The Skillful Teacher

Teaching Online
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My initial reaction to this development was political, intellec-
tual, and pedagogical skepticism. Politically, online education
seemed to commodify learning, to turn it into an external object
marketed for a hefty price to save cash-strapped programs trying to
stay afloat. To me it appeared to embody some of the typical excesses
of capitalism by turning a dynamic, fluid, and unpredictable 
phenomenon—the process of learning and teaching—into an objec-
tified product, something to be bought and sold on the open market.
I also felt that the exclusionary patterns built into face-to-face edu-
cation would be magnified even more online. Instruction was over-
whelmingly in English, students without experience on, or access to,
computers would be penalized, and there would be little opportunity
for any kind of remedial counseling. Intellectually, I feared that stan-
dardizing courses for online delivery to a wide audience would mean
dumbing them down—removing all ambiguity that could not be
resolved via e-mail and focusing only on accessible, simple materi-
als that could be used by students with a wide variety of ability lev-
els. Pedagogically, I felt that online teaching took the personal
dimension out of teaching, removing the relational element that I
always believed to be so important to learning. How could students
learn to trust someone they never saw in person or spoke to directly?
These fears ebbed as some interesting things started to happen.
First, students began to tell me that some of my classroom exercises
(such as newsprint dialogue) paralleled online teaching processes (such
as threaded conversation). That made me realize that online teaching
was not necessarily qualitatively different from its face-to-face coun-
terpart. Indeed, various introductory guides to e-teaching explore
many of the exact same problems (how to engage students, respond to
racial differences, take account of different learning styles, and so on)
that engage the attention of teachers in face-to-face classrooms (Palloff
and Pratt, 2003; Conrad and Donaldson, 2004). Second, I realized that
one of my chief preoccupations as a classroom teacher—to avoid one
or two powerful voices dominating the discussion—might be differ-
ently (and maybe more easily) addressed in an online environment.
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In asynchronous discussion learners would have the time to think
through their responses without the pressure to come up with an
impromptu contribution or response to a teacher’s question that
would make them look good in class. Students who struggled with
language, who were introverts, or who needed time to process infor-
mation and create meaning, as well as those who were intimidated
by the theater of the classroom (particularly having to play the role
of the smart, capable, committed student), would all benefit from
online learning’s privacy. The online environment also placed a
greater degree of control into the student’s hands over when and
how fast learning happened, something Piskurich (2003) argues
increases both retention and self-directed learning. Finally, when-
ever I did engage in some measure of online teaching, the students
involved stressed the importance of feeling a member of some kind
of learning community in exactly the way that students in my face-
to-face classrooms did—a dynamic explored by Palloff and Pratt
(2004) and Lewis and Allan (2005).
However, although a case can be made that the dynamics of
online teaching are not intrinsically different from those of the face-
to-face classroom, there are contextual features that need to be
borne in mind since they give online teaching a particular reso-
nance. First, the learner’s physical isolation means that the impor-
tance of individualized evaluation is more crucial than ever. Given
that online course materials are usually prepared well in advance,
the main teaching actions that happen online occur in the giving
of evaluative comments. Not only does evaluation help the student
learn, it also convinces her of the social presence of the teacher in
cyberspace (a notion I will say more about later in the chapter).
Second, the time spent in giving extensive feedback is, itself, con-
siderable. One of the greatest misconceptions about online teaching
is that it is somehow a “quick and dirty” version of the much more
complex reality of classroom teaching. Nothing could be further
from the truth. Teachers who have taught online will usually say
that their face-to-face classrooms are far less time consuming.
Teaching Online
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Third, the possibility of reading and giving visual and tonal cues
in classroom communication is obviously rendered almost impossi-
ble. Despite attempts to develop a visual and tonal shorthand for
online communication (smiley faces, exclamation points, dots
for pauses, boldface and capitals to express importance, and so on),
the scope for massive misinterpretation of comments exists. Words
written are very different creatures from words spoken with a
warmth or frigidity of tone, accompanying gestures of emphasis or
dismissal, and lively facial expressions that communicate interest,
empathy, or contempt. It is also the case that real-time or live con-
versations held online exhibit distinct dynamics (Hoffman, 2003,
2004). At a very basic level, fast typists enjoy a distinct advantage
over those with little keyboard experience. Also, unlike a live face-
to-face conversation, there is a delay (sometimes rather prolonged)
between the individual typing the words she wants to convey and
all other chat participants seeing the words projected on the com-
puter screen. Such delays often result in responses that overlap with
each other, leading to multiple lines of communication that can be
confusing and disorienting. Since live chats cannot work at all
unless the group of participants is small, the instructor who decides
to rely heavily on them may find herself, particularly in a large class,
committing to as many as five or six one-hour chats a week. In
Palloff and Pratt’s (1999) opinion, live chat “rarely allows for pro-
ductive discussion or participation and frequently disintegrates into
simple one-line contributions of minimal depth” (p. 47).
Almost by default, then, the primary mode of student-to-student
and student-to-instructor interaction in an online course occurs
through asynchronous discussion. The advantages of this kind of
interaction include its flexibility and convenience, the time it
affords learners to think things through, and the fact that partici-
pants in hard-to-reach locations can be accommodated. However,
an online course can seem a very “cold” emotional climate for some
learners, particularly extroverts who crave the synergy of people in
a room arguing, clarifying, disagreeing, and encouraging each other
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in learning. Similarly, students from cultures in which collective
decision making is the norm, and in which individual identity is
considered as something that can never be separated from racial or
tribal group membership, will find it a deeply unnerving experience
to sit by themselves, stare at their screen, and respond to words
typed by others at a different time and in a different place.