Progression of a PC Pupil

I had hoped for a traditional graduate school experience; I wanted to sit in a classroom with other adults who were passionate about the same material as me.  I wanted to get experience as a Research Assistant or Teaching Assistant so that I could learn from my colleagues.  I wanted what most graduate students take for granted:  a collaborative educational experience.  Because I was active duty in the US Air Force and stationed in Alamogordo, New Mexico, my graduate school options were limited.  I had tuition assistance funds, but there were only two schools on base that offered graduate degrees and the nearest regional university campus was over 50 miles away.  Thus, I began my journey.  I took graduate courses via night-courses, weekend courses, and finally, distance courses.  

The first digital course experience I ever had was in my first online class around the year 2005.  While Scalar and other digital technologies didn’t really exist yet, there were cutting-edge (for the time, anyway) instructors attempting to teach online.  What this meant, was that they used Blackboard, shoved the readings and notes onto the platform, and asked us to post comments about the reading and then comment on other peoples’ postings. 

For example. . .

Assignment:  Answer the Prompt, then comment on at least 2 other students’ answers for each prompt.

Prompt 1:  Explain in your own words the phrase “psychological assessment.” 

My answer:  Psychological Assessment is an individual evaluation of some construct relative to other scores on the same evaluation that provides information to guide decisions.  Assessments can be conducted via oral, paper and pencil, or computer driven exams and may measure anything from math skills to degree of depression.  These assessments may be applied in a school situation, counseling setting, vocational site, or many other venues.  Some examples of psychological assessments are college entrance exams (such as the SAT), personality tests (such as the MMPI), and aptitude tests (such as the Wechsler Scales).

Comment on "John’s" post:  John, I like your emphasis on standardization.  This is an important element.

Comment on "Jane’s" post:  Jane, It is interesting that you included the in-take and the importance of body language in an assessment, I had overlooked those points in my answer.

This was somehow supposed to develop community and replace in-class interactions.  This was supposed to help teach us the material.  I found myself clicking on the links to the posting of my forty classmates, trying to find one that was short enough to read and comment on with minimal effort.  When I found one that I wished to comment on, I would try to write something positive, because I tend to be a positive person, regardless of whether I agreed with the post or even found it interesting.  This led to a lot of box checking, and a sense that I did not know the instructor and he did not know me either.  I was concerned about how this impersonal experience would impact my scholarly experience.  How do you ask some instructor to write you a job recommendation for a job, when she only knows your performance in this contrived classroom environment?  I felt anonymous as just a name on a web-page, disconnected from fellow students, and without any guidance from the teacher.  The class interactions were forced and the environment felt like an artificial replacement for classroom interaction.  

While I had minimal interactions with my professors, I was still plagued by their "big brother" presence.  Once a student revealed to the rest of us that teachers could see how many times and how long we logged into and opened documents in Blackboard.  Students are savvy when it comes to work-avoidance; I recall a fellow student suggesting that we all open the material before we go to dinner and return to working later, so that the teacher would think we were interacting with the material longer than we were.  While I was not the type of student to dodge class work, I found myself very conscious of each move I made in blackboard thereafter.  This understanding of the system immediately encouraged students to "game the system."  This was not the type of collaboration I had hoped for from fellow graduate students.

What further amplified my disappointment with distance learning was that the distance technology was often unreliable and frustrating.  Teachers were frequently unavailable, or incapable, of assisting with the class platform.  I would type my posting in a word document first, because at that time, the Blackboard program had minimal editing tools and spell checking.  Then, I would copy my work and paste it into the Blackboard discussion board only to find that my indents, 

breaks, and formatting 

went all WoNkY when I pasted it.  Consequently, there was a fair amount of time learning to adapt to the technology instead of learning the course content.  This technological challenge and lack of support further reinforced my feelings of disconnection from my teacher's and helplessness in the "classroom".

