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K-12 Online Education in Alberta: Keeping the Learner in Focus
Bill Muirhead
Executive Director
Alberta Online Consortium
Since 1995 more than 23 online schools have begun operation in Alberta. The term "online education" denotes the processes involved in distance education where network technologies such as the Internet are used to make connections among students, teachers, students, and educational materials. Computer technology differentiates this specific type of distance education from correspondence, radio, and television formats.
A research project was undertaken as part of my Doctoral studies at the University of Alberta to explore teachers’ perceptions of online education. Examination of web-based documents from online schools, print-based information supplied by online programs to the public, publicly available information from Alberta Education, personal communications with Alberta educators, and other research studies were used to establish a base-line reference for the emergence of online education in the province.
After preliminary interviews, 14 teachers in four online schools were selected for this study based upon similar program infrastructures, institutional support, length of online experience, orientation to online education, and comparable subject and teaching levels. Teachers were interviewed over six months, January to June 1999.
Five major themes emerged from the study leading to identification of five major organizational challenges.
Major Themes
Evolution of Tasks and Responsibilities
The first theme that emerged from an analysis of the data concerned the evolutionary aspects associated with online education. The term "evolution" is purposefully used to denote the addition of new tasks to the professional responsibilities and the equally important altering of traditional tasks associated with teaching to become more compatible with the new landscape of online education. Interviewed teachers suggested that the single greatest change to their professional lives was the expectation that they author online courses while also being concurrently responsible for teaching.
The theme of convergence arose from analysis of the data; it was not apparent during onsite observations or interviews with teachers. Convergence is used to denote a "narrowing of a gap," or of a "coming together" where thoughts, ideas, and functions begin to lose their separate identity and thereby become more alike.
The convergence of online education as a theme includes four aspects: (a) the move to adopt integrated online instructional packages; (b) the adoption of shared instructional design models within schools and between schools; (c) the move towards incorporating both face-to-face and online instructional options; and (d) the development of online databases for sharing disparate student data.
All teachers held strong views about the potential of technology for individualizing instruction to meet individual learning needs. However, their positive attitudes did not preclude teachers from remarking on the gap between their vision and the current reality. They reported disappointment with the reliability of computer technology. Problems with student computers were doubly frustrating where teachers were the primary source of technological support for students.
Another problem for teachers was the absence of mature integrated content-development tools that could work with content delivery software. This hampered teachers in taking full advantage of the potential of online education.
A powerful theme which emerged was a sense that online education had significantly altered teachers’ relationships with others. For many, "teaching" was seen to be a relationship-building profession. Throughout onsite observations, informal discussions, taped interviews, and follow-up conversations, teachers constantly returned to the theme of relationships and interactions with others.
The final overarching theme was the all-encompassing notion of "time" and how the teachers understood their professional activities in terms of how they spent their working time. In terms of time as a resource, teachers spoke about how time affected their perceptions about stress, anytime education, and task complexity.
Teachers' involvement in online education had resulted in heightened awareness about time and professional tasks. When the teachers assessed the many adjustments that they had been required to undertake, the greatest had been to personal time management skills.
The notion of time and how teachers perceived time was often raised during interviews. One of the significant changes to their teaching day was a sense that they were no longer governed by the clock but by the task.
The organizational challenges identified by the interviewed online teachers have been categorized as relating to roles and responsibilities, work locations, stress, professional development, and market forces.
All teachers described the unease that they felt in adapting to the changing roles and responsibilities which online education had upon their day-to-day teaching activities. None of the 14 interviewees had been introduced to distance education materials during their pre-service teacher training and none had been exposed to teaching skills applicable to teaching online. Neither had any of the 14 teachers been exposed to practical or theoretical instructional design models which they felt could be applied to a online school environment.
Teachers described three areas where they felt that their roles and responsibilities had undergone the greatest changes: (a) how teachers provided instructional and emotional support to students; (b) the expectations associated with authoring online courses while maintaining a full teaching load; and (c) the requirement to provide ongoing technological support to students and parents.
All teachers independently raised feelings of personal stress related to workload, and all identified three areas of professional activities they perceived as the three overarching root causes of their stress. First, as discussed earlier, teachers remarked on how the current expectations of employers to concurrently teach while authoring online courses was extremely stressful. A second stressor was the expectation both from themselves and from parents and students to be accessible on a 7-day, 24-hour basis (7x24). A third source of stress was the lack of adequate time to handle the many day-to-day responsibilities of marking, answering e-mail, participating in online discussions, building online relationships with students, and other online teaching tasks. These were related to multiple professional responsibilities, task complexity, and family/work responsibilities.
The stress of creating new courses was increased because, as stated earlier, none of the 14 teachers in this study had received formal pre-service preparation in theory or practice related to distance or online education.
Most teachers described how they had extended their workday to include checking e-mail before they went to bed and before breakfast in the morning. A universal concern among teachers was the consequences to family and friends of overly extending their working time. The need to establish boundaries between the demands of teaching online and one's home life also applied to teachers who worked from a school.
All teachers agreed that online schools needed to provide more opportunities for professional development than the few days now scheduled. Teachers felt overwhelmed with the new skills and knowledge that they were required to master in order to successfully carry out their professional responsibilities. If teachers are to provide the level of technological support to students and parents which online schools require, then they agreed that ongoing professional development opportunities must be provided in these priority areas: (a) content development and delivery tools; (b) hardware and software systems used by online students; and (c) the latest thinking in instructional design and pedagogical matters.
The notion that online education existed within a "competitive environment" where market forces combined to pit one online school against another was shared by all interviewees. In recent years, parental choice has been an important aspect of educational reform efforts within Alberta, therebyguaranteeing parents the right to enroll their children in any school or any school jurisdiction in Alberta. To support parental choice, government policy has ensured that provincial funding will be made available to the school jurisdiction in which the child was enrolled.
The combined effect of these efforts has been to provide an incentive for online schools to seek out students from across Alberta and to target those parents and students who would most directly and quickly benefit from a online schooling (e.g., rural, small school, and home schooling). Marketing programs had been undertaken by all four online schools in this study. The Internet and its ability to break the bonds between geography and education had created, according to teachers, a "free market" for education.
The introduction of market forces into education had the opposite effect upon traditional teachers. All online teachers reported hearing from colleagues that online education was a means by which the collective rights of teachers could be weakened. In some cases this created strained feelings among online and traditional teachers. The interviewed teachers felt that traditional teachers feared that online education might one day replace or displace them from their current positions.
In my opinion, online school education will increase in terms of numbers of schools, students, and courses that are involved, and that more countries will implement it. Sharing of information about practices, benefits, and difficulties experienced among jurisdictions as online school education increases in scope will be essential. Carefully constructed research projects, perhaps involving international cooperation, will help in this endeavor.
References
Cuban, L. (1986). Teachers and machines: The classroom use of technology since 1920. New York: Teachers College Press.
Haughey, M., & Muirhead, W. (1999). Online learning. A best practices paper. Edmonton, Alberta: Alberta Education.
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