International
Journal of
Educational
Technology

Experiences of Students, Teachers, and Administrators in a Distance Education Course

Margaret Downs, Ph.D, Independent Consultant
Leslie Moller, Ph.D, Pennsylvania State University

Abstract

Introduction

Margaret: Why are you taking this course?
Student: We didn't have any other advanced classes. . . . Without this [distance education course] we wouldn't be able to take them. I mean we have a math twelve and precalc but we don't have any calculus classes so this is the only way to get a calc class and college credit if you wanted it. So, that was one of the advantages.

Many high school students in small rural schools do not have the same educational opportunities as those in larger schools. Because the schools are so small with limited resources, few students have the opportunity to take advanced courses; so desired courses simply are not offered. It should be acknowledged that with the use of two-way audio and video technology, educational initiatives are increasingly implementing distance education courses to reach remote students.

The study involved three high schools, one in a small city and two in neighboring rural areas. The three schools were within one-half hour's driving distance from each other. The community within which the schools were located was in favor of the distance education program. In some cases, the community benefited from the technology by having access to college courses after school hours. The primary industries in the area are small colleges or community colleges, farms, and a few small factories. The primary teaching site and two remote sites for the calculus course were in high school classrooms that were equipped with distance education technology by the Cooperative Educational Board (CEB).

CEB is a New York State agency. As stated in one CEB 1994-95 Annual Report, one of the guiding principles of the agency is to provide support services: "[CEB] services to districts are to be considered an arm of the local school districts to supplement, advise, and support the activities and services operated by districts" (p. 3). CEB provided two-way television distance education technology and support services for the pilot course, which was intended, for advanced students who would not otherwise have access to such a course. CEB is a part of the New York State Government's promotion and support of funding for distance learning that enables students in rural schools to have access to greater educational opportunities. In addition to the technology, CEB provided a staff person to maintain the system and troubleshoot problems with the technology as they occurred.

Distance education courses are being offered at elementary and middle school levels as a method of curriculum enrichment. This article reports the findings of a study, reviews research related to distance learning in secondary schools, and provides insight into key issues concerning students, teachers, and community development in distance education.

The Use of Distance Education in Secondary Schools

Distance education has been defined in many ways. For instance, distance education has been defined as planned learning that normally occurs in a different place from teaching (Moore & Kearsley 1996,). This study describes distance education as "a planned and systematic activity [a step-by-step procedure] which comprises the choice, didactic preparation and presentation of teaching materials as well as the supervision and support of student learning and which is achieved by bridging the physical distance between student and teacher by means of at least one appropriate technical medium [such as two way audio and video]" (Keegan 1986, 58).

Distance education courses are being offered at elementary and middle school levels as a method of curriculum enrichment. The majority of distance education students are academically gifted and talented students whose teachers feel can "handle" the unique circumstances. But the primary impetus for distance learning at the secondary (or high school) level is the need for greater educational opportunities in small rural school districts (U.S. Congress 1989).

In the 1990s the use of distance education technology has reached all age groups. The general educational goals include serving students and schools that are considered educationally disadvantaged or traditionally underserved (U.S. Congress 1989). The lack of teaching resources for these students and schools provided fertile ground for the community to embrace distance education as an alternative to traditional classroom teaching.

Traditionally, the greatest percentage of distance students have been adults (Garrison 1989; Moore & Kearsley 1996); however, Schlosser and Anderson (1994) reviewed literature on distance students and found that tradition is changing due to the implementation of newly funded distance education programs such as the federal government's Star Schools Program. In 1987, the "Federal Star Schools Assistance Act authorized a five-year budget of $100 million to promote the use of telecommunications for instruction in math, science, and foreign languages at the K-12 level" (Moore & Kearsley 1996, 51). With programs like the Star School Program, more distance learning courses are being increasingly offered to K-12 student populations as well as traditionally underserved populations, therefore it is important to understand how distance learning impacts its participants and classroom community.

Methodology

Research Question

Given the phenomenological nature of this research, qualitative methodology was employed to collect data and provide richly descriptive (Bogdan & Biklen 1992) information from which future distance education programs may draw from for the reason that student and teacher experiences can describe some situations and issues that may also be encountered by others in similar situations. Qualitative research is used here as an umbrella term for a methodology that, as Sherman and Webb state, provides an understanding of an experience as nearly possible to the participant's experience (1988).

