In Their Own Voices: Suggestions and Concerns

The following quotations represent some of the many suggestions and concerns voiced by both national and local survey respondents in response to the last two questions on the survey.

What could your department or institution do to better support your online teaching?

"More training, more resources."

"Promote it, define it, and develop guidelines for teaching."

"Provide a separate orientation for online instructors. Many of our needs/problems/concerns are different than on-campus instructors."

"Make it financially worthwhile to train to teach online."

"Do more to reward and value online teaching instead of considering these classes students take when they have no other options."

"Though we used to receive grant or internal funds to develop the course, we no longer receive that kind of compensation, even though it is extremely time consuming to create a dynamic and successful online course."

"My department could acknowledge that online teaching may have some benefit—both to the students and to the department's budget. Right now, it seems like online teaching is viewed very much like online publishing—as a poor second cousin to the 'real' thing."

"The department needs to buy into the fact that online teaching is a real thing and is not going away. . . . I would just love it if my department supervisor would call me up one day and ask if she could be a guest in my online classroom."

"Simply recognizing the innovation required of online teaching would be nice."

"My institution could acknowledge that online teaching is labor intensive."

Please describe any concerns that you have about the preparation, development, and support of online writing instructors.

"I know many institutions offer workshops to help instructors incorporate technology into their courses, especially courseware. But based upon my experiences with these workshops (at two different campuses) the push is more about how one can make teaching more efficient and more packaged. Rarely does it seem as if these movements to go online are motivated by trying to teach students better."

"How much are students in a writing class actually learning online? Is teaching online composition a matter of measuring what students already know or what they are learning?"

"A general concern I have is that oftentimes the call for online writing instruction comes from the top and is 'shoved' down. This model disturbs me quite a bit. . . . I know many institutions have decreed that all or some portion of writing instruction will be online. This strikes me as being very anti-teacher and anti-student. These sort of decisions are hierarchical in the worst sense, and they are the sort of decisions that can lead to dissension and dissatisfaction."

"The development of online writing courses at my institution seems to be a natural evolving process. Those of us who teach online communicate with others and thus perfect the process each semester. I believe that this might be the best approach. Every instructor will teach differently and so to unify from above, from the administration, would not be beneficial for the instructor—at least not for me."

"I am concerned that the quality of teaching at some institutions isn't good because faculty aren't being trained well, and that too many students are being enrolled in these classes."

"The amount of time spent on individual students causes me to actually spend more time working with students than in a face to face class so size must be limited to the same or smaller."

"Having worked with several new online teachers, and with teachers who would like to put some work online, I have come to the conclusion that those who want to teach writing online need to be sure that they understand fundamental differences between the Internet classroom and the traditional classroom. . . . Online writing teachers must understand that the classroom is open 24/7 . . . and that individual students will vary greatly in how each one approaches his or her course."

"The worst design for these courses is to assume that putting everything online from a traditional classroom setting will be enough . . . . Teaching online is very different, and the simple fact that many schools are simply offering these courses to anyone (instructors and students alike) is really dangerous."

"I am concerned that online teaching be weighed equally with face-to-face teaching for professional evaluation purposes."

"I worry the class isn't taken as seriously because it is online."

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