There are ways to foster online, distance relationships.  Nowadays no one would argue that facebook and other social media have created an alternative, but just as "real", social environment, but this was before social media boomed.  One of my friends once asked me, “how you can possibly study online?”  She continued to outline how it seems impossible to create a class and actually learn anything from a class taught over the internet.  From her perspective, shopping, sharing photos, and looking-up information were about the only practical uses for the internet.  Ironically, she had met her husband online via a faith-based online dating site.  I remember asking her, “SO, you think that one can’t learn about subjects online, but you think that it is a perfectly acceptable thing to meet your spouse and father of your children online?  And it's perfectly normal to only meet him in person (not online) two or three times BEFORE GETTING MARRIED?  Isn’t that hypocritical?”  Her response was simply, “touché.”  This brings me to the point that, while relationships can be cultivated online, it wasn't being done in my classes...at all.  Indeed it seemed that professors were anticipating that technology would provide them time-saving advantages in course management, but were unprepared for the time investment required to investigate ways to maximize this educational and social benefits of these platforms for their students.

The years went by and I continued interspersing in-class courses with online courses until I finally moved to taking most classes online.  This was a practical move, not a preference, because of the flexibility of "attending" classes online.  Asynchronous classes have always had the advantage of being convenient (especially when I had a crying baby at home, no daycare, and an irregular sleep schedule).  Some instructors began integrating recorded lectures in addition to just posting readings and writing assignments.  This seemed like a huge innovation since I could watch lectures at any time of day, and re-watch them also if I needed to refer back to them.  By 2008, I had an instructor who would supplement the online course with a synchronous meeting time on wednesday nights for a Q&A session.  That particular program was one in personal finance, so it was especially important to have someone to answer questions about how to crunch the numbers.  Since, this face-to-face time pre-existed many capabilities of modern distance software, there was no way for the professor to share her desktop.  For those of us who aren't necessarily auditory learners, it was difficult to have the instructor talk through complicated algorithms without any visual accompaniment.  There were other infrastructural barriers also.  My professor was located in a different time-zone from myself, so the meeting times were often impractical for me.  Frequently, the professor wanted to meet at a time that conflicted with my picking-up my child from daycare, or before my husband was home from work and able to watch our little one.  This was (and still is) a problem with the synchronous format; no time-slot pleases every student.  While I could see the professor, I could not see the other students.  So even then, I would see a student's name on a chat-like board to the side of the screen, but could not keep the forty or so students straight enough to distinguish any one specifically.  One might assume that adding the video element to the classroom might encourage a connection between students and teachers, but the technology does not build relationships, the people using them do.

It wasn’t until 2013 that I began taking classes with ODU online (after taking several ODU courses at the Norfolk campus in the traditional classroom environment).  I finally got to take my first synchronous distance course.  WebEx and Jabber have offered very different experiences from those I had experienced that relied solely on Blackboard.  Seeing the faces of my classmates as we contribute our thoughts on a topic adds an important level of interaction that I was missing before.  In many classes, we have contributed to a googledoc to collaboratively create notes in a class, allowing each student to contribute information, thereby not allowing anything important to be neglected in the note-taking.  One assignment required me to skype with a partner outside of class in order to create a project through teamwork; I live in Colorado and my partner lives in Florida.  It is amazing what the evolving technology and the instructors’ evolving use of the technology has allowed my distance classroom experience to become.  Not to sound like and ODU commercial, but here is the thing:  it isn't just about the technology.  Students in the graduate student organization have offered to stream meetings so that distance students can participate.  Fellow students in my classes have offered to photocopy articles from the ODU library (articles that the teacher put on reserve for the course).  One instructor was willing to bring her laptop to a traditional class, so that I could take the required course, even though it wasn't offered via distance that semester.  Still another instructor is currently allowing me to take his course via independent study; since the course is a requirement and it isn't taught by distance, he is skyping with me weekly to discuss the readings.

In the end, I was finally able to study Literature, the subject that I had always wanted.  I was able to meet with other students and discuss texts with other passionate people.  I did not have to sacrifice flexibility for some for-profit diploma-mill education.  I know my professors and they know me.  If asked to write a recommendation, I am confident that each professor could comfortably provide me with one.  In the end, I made friends in my classes.  We collaborated on projects.  We gave in-class, real-time presentations.  We share family photos on facebook.  And we have never met in person.