A familiar process in a qualitative study is for the research question to emerge and become more refined as themes and patterns become apparent. This study began with the general question, "What are the experiences of high school students, teachers, and administrators in a distance education classroom?" As the data was collected and analyzed, the research question that developed is, "What are the experiences of distance learning students, teachers, and administrators that pertain to the teacher's style and the classroom community?" In addition to the distance aspect of the course, the data revealed that it was important to understand how the teacher's style and classroom community influences the participants' experiences.

Sample

The key respondents (Bogdan & Biklen 1992) consisted of all nineteen participants involved with this distance education calculus course: the teacher, four students at the home site, three students at one of the receiver sites, six students at the other receiver site, and the three corresponding administrative support persons from each site. This number of informants included the regional technical support personnel and the university curriculum development professor.

Data Collection

Descriptive information was collected through documentation review, observation, and interviews with teacher, students, and administrators. The teacher and administrators were interviewed individually in their offices and classrooms at separate times. The senior students who took the course were interviewed in the small group of their distance class during their lunch hour. Each of the interviews took about an hour and were tape-recorded for later transcription and further analysis. The interviews involved structured question and allowed for open-ended comment. For example, Why are you taking this course? Do you have other classes where you receive instruction through distance technology? Tell me about your distance learning calculus class.

The interview questions were developed to find out the meaning (Taylor & Bogdan, 1984; Bogdan & Biklen, 1992) of the distance education course from each participant's perspective.

While people conducting qualitative research may develop a focus as they collect data, they do not approach the research with specific questions to answer or hypotheses to test. They also are concerned with understanding behavior from the subject's own frame of reference. (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992, p. 2).

Thus, the structured interview questions were designed to provide a framework with which to begin gathering data from the participants. The interviews were conducted to further probe interviewee's thoughts and feelings about distance education and the technology.

In addition to the administrators, teacher, and students, the CEB technician was interviewed in an unstructured style that occurred during a lunch break. The university professor who designed the calculus course was also interviewed during one of his regular visits to the home site. The professor was asked if there had been any special adjustments made in the curriculum to accommodate the distance technology. He said there had not been any adjustments because the evidence of the students' learning had not indicated that it was necessary.

After the first interviews with some students, administrators, and the teacher, the data were analyzed and the theory developed (Strauss, 1987); then another set of interviews was conducted, repeating the cycle ten times--interview, analysis, theory development--until the data collection was completed (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992).

Data Analysis

The data were coded using the constant comparative method (Glaser & Strauss 1967, cited by Bogdan & Biklen 1992) to identify key issues, recurrent events, or activities in the data that become categories of focus; then the analysis continued to double back to more data collection and coding. As data were collected, the field notes were examined, transcripts, and aspects of the program and written comments were made to (a) note emerging themes, and (b) identify patterns and relationships.

Results

Administrators

The major findings about the administrators' experiences during the distance learning process were related to organizational, administrative, and leadership issues, including departmental policies, timing and sequence of courses, enrollment, and course delivery (Kovel-Jarboe 1990). The organization of the distance education course was based on the existing course structures within the schools and relied on their daily administration. The teacher and administrators attended a two-day training session, provided by the Cooperative Educational Board (CEB), during the summer before the school year began. CEB facilitated the training that was reported as a good introduction to the technology and deemed helpful, yet it did not prepare the teacher and administrators for the heavy demands on their time that the distance course actually made.

Therefore, the distance education coordinators and administrators for each school provided the basis upon which this distance course operated as a subsystem to the 'traditional' administrative system in place (Gibson 1990). The subsystem included preparation, training, student selection, scheduling, controlling class size, and aligning grade systems among the three schools.The administrators who were asked to be the distance education coordinators were already employed by their respective schools. As coordinators, they were involved in the two-year planning process for the distance program. Leadership was demonstrated by the administrators in delivering the course and in dealing with technological issues. The leadership was especially noted when preparation required more of the administrator's time when the initiative first became funded and policies and procedures were set in the rural school district context.

The "time" issues with the technology centered on the loss of time the teacher and students were accustomed to having in a "traditional" classroom setting. "Extra time" was required for the technology: the set-up for class, accommodating different class schedules at receiver sites, faxing assignments, giving extra help, and dealing with difficulties, such as students' lack of privacy, audio feedback, cameraman malfunctioning, and microphone malfunctioning. For example, the students pointed out the lack of privacy due to the ever-present microphones, during student-student interactions. The teacher also acknowledged that during class it was difficult to have private teacher-student communication when appropriate. The teacher recounted one instance:  Teacher: If you are experiencing some difficulty either personally or mathematically and they're at a remote site, it's very difficult to have any privacy with them to talk with them a little bit, to try and help them. At one point, on one of our first exams, one of the students at a remote site became very distraught and began to cry. Now that's not terribly unusual in the high school setting. These are very highly motivated students and sometimes they get very stressed over examinations and so forth, and combine that with something that may have happened to them before they came in the room and they suddenly break down. . . . What you like to do in a situation like this is take the student aside, and remove them from the classroom, and let them go somewhere where they can just recover. . . . I simply asked her to go to the phone in the back of the room, which was a little out of ear-shot . . . since I turned my microphones off. So we talked over the phone a little bit and got her calmed down, and then she was okay.

