Class Without Walls

By Teri Bachman

Online education—how well does it work? And does it belong on the Davis campus?

Naomi Janowitz, professor of religious studies, doesn’t own a cell phone. She doesn’t own a television. But she does have an interest in using new technology where she thinks it is useful. Janowitz is one of the faculty at UC Davis who is experimenting with online education—putting components of her courses online—to improve her undergraduate classes.

Online learning is common in some quarters: at institutions like the University of Phoenix and National University, where students can get a degree entirely through online courses; and in continuing education programs, including UC Davis Extension. These programs, which cater to working adults, have turned to technology to make their classes as convenient as possible for students with jobs and families.

Distance education has been slower to emerge at residential universities like UC Davis, which chiefly enroll traditional students who live on or near campus and attend school full time. But enrollment pressures that lead to overflowing classrooms and make it difficult to meet the demand for popular or required courses have prompted faculty and administrators to look to technology to increase the number of students who can be served. Here at UC Davis, a few departments, like psychology and chemistry, have turned to online courses to make more efficient use of classroom and laboratory space. And innovative individual faculty, like Janowitz, are finding that technology can help them make better use of their in-class time. Some benefits of online classes are obvious. They allow students to choose the time, place and pace of their studies. Online courses can incorporate both video and text; photos, illustrations and animation; links to additional information; quizzes to test understanding; and the ability to search and navigate forward and backward. Some disadvantages are equally well known: computer glitches and slow modems and the potential loss of face-to-face time with faculty and peers, to name a few.

But other questions about online education remain unanswered: Do the students learn as well as they do in class? Are students as happy with online courses? Do the courses take more or less faculty time? Do they cost the university more or less? And just what is the appropriate role for online education at a residential campus like UC Davis?

To help get at the answers, organizations like the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation have funded a number of studies across the country to compare traditional classes with online counterparts. One of those studies was recently completed at UC Davis.

With a $500,000 Mellon grant, a team of UC Davis faculty developed online courses for 10 undergraduate classes and took a close look at how the students and instructors fared and how the costs of online offerings and their in-class versions compare. The project was co-directed by Harry Matthews and Barbara Sommer. Matthews is a professor emeritus of internal medicine who was one of the first at UC Davis to develop and offer an online course. At the time of the Mellon study he was director of Mediaworks, the campus unit that provides assistance to faculty who want to use technology in their classrooms. Sommer is instructional programs coordinator at the Teaching Resource Center and a lecturer in psychology who has also offered an online course—a lab section for psychology research methods.

The questions they were asking for the Mellon study were important ones. “We have to be very careful about this,” said Matthews about the campus’s incorporation of online education in its curriculum. “This is students’ education that we’re messing with.”

Project particulars

For the Mellon project, large general education courses were selected—classes with enrollments of 200 to 500, with more students on waiting lists in some cases. Subjects ranged from Asian art history to biology, winemaking to anthropology. Faculty were offered $10,000 to entice them to participate, and Mediaworks helped them develop online materials (one instructor had already been offering an online version of her course). The classes were given in both the traditional and online manners, with students, in most cases, allowed to pick which version they used. One class was offered online only and compared with its traditional counterpart, which had been offered in previous quarters. The classes took place fall 2000 through spring 2002.

The online courses, in general, were hybrids, with the lectures posted online and the in-person discussion sections led by teaching assistants. The online material consisted of an audiotape of the lectures—recorded during previous quarters—with graphics, a transcript and links to additional material added, all in a Web-friendly form.

For the study, faculty kept careful logs of the time they spent on activities for their online and their traditional classes, student performance was assessed and student satisfaction was evaluated through surveys and focus groups at the conclusion of the classes. The data have since been analyzed, and Matthews, Sommer and their colleagues are now writing and submitting papers on the results. Here’s what they found:

The cheaper option

The accepted wisdom is that online courses cost more than traditional courses—but that’s the case only when startup costs alone are considered. For the Mellon financial analysis, led by Michael Maher, professor of management who has himself developed an online course for the University of Chicago, both the startup costs and the costs over the life of the courses were considered.

