Read some comments from experienced online instructors about the Perks and Pitfalls of Online Teaching.

• Mark Bullen
• Lori Lambert
• B. Siennicki
• Darlene Sherwood

Mark Bullen

"Since 1997 I have taught a dozen online courses for UBC and Athabasca University. As I see it the perks and pitfalls of online teaching are two sides of the same coin: flexibility. Teaching online allows you to teach from anywhere so when I'm traveling on business, no matter where I am in the world, as long as I have Internet access I can stay in contact with my students. However, this is also a pitfall because it means I am working all the time - on holidays, on weekends, in the evenings. Even when I give clear expectations to students about availability (no weekends or holidays for example), students get used to the immediacy of online communication and come to expect to be able to reach me anytime."

Mark Bullen
The University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada

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Lori Lambert

"For the past three years I have been teaching online to Native American students at Salish Kootenai College, a tribal college in western Montana on the Flathead Indian Reservation. In fact, I haven't stepped foot in a traditional classroom in all that time.

The exciting part of teaching online is the fact I can travel all over the world and still connect with my students over the Internet. That is a perk for me as I travel extensively in my position as Assistant Director for Distance Education in a busy tribal college.

Once when I was in Finland at a conference, I connected through their university's library Internet service provider. A group from Murmansk, Russia gathered around and were utterly amazed that I was teaching from Finland to the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana.

In online teaching for students as well as instructors, there are always pitfalls. For example, little glitches in technology, texts not arriving or being held up at international customs sites, partners, dissolving partnerships and taking the only computer away from the student. This year in the first two weeks of the term our server went down. Not only were students up in arms, instructors were as well and so was the administration. The Distance Education department worked overtime for a week, sometimes until two o'clock in the morning getting it back online.

This is the nature of the work. For me as an instructor with over 25 years of teaching experience, the perks of online teaching far outweigh the pitfalls.

Sure, I miss the stuffy classrooms; I miss student faces and the sound of laughter; I miss their immediate responses to queries. But it isn't about me. It is about American Indians and their ability to gain access to an education formerly denied because of location, family ties or what ever.
I am encouraged."

Lori Lambert (Colomeda)
Salish Kootenai College
Montana, USA

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B. Siennicki

"Instructors can return assignments as soon as they are completed, but as soon as the first one is returned, the email jungle drums start pounding, and the instructor is bombarded with "Where's mine?" emails, all of which need to be answered, thereby delaying marking even longer. However, waiting for all assignments to arrive before returning any is unfair to students who submit early and on time.

In addition, instructors waste considerable time fiddling with files - improperly saved files that can't be downloaded and need to be resubmitted, inappropriately identified files that need to be renamed and saved by the instructor, email addresses and subject lines that don't reflect the name of the sender or the contents, files that have been posted to the wrong place - and administrative matters such as creating class mail lists, organizing chats, helping students understand how to attach files, read annotations, etc. - in other words, considerable time spent in matters that have nothing whatsoever to do with the scholarly attributes for which the instructor was supposedly hired."

B. Siennicki
The University of British Columbia,
Vancouver, Canada

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Darlene Sherwood

"One of the perks of teaching online is that it lets each student contribute to the discussion. For example, in one of my online classes we have students present a topic of information, then other students reply to it. Participation marks are built right into the course outline, so students do contribute.

In a traditional classroom, you may have people trying to dominate or others too shy to answer. Online instruction also teaches students to use the web as a learning tool and a research tool. Students are expected to look critically at the information provided on the web and source of the information.

There are pitfalls as well. Seventeen, eighteen and nineteen year old college students may not have the time and personal organizational skills (some adults never have it!) to learn in an environment that does not have a structured time on the timetable - they can learn at their own time, but it's not always easy to find the time, or set aside the time to do the work. Conference boards with huge numbers of student postings can be extremely difficult to read and almost overwhelming to some students and teachers. Because of this it is a good idea to go in everyday and read postings from students rather than let them sit and build up."

Darlene Sherwood
Sir Stanford Fleming College,
Ontario, Canada

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