Scheduling was a challenge for the administrators. They had to take into account differing bell schedules at the three schools, as well as course schedules of students who wanted to take the course. Asynchronistic bell schedules are not uncommon for distance courses and should be noted as another factor that takes time away from instruction (Baker 1992).

The selected students in the distance education course were described as motivated to learn. They were selected for this first-time distance education college calculus course because they were deemed to be independent, motivated, and good students based on their prior performance. The small class size is important for the reason that the distance course requires much more from the teacher than the traditional classroom. Some administrators regard offering a distance education course to a few students as cost effective because they do not have to hire and pay for a new teacher. However, other administrators see the small class size as a waste of resources because they could be using the space to reach more students.

The students' attendance in the distance education class showed little difference from the traditional class. There were four additional students in the distance education class at the beginning of the semester and that dropped the course within the first two weeks of class for different reasons: a home site student was moved to another section because she was not deemed to be in the appropriate course level, a home site student decided not to take any more math courses, a home site student was a capable foreign exchange student and chose a lower level of math, and a remote site student's schedule changed at the beginning of the second semester (in January). The distance education course began with seventeen students and ended with thirteen.

Teacher's Style

The teacher was reported to be organized, experienced, and familiar with the curriculum. Interactions and communication were important to her, as was being available to help students. She strove to create a cohesive classroom community where she could connect with the students and adapt her teaching style to take advantage of and compliment the technology. A teacher's style was noted as an extremely important aspect of the distance education class (U.S. Congress 1989).

The findings reveal that this particular teacher's style contributed to the participants' perception that this distance education class was successful. Her characteristics include: (a) interactive communication; (b) meeting with the entire class; (c) scheduling formal and informal meetings with the class during the school year; (d) always teaching to the camera (eye contact is critical for personalization); (e) using technology capabilities to enhance learning by including close-up lens shots; (f) traveling periodically to each remote site and teaching from those sites; (g) formatively assessing students and teaching at a distance; (h) avoiding pitting one school against the other; (i) using group interaction time to help students whose academic background is not strong; and (j) checking with students to determine what activities might interfere with class and planning accordingly (Hughes 1988).

The teacher's independent efforts contributed considerably to her ability to deal with the ongoing challenges of teaching and at the same time managing distance education technology while instructing high school senior students in three different schools. The teacher was organized, focused on using both physical and verbal communication to keep the students interacting with her and each other, and she was available to help students. The teacher was able to integrate the technology with her teaching style and classroom community.

Student Socialization

The major issues for students during the distance learning process were interactions with the teacher for learning purposes, socializing with other students, and having a sense of community in the classroom. Previous research (Kember 1989; Newby 1991; St.Pierre & Olsen 1991) showed that student motivation was a classroom issue; however, it was not an issue for these participants because they were reported as already very motivated students. St. Pierre and Olsen (1991) surveyed student attitudes toward distance study and found that "motivation was the single most important of the feedback-related independent variables influencing student satisfaction" (p. 67). The most desired feedback was through didactic conversation with the instructor.

The students at the three schools each had distinct characters as groups and three different ways of communicating. One was "more interactive with time," another was "very interactive, a boisterous large group," and the last was "very quiet and not interactive." Because of their quiet nature, the last group was thought to be rude by some students. At the same time, the quiet group thought the louder group was "annoying and interruptive." The difference in the social goals of the groups may have influenced the groups' perceptions of and interactions with each other. In Lepore's, et al. (1989) research, it was noted that students tend to withdraw if they perceive social rejection and students who perceive control over a situation tend to overcome rejection and persist toward the educational goal. The limited one-on-one interactions between students may have contributed to tenuous social bonds among the different groups by not allowing for enough social time in class for students to build stronger relationships.

All the participants acknowledged the lack of face-to-face interactions in the distance education class as a challenge. They were not able to talk to other students, before, during, and after class and reported the lack of face-to-face interactions as limiting to their "normal" social activities. The learning "process," not the "learning," was perceived as limited because of the isolation of students from each other and the teacher.

