Dance instructor waltzes with students in cyberspace

Choreography course on-line shows how teaching, learning are being transformed

Monday, October 16, 2000

Kevin Marron

Dancing professor Iris Garland has learned to improvise when she teaches choreography in cyberspace.

"You have to step back and allow the students to interact with each other," says the Simon Fraser University (SFU) professor, whose on-line course, Dancing in Cyberspace, teaches students from around the world how to create dance movements using a software animation tool called Life Forms, developed by Vancouver-based Credo Interactive Inc.

Using technology to teach choreography may seem like an unusual and ambitious project, but Ms. Garland says her biggest challenge was to keep in step with the dramatically different way in which students learn on-line.

The latest learning technology is not only transforming the way students learn, it is changing the role that teachers play in the classroom, and this new role is one that many school administrators have yet to understand, according to Ms. Garland and other telelearning experts.

"It's a huge cultural change for many teachers," says Brent Gallupe, a professor of information-technology management at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., who has surveyed on-line teaching methods employed by business schools throughout North America.

"Instructors who have traditionally thought of themselves as knowledge gatekeepers -- the great persons with the students learning at their feet -- have a hard time adapting. The technology makes instructors more like guides or facilitators, pointing to the sources of knowledge."

University teachers typically spend about 80 per cent of their teaching time lecturing in live face-to-face courses, but the teacher of an on-line course is the author of less than 25 per cent of all the communication, the rest of which consists of input from students, according to research conducted by Lucio Teles of SFU's Centre for Distance Education. "Students can be very talkative on-line. You can't ask someone to be quiet," he says.

But spending less time lecturing does not translate into less work. On the contrary, instructors spend more time on an on-line course than on a live lecture series, says Mr. Teles, who adds that teachers must respond to students' correspondence and discuss the issues that they raise. He says the best on-line teachers exhibit great skill in weaving the different strands of students' discussions into common themes that all members of the class can learn from.

Mr. Teles says teachers also spend a lot of their time dealing with technology issues such as problems that students may encounter in logging on and difficulties created by viruses or incompatible software. He says the No. 1 request of many on-line teachers is that administrators provide more technical support.

"It's very labour intensive -- like being on emergency call," Ms. Garland says. "You have to really stay connected to the class every day. If students have questions or problems on-line, they want to know the answer now." She says she also spends a lot of time "moderating to make sure there is a good ambience on-line and trying to challenge them so as to raise the quality of their discussions."

Many people may expect that this style of teaching would appeal most to younger, more technically adept professors, but Mr. Teles has found the opposite to be the case.

He has two explanations. One is that older teachers feel more confident about their teaching abilities and do not mind being challenged by their students in the rough and tumble of an on-line forum.

The other explanation has to do with the traditional ways in which universities measure the performance of professors. Mr. Teles says many Canadian universities do not consider on-line courses to have the same status as live lectures, and therefore do not give them the same weight when considering a professor for a permanent appointment. For this reason, many younger professors who do not have tenure tend to stick to giving traditional lectures, he observes.

Ms. Garland also takes issue with the value that university administrators place on on-line teaching. Although she has just retired from the university, she still hopes to be able to deliver her popular Dancing in Cyberspace course next year. But she is embroiled in a dispute over the fee that she should be paid.

She says administrators want to pay less for teaching an on-line course than for a live one, on the grounds that a professor does not have to play a very active role in delivering an on-line course, once the content has been developed.

"The administration would like to think [that] once they have an on-line course developed, all you need to do is put it on the Web and all the instructor has to do is to drop in and moderate it.

"They sell it to the university that on-line teaching reduces costs, but actual interaction on-line is really important. A teacher's presence answering individual questions is absolutely necessary and much more labour-intensive than any other courses I have taught.

"There may be some course that you can just stick on the Web and allow some graduate students to moderate. But I don't think that's the best way."