CourseWork:  An OKI Pilot Project

The Faculty Perspective by

Dr. Gareth Euridge

June 18-20, 2003

 

I performed the classroom test of this pilot project, and, before I begin, I must ask you to forgive me if much of what I have to say today will apply to CMSs in general because, in current functionality at least, though perhaps not in ultimate potential, there is little difference between the OKI system, CourseWork, and the proprietary one currently licensed by Denison, BlackBoard.  First, however, some background on the types of courses I teach and my general use of Instructional Technology in those classes.  I will then offer an overview of my experience, and my students’ experience, when using CourseWork.  Finally, I will conclude with some key issues that I believe are structural to the future use of CMSs in general.

 

Background:

I am an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Denison, teaching the usual range of courses: Upper division seminars, lower division survey courses, and, First Year composition classes.  I would also consider myself, as a professor, to be relatively “teched-up.”  In my courses, for example,

a)      Students are required to digitize video, then embed that video in papers and PowerPoint presentations.

b)      Students submit papers electronically, I mark them up using Word revision tools, and, embed audio comments at the end.

c)      I am both an early and a late adopter of CMS tools.  I was using discussion boards and required electronic submission of papers through network drives probably some 6 years ago.  For various reasons, some of which I will discuss below, I stopped using this technology.  Last semester, however,  I was asked to participate in a test of the OKI CourseWork, and, because I was teaching two identical sections of my Early British Literature course , we decided to use CourseWork for one, Blackboard for the other. 

Finally, I should remind you that I teach English at a residential liberal arts college.  For the moment, at least, large books remain non-negotiable as the means of primary content delivery.  Furthermore, English courses are, at some level, content-less; unlike, perhaps, courses in the sciences and the modern languages, there are few facts to learn, few mechanistic skills to acquire, and few “exercises” which can be transferred to the internet.  My comments, consequently, come from the perspective of teaching a traditional reading-intensive humanities course.

 

Faculty Perspective:

1)      About 40% of Denison faculty use CMSs and, of that 40%, most are junior faculty who, I think, are more receptive to the pedagogical benefits that CMSs provide; they are more familiar with technology in general and they are more likely to have broadband “home-offices.”  I would hesitate to suggest, however, that this ubiquity of use among junior faculty indicates that assistant professors are necessarily on the forefront of pedagogical innovation.  Having informally polled my colleagues as to how they used  CMSs in their classes, it became evident that most faculty view CMSs as merely ancillary management tools; many acknowledged, quietly though candidly, that they use these systems not to solve any particular pedagogic issue but simply because, these days, one does.

 

2)      For the most part, faculty at Denison use CMSs as a means of uploading “static” course content in advance (syllabi, reading prompts, secondary readings, images, sometimes PowerPoint presentations).  In many ways, consequently, faculty use the programs as an alternative to a class folder on a network drive.  There are significant advantages to this system: digital materials can be organized and described within the system itself; materials can be released at specific dates; students are saved some of the difficulties of negotiating the campus network; and, though less relevant for a residential liberals arts college, this information can accessed when away from campus.

 

3)      Few faculty members, however, employ the more sophisticated features of the CMSs such as gradebooks, calendars, the internal email system, discussion boards, etc., and I think that there are good reasons for this.  Quite simply, if one already uses a standard email program, it is easier to contact students directly through a distribution list; many faculty also wish to keep a copy of all emails sent and the use of a dedicated web-based email system complicates rather than simplifies this process.  The same is true for minor changes to a syllabus; it is somewhat redundant to send an email to students telling them to check the CMS when, in fact, one can normally just tell them, and students access their email more regularly than they check the CMS on the off chance that something has changed.  Also, as far as I know, I was the only faculty member to make extensive use of the digital dropbox function of CourseWork because, unless one is going to respond to the paper also digitally, using this system merely transfers the burden of printing from the student to the faculty member.  More than this, the digital drop-box in both systems was rudimentary; with students attaching various video files to word documents, quite frequently I found myself needing to download, say, 100 large files for a single assignment and, in both systems, this can only be done, via various dialogue boxes, one file at a time.

