which is relatively small in size. This model assumes that the instructor must be responsible for all interactions, answering every inquiry, comment or discussion personally. As a result, faculty members often spend more time teaching online and interacting with students than is the case in classroom teaching. This small-class model limits the ability of programs both to scale (i.e., produce more cost-effective courses) and to serve more students (i.e., increase access). In some cases, programs with especially high demand are finding difficulty in securing the needed number of instructors.

The Center for Academic Transformation's Program in Course Redesign offers a number of strategies that can address this problem. Each strategy takes advantage of information technology and a sophisticated division of labor to enable fewer instructors to serve larger numbers of students. Four basic design principles, which can be used in various combinations, undergird these strategies.

1. Combine multiple sections of a course into one large section.

A key idea in these redesign strategies is that both the development and delivery of entire courses are the objects of redesign. Like the online programs mentioned above, courses are designed once—often by faculty teams with IT support—but unlike those programs, the redesigned courses are delivered in a single section. Virginia Tech, for example, combined 38 linear algebra sections of ~40 students each into one 1500-student section; Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) combined 26 fine arts sections of ~30 students each into one 800-student section; and the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) combined 16-20 world literature sections of ~60 students each into one 800-student section.

The advantages of offering the course in a single section are many. Consistent content coverage means that all students have the same kinds of learning experiences. In contrast, those programs that build once, deliver often using multiple instructors cannot guarantee a consistent experience for students, especially when instructors pick and choose what to cover. Course coherence and quality control improve significantly in a single-section approach. The desired learning outcomes among all students can be more easily achieved, and students are more consistently prepared when they move on to other courses. Treating the whole course as one section also can eliminate duplication of effort on the part of instructors; faculty involved in the course can divide their tasks among themselves and target their efforts to particular aspects of course delivery.

2. Emphasize student-to-student interaction and teaming.

As long as faculty members are expected to respond to every student question or interact directly with each individual student, it will never be possible to accommodate enrollment growth cost effectively while providing a high-quality learning experience for students. Strategies that direct course activities to and receive responses from groups of students provide a way out of this dilemma. Many of the projects in the Program on Course Redesign use teaming strategies, but in its redesign of introductory astronomy, the University of Colorado-Boulder has developed the most elaborate one. Although this design relies on face-to-face interaction, it could easily be adapted for fully online use.

The entire class (~200 students) meets twice a week with one faculty member. At the first meeting, the instructor provides a brief overview of the week's activities. About a dozen discussion questions are posted on the Web, ranging from factual questions to complex questions that require the students to draw a conclusion from a variety of facts and principles. Some questions have no definite answer and are intended to elicit controversy. In mid-week, students meet for one hour in small learning teams of 10-15 students (supervised by undergraduate learning assistants) to prepare answers collaboratively and to carry out inquiry-based team projects. Teams are supported by software that allows them to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously. All teams post written answers to all questions, and every team member must sign up as a designated answerer for one or two questions.

At the next full-class meeting, the instructor leads a discussion session in which he directs questions, not to individual students, but to the learning teams. Before the meeting, the instructor uses convenient software to review all the posted written answers to a given question. If all the teams have correctly answered a given question, the instructor skips that question. Instead, he devotes the discussion time to questions with dissonant answers among teams. Periodically the instructor poses a related question and gives the class time for each team to formulate an answer. The discussion sessions both reinforce the students' learning and clear up misconceptions.

3. Automate grading and student feedback wherever possible.

Increasing the amount and frequency of feedback to students is a well-documented pedagogical technique that leads to increased learning. Rather than relying on individual faculty members in small sections to provide feedback to students (a technique known to increase faculty workload significantly), courses involved in the Program in Course Redesign incorporate automated grading that provides immediate feedback to students wherever possible. Rio Salado College, for example, uses Academic Systems mathematics software, which includes a large bank of problems and answers for each topic; FCGU and USM use WebCT to create tests banks for practice tests for each course module in their humanities courses.

Automated grading and feedback probes students’ preparedness and conceptual understanding, motivates them to keep on top of course material and encourages them to spend more time on task. Students receive diagnostic feedback that points out why an incorrect response is inappropriate and directs them to material needing review. While these practices are highly desirable in all courses, in distance-learning courses they can remove the time gap between the submission of assignments or tests via mail or email and instructor response. In addition, they off-load a significant number of instructional tasks to the technology, thus reducing rather than increasing faculty workload.

4. Use a differentiated personnel strategy.

By redesigning the way the whole course is delivered to use different kinds of personnel in addition to faculty members, it is possible to increase the number of students that can be served at reduced cost. Each of the following examples relies on adding personnel with specific responsibilities to the instructional mix and creating a division of labor both among faculty members and others involved in the course.

To accomplish its redesign of introductory mathematics, Rio Salado added a course assistant to address non-math-related questions (which characterized 90% of all interactions with students!) and to monitor students' progress. This freed the instructor to handle more students and to concentrate on academic rather than logistical interactions with students. As a result, one instructor is able to teach 100 students concurrently enrolled in any of four math courses. Prior to the redesign, the instructor typically taught 35 students in one section.
The University of Southern Mississippi's redesign of World Literature is organized around four four-week modules. A course coordinator, responsible for overall course administration, manages the team-teaching of four faculty members (who each teach one module in their area of expertise) and four graduate assistants (who help students with writing and grade their essays). The faculty members are responsible for content, complementary materials, quizzes and exams. The coordinator and the four faculty members each receive credit for teaching a single course. Prior to the redesign, USM needed to staff 16-20 sections to serve the 800 students enrolled in the course; USM now requires the equivalent of five staffed sections to serve all students. Thus, USM has more than tripled the number of students that faculty can handle by a using coordinated approach.
The explicit goals of Florida Gulf Coast University's redesign of its required fine arts course are to accommodate enrollment growth and achieve greater coherence and consistency. Previously the course was taught in sections of 30 students each. The redesign's single section includes six modules, each designed by faculty experts. Students are placed into cohort groups of 60 and, within these, peer learning teams of six students each. A single full-time faculty member, responsible for academic matters and for preceptor supervision, teaches the course, working closely with a full-time course coordinator (responsible for administrative aspects) and a group of preceptors (responsible for interacting with students, monitoring student progress, overseeing four Web Board discussions and grading critical analysis essays.) Preceptors, most of whom have a B.A. in English, are paid $1800 per cohort group; adjuncts who taught the traditional course were paid $2200 per 30-student section. The model allows FGCU to scale by adding preceptors while maintaining important faculty oversight via on-going curricular review and course coordination.

Each of these four strategies, used alone or in combination with one another, points the way to cost-effective methods of serving more students while increasing the quality of their learning experiences. Re-considering how to deliver as well as develop online courses is the key.