Learning with technology has been previously acknowledged as a communication challenge for the student-teacher interactions because the student-teacher interactions are considered most important in any learning situation and especially in distance learning (Moore, 1990; Bates, 1991). However, the students reported student-student interactions to be important too. In support of these findings, Lauzon's (1991) research shows that the isolation of the learner from the instructor and other students limits the learning process.

Verbal and visual clues were noted as an important part of communication in the distance education classroom. The act of communicating verbally and visually has been acknowledged as a challenge for distance student-teacher interactions (Moore 1990; Bates 1991).

The students' lack of privacy was disliked by the students and should be acknowledged as a weakness in distance education. The microphones at each student's desk limited their unstructured interactions in class. For example, when the teacher was speaking to an upset student at another site, the student and teacher would like to have had more spontaneous, private communications.

Technical difficulties were a part of learning with technology that the students learned to endure and integrate into the daily activities. The students used video to overcome missing lessons due to technical problems. For example, class time was lost due to technical difficulties with the cameraman, the camera that followed the teacher, and the time taken to fax assignments during class, when the fax machine was either too slow or didn't work. The students also used videos to review difficult lessons. The ability to videotape class added more dimensions to the classroom and perhaps helped compensate for the lack of face-to-face interactions. Students could watch repeatedly a lesson they could not see, hear, or understand. Students absent from class could "attend" the missed lesson on videotape, which included students in other sections of the course beside the distance course unit. And a teacher could review the tape to critique his or her teaching style.

All the participants considered learning with the technology a novelty. The participants did not feel that the technology impeded the learning, rather that the challenges that the distance between the three classrooms presented were met mostly with problem solving intentions and positive attitudes because this distance education class was understood to be a new experience. The findings that actual learning was not impeded by the use of technology support Clark's (1991,1993) research on teaching and learning with technology. As Price (1996) said, "Technology doesn't teach. People do."

Discussion and Conclusions

The participants acknowledged several benefits and drawbacks. Whether or not the benefits outweighed the drawbacks is dependent upon a participant's perspective. In this case, all the participants reported that, even though there were drawbacks, they would recommend distance learning.

Benefits

The teacher, students, and administrators agreed that a benefit of this distance education program was that the students could take a college course, receive college credit, and gain from new exposure to other environments and a different teacher. The fact that the course provided an opportunity for students who would not otherwise have the opportunity to take a college calculus course was a benefit that seemed to make all the drawbacks worth the time and trouble.

The students also liked the experience of going to "a new school" to meet students from the other sites and to socialize. The teacher and administrators provided several field trip opportunities for the students to develop a sense of community. Some of the students had made new friends with students at the distant sites.

The highly skilled and experienced teacher was deemed to be an asset to the program by all the participants. She went out of her way in her regular daily schedule to make sure the distance students were getting all the materials and help they needed to learn the assignments. Additionally, her teaching and communication style was effective in getting students to participate in class even at a distance.

All the participants acknowledged the benefit of having more course offerings. The small rural schools greatly increased their capability to serve their "good students" with distance education offerings and the option to earn college credit. Other benefits included the ability to videotape. Videotaping class allowed for absent students, and those students having technical difficulties, to review class on video so that they wouldn't miss any of the lessons.

Drawbacks

The participants acknowledged a number of drawbacks in the distance learning class. Students expressed a desire to chat more with each other in class. Additional drawbacks included: (a) lost time when students were late to class due to different school schedules; (b) lost time due to the faxing of assignments to and from remote sites; (c) extra time required to use technology during class time; (d) technical difficulties due to the cameraman is not working, audio feedback, lack of sound at times, and slow fax machine; (e) lack of student privacy when private communications were necessary between students and teacher; (f) missing face-to-face interactions and participants being unable to see faces clearly over the TV monitor; and (g) the distance between the classroom interactions and community by making the interpersonal contact more difficult.

The formation of community is an important issue and challenge in distance education. In this study, there were some indications that a sense of community had developed, but other indications that it had not been achieved. Klasek (1972) has defined classroom community as all the resources (people, places, and materials) which contribute to the achievement of instructional objectives. The ways these resources interact are new and changing on a daily basis (Salomon 1981). Therefore, a concise definition of classroom community is difficult to pinpoint and should be further studies. However, based on the above definition of classroom community and the data collected in this study, come level of community was achieved. The participants believed a higher level of classroom community interactions would have been more desirable, yet it is unclear how the participants developed an awareness of being a part of a community and exactly what that meant to them in this distance education course.

Privacy for students is an