 

4)      A recent study from the Univ. of Wisconsin system, however, identified some clear benefits to the use of CMSs.  Faculty claim that the process of organizing material well in advance leads to improved teaching--the report characterizes this as an “accidental pedagogy.”  I would confirm this, both from personal experience and from conversations with my colleagues.  Most experienced faculty members, I would tentatively suggest, only ever “half-plan” a course because, familiar as they are with the material that is to be covered, they are comfortable with a level of flexibility; it is also extremely difficult, intellectually, to condense one’s expertise in a field into clear, modular, discrete teaching units.  The very process, however, of uploading material for the entire semester forces faculty to think and rethink their courses in advance, and, while this does not necessarily affect the latitude of any single class session, it does provide students with the security of a mapped, predictable, and hence reassuring learning environment; students, unlike most professors, are often confused by the material covered in a course, and a CMS can, I think, provide students with an important sense of stability and predictability.  The development, in an OKI environment, of tailored interfaces, of more sophisticated gradebooks, of office-hour sign-up forms, etc., will only complement this effect.

 

5)      Despite these benefits, many faculty are concerned about the amount of time required to develop and maintain CMSs because, although there may well be some degree of institutional pressure to adopt these programs, there are certainly few institutional rewards for those who choose so to do.  Furthermore, although most faculty members acknowledge the “accidental pedagogy” advantages of using, in our case, CourseWork, some of us wonder, retrogressively, whether these results could be achieved more simply by using a network folder for the class.  Finally, in learning environments such as our own that demand frequent revision of classes, that require new and different courses, that insist upon fresh classroom material, there is little faith that the hours spent in preparing digital material for one class will pay forward to subsequent iterations of the course.

 

Student Perspective

 

Students, at Denison at least, seem neither to embrace nor to reject the use of CMSs in their classes; most report that they find the use of CMS system helpful, though few seem to be able to articulate the salient features of the management system they find of particular value: several students claimed that they found the system of use when away from campus; others commented that it was valuable to have course presentations available for review; others liked not having to fight for a printer.  For the most part, however, it was clear that students considered the CMS to serve a valuable administrative function but I saw little evidence that students perceived these systems as signaling a new modality of learning.  On the contrary, in some ways students proved resistant when I attempted to implement some of the more elaborate and also pedagogic features of the software:

1)      Digital Drop Box:  Despite the seeming ease of use of the DDB, students found the process complex and difficult; over the semester, at least half of the students in my classes had problems depositing files in this manner.  The problems, however, did not necessarily lie with the CMS itself: students sometimes copied a Windows “shortcut” into the dropbox rather than the document itself; others gave me the wrong file (I would receive, for example, a “paper3.doc” from a completely different course, or, alternatively, the wrong draft of the right paper); students sometimes needed to submit multiple files (embedded media, etc.) and, not knowing how to zip the files, the students found the process overlong.  Further problems were encountered when, in my attempt to transfer these files to CD (to take home), I discovered that, despite repeated instructions to name their files individually (Jane Doe Final Paper.doc), I was beset with multiple files named “Final Paper” which, in turn, overwrote each other.

 

2)      Although students recognized the potential value of a repository system for course materials, they wanted to view this as a supplement rather than a replacement for more traditional “hand-outs.”  As a result, I achieved a far lower “read rate” when distributing materials electronically than when I handed out photocopies in class.  Again, this is not inherently the fault of the system, but, in the real classroom, students are more likely to read material if they are given a hard copy than if it exists electronically alone.  

 

3)      Many students were also resistant to the use of discussion groups, an aspect of the CMS that has received considerable attention of late.  The reasons for student resistance, however, are complex, imbricated, and, for frontline educators, perhaps even “touchy.”  The idea of discussion boards is, I think, quite possibly the most revolutionary and exciting aspect of the CMS systems: it allows, theoretically, for learning outside of the classroom; it encourages those intimidated in a traditional classroom setting to express their opinions; it gives the professor an authentic opportunity to decenter the classroom by basing a class session upon the issues raised in outside discussion.  In practice, however, a less shiny dynamic can emerge (or, at least, did so in my class).  For example, in order for me to incorporate into class ideas raised in discussion I require postings perhaps two days before the reading assignment is due; unfortunately, students tend to operate upon a just-in-time schedule and few, consequently, have read the material this far in advance.  I tried extending the deadline to directly before class, but, again, the postings only seemed to fulfill the letter, and not the spirit, of the requirement.  Some students also considered the discussion rooms as a form of “double jeopardy” in that, because I do give quizzes, this requirement was just another mode of  enforcing compliance with reading assignments; it is indeed hard (and potentially embarrassing) to comment publicly upon a text that one has not yet finished (“Romeo and Juliet make such a happy couple”).  Moreover, the students who did post active responses were genuinely disheartened by the lack of engagement on the part of their peers.  In their evaluations, many students said that they viewed this requirement as little more than a chore.  Discussion boards, consequently, offer a wonderful teaching opportunity but they carry with them a significant risk; they can mirror the vibrant intellectual curiosity of a course, but they can also reflect, unflatteringly and very publicly, qualities of a different kind. 