The Mellon team found that the expense of creating an online course—developing content, programming, acquiring software and hardware—was high but more reasonable when spread over five years, the average lifespan of a course. Faculty and teaching assistant time to administer the course was quite comparable between the two methods. For the traditional in-class course, the largest expense was the cost of classroom space. They found that the cost of a lecture hall—based on construction and interest costs spread over 30 years—amounted to $17.86 per student for a three-hour-per-week course.

The result for Introductory Food Science—one of the courses whose cost was evaluated in detail—was online expenses of $41,051, 9 percent less than the $45,390 cost of a traditional course.

Of course, changes in how an online course is developed or managed could result in higher or lower costs. Any number of bells and whistles can be incorporated in online courses, all at additional developmental costs. Or to save money, course development could be further streamlined and automated. Or additional savings could be realized with more radical adjustments—say, reducing the role of faculty while increasing that of T.A.s once the course is developed.

Students—how they did

Though the online courses cost slightly less, their students didn’t do quite as well as their in-class counterparts. An analysis of six of the 10 Mellon courses that provided adequate data showed that, in five of the courses, the in-class students earned slightly higher grades. There was no difference in the sixth class. In both traditional and online courses, students with higher GPAs performed better, in general, than students with lower GPAs, and freshmen performed worse than students with more advanced standing.

The in-class versus online comparison accounted for only 2.2 percent of the variance in performance, whereas GPA accounted for a 23 percent to 42 percent difference, depending on the course.

Matthews said he was disappointed that none of the classes replicated the improvement in student performance that he saw in the online course he developed for entering medical students, Molecular and Cell Biology, which served as a prototype for the Mellon classes. For that course, Matthews similarly put the lectures online but took advantage of that freed time to split the class into small groups and discuss real-life applications of the concepts presented in the lectures.

Nevertheless, the difference in performance was “extremely small,” wrote Sommer and her colleagues in a paper about the results. “Our findings can be used to support the conclusion that online presentation does work.”

“Remember,” said Matthews, “this was the first time that the online classes were done. We should have really compared them with the very first time that lectures were given.”

And indeed, in one of the online courses that was offered twice, student performance improved on the second go-round. Matthews predicts that other online courses will see a similar improvement once they’re offered multiple times and adjusted each time based on faculty and student feedback.

Students—what they thought

Students gave slightly lower marks to the online courses—but the differences were statistically significant in only two of the classes. In Introductory Food Science, one of the Mellon project’s first online courses, hardware and software problems proved frustrating for both students and the professor. In addition, the online course was up against a traditional class taught by a popular instructor known for his lively presentations. Students also complained about the one course that was offered online only. “A lot of them had never taken an online course before,” said Sommer. “They felt trapped, and they were resentful.”

In general, students seemed to want it both ways: to have a professor give the lectures but also to have them available online.

“Students loved the convenience and flexibility,” said Sommer of the online classes. “But students expect to be professed to, and some feel cheated if they don’t have that experience. Some students felt that online courses were not appropriate for the university, that they were for community college. They felt that they deserved a real professor.”

Even some students who acknowledged that they sat in the back of the class, that they didn’t speak up in class and that they didn’t visit the professor during office hours still preferred the lecture hall experience. Some noted that it was hard to distinguish more important points from less important material in the online course. Others pointed out that online classes make it too easy to procrastinate.

An editorial on educational technology in the California Aggie in May echoed the Mellon project findings: “A few online courses here and there bring variety to those students who are willing to experiment, but the moment there is a dearth of instruction in physical classrooms, the whole concept of ‘going to college’ will have lost its meaning.” But, it also acknowledged: “Administered correctly and in the right doses, [technology] can make both professors’ and students’ university experience that much more fruitful.”

Enrollment push

Though student performance and satisfaction were slightly lower, the findings of the Mellon project were, at bottom, reassuring, say Matthews and Sommer, and positive enough that many of the online courses are being offered again this year.

“What the Mellon project did tell us, essentially, is that online learning does no harm,” said Matthews. “The data will be helpful in explaining that to deans, to department chairs, to Academic Senate committees, to all the people who are rightly concerned about the effects on student education, on budgets and so on.”

Currently, support for online courses by those chairs and committees has been limited. At a research university, what’s valued is a faculty member’s research into his or her particular field—not research into the realm of online learning.

But as enrollment grows and budgets for new classrooms shrink, online learning is being given a more serious look. That was the case in the chemistry department at UC Davis. The third quarter of general chemistry—which traditionally enrolls 600–900 students a quarter—consists of a lecture and weekly laboratory sessions led by T.A.s. Portions of the lab—the pre-lab explanation and safety instructions and post-lab write-ups—are now done online. The actual experiments are done in the laboratory. That allows the department to make the most efficient use of its lab time and space, said chemistry lecturer Dianne Meador, who developed the online course in conjunction with Bill Fink and Mediaworks. The online instruction, which lets students know immediately if their calculations are incorrect, also offers uniformity in grading across the sections.

Students like the online work and are recommending it for other chemistry classes. “The department wouldn’t keep it if the students didn’t feel it was useful,” said Meador. She and her colleagues are now developing online material for second-quarter general chemistry, and the physics and biology department have expressed interest in their program.

Done right

If online courses are done well, their benefits can go beyond freeing classroom space. They can do much more than “no harm”—they can improve the quality of education. Matthews’ prototype course and Janowitz’s efforts—hybrid courses combining online lectures and in-class discussions—are examples of that. By putting his lectures online Matthews gave his students the opportunity to absorb the material and then meet with him in small groups to discuss and apply the material in sample clinic situations. It enabled them to go beyond mere memorization, strengthening their ability to use what they had learned.

Similarly, Janowitz, for her survey of religion course, is posting her videotaped lectures online, along with related material. That allows her students to view the material repeatedly, if need be, and come to class ready to grapple with the ideas. And it allows Janowitz to talk with, instead of lecture to, her students and to develop a relationship with them.

“Long ago we had only one book, and we had one person stand at the front of the class and read from it,” Janowitz says. “That still, in some ways, is our educational model—the lecture. Now the technology allows you to make the material available in a different way—you are not the only one who has the book anymore.”

She feels that she benefits as much as her students do from the new format. “It is easy to get in a rut with your teaching,” she said. “This has given me an opportunity look at what I’m doing—at the point of my teaching. It has reinvigorated my time in the classroom in many ways.”

The best course

Online learning is still in its infancy, and the possibilities are as endless as the Internet itself. A potential benefit of such courses is what’s being called “mass customization”—the ability to individually tailor a course to suit many people. Modularized courses could allow students with different skills and knowledge to start at their appropriate level. “Smart” courseware could assess a student’s learning style and pace and adjust accordingly.

But who has the time and ability to develop such courses? Perhaps the job is best left to publishers who could offer courseware much as they do textbooks, says management professor Maher. Instead of individual faculty reinventing the wheel with each online class, they could purchase modules appropriate to their section.

But the question remains: Is that the best course for UC Davis? What is the role of online education at this residential, research university?

To answer that, Matthews believes that faculty and administrators need to explore a bigger issue: what he calls “the Davis experience”—why do students come here, and what do we hope they receive?

“We need to focus on what is important, and that’s not giving students grades and transcripts,” said Matthews. “Maybe the first employer will look at a student’s GPA. Maybe not. The second employer certainly won’t. A graduate school will look at a GPA, but after graduate school, no one will.

“What we’re really providing students is social interactions—the chance to meet other students and meet the faculty, who should be role models for students in many respects.”

Larger and larger classrooms only reduce the opportunity for students to interact with faculty, believes Matthews. If online courses can reduce the instructor’s workload—the routine content presentation—it could free faculty for more meaningful interaction.

Janowitz makes a similar point. “We have this incredible technology available to us. Is there any way that we can use it to foster our primary educational goals?”

Her goal is to strengthen the ability of her students to read, think and write critically. Technology alone can’t accomplish that, but it can free her to work more closely with students to develop those skills. Distance education can, paradoxically, bring faculty and students together.

“Teaching is a relationship,” says Janowitz, “and to the extent that I’m able to develop a relationship with students, I feel like I’ve had a more educational experience and they’ve had a more educational experience.

Teri Bachman is editor of UC Davis Magazine.

For more information visit http://moby.ucdavis.edu/Mellon/index.html.