 

Conclusions:

 

CMSs are still in their infancy, and, I confess, just as my own PocketPC is employed as little more than glorified address book, CMSs are being under-utilized as little more than dandified network folders.  It strikes me, consequently, that there are two key issues, one technical, one theoretical, that need to be addressed before the promised pedagogic payout can occur:

 

• Technical

a)       Faculty:  Faculty certainly need education on the use of the CMS itself.  But more than this is needed.  I suspect the reason many faculty members resist the use CMSs is because their existing material is not itself yet “digital ready”; my colleagues have filing cabinets full of photocopies, newspaper clippings, slides, VHS tapes, example student papers, all of which, to judge by the counter on our Xerox machine, find their way into the classroom.  But few faculty have anything more than a course syllabus, a few paper prompts, to post to the CMS, and I suspect that CMSs and Vitas are alike; empty ones are embarrassing.  Consequently, there is a need for training in digitization of video, in paper conversion to PDF, in image manipulation.  When faculty have digital materials they wish to share, both with their students and with their colleagues, then the use of CMSs will become truly ubiquitous.  This issue, of course, then spins wildly into the library itself, into questions of copyright, into standardization of media formats, etc.

 

b)      Student:  Despite the conventional wisdom that students are more technologically savvy than their professors, my experience tells me otherwise.  And, certainly, some of the frustration on the part of my students with use of CourseWork stemmed from a fundamental IT illiteracy: many students, for example, do not know how to rename files, how to locate files on their hard drives, how to negotiate the campus network, what the various buttons at the top of a discussion board are for (post, reply, post and reply, cc, bcc, etc.).  For the full functionality of a CMS to be harvested, these fundamental skills must be acquired by faculty and students alike.

 

c)      Finally--and I recognize the administrative and technical problems of this proposal--the scope of CMSs needs to be expanded also.  I wonder why we limit access to these resources to those currently taking the course.  Why not make the resource available to the entire campus?  For that matter, why not allow portability of these resources.  I think, for example, that it might be useful to allow students to amass, for review, a portfolio of the CMS enhanced courses they take over four years . . . .  There is still much we need to do before the pedagogic potential of CMSs reach critical mass.

 

• Theoretical:

Portality.  At Denison, we currently have a campus portal (MyDenison) which gives students individualized access to Denison information, news, academic records, etc.  MyDenison also includes a link to Blackboard which, in turn, requires another level of authentication.  There is little evidence, however, that MyDenison is widely used by students, faculty, or staff.  Similarly, I had little sense that students view CMSs as anything other than a “purpose-specific” tool; they go there only when they need to upload a paper, download a reading.  In casual polling, however, I did learn that students use commercial portals (MyYahoo, etc.) as their source for news, sports stats, TV listings, etc.  To each content system, then, its discrete purpose: MyDenison for parking tickets; CourseWork for downloading a text; MyYahoo for everything else.  Practically, this is cumbersome.  But conceptually, this is problematic also because, implicitly, this fragmented structure promotes and reinforces a sense of compartmentalization in lived experience, a demarcation between the administrative, the academic, and, for lack of a better expression, lived-life.  Our goal, in liberal arts institutions, surely is to problematize that taxonomy, to suggest that all aspects of experience are fundamentally imbricated, that the intellectual is part of one’s entire existence and not something that takes places merely from 8.30am to 2.00pm, Monday through Friday.  CMSs can serve ultimately, I think, to dissolve for students this fractured perspective because, with time, and, more particularly, with OKI systems, we can tailor the CMS to our particular needs, customize them to our unique vision.  Perhaps, in the future, rather than there being a link to CourseWork from MyDenison, the link will be reversed with the intellectual hub of the student experience providing links out to the other aspects of life.  Perhaps we should consider, then, that we are not ultimately building Course Management Systems (a modest goal at best) but, instead, Academic Centrality Portals that remind students of their core purpose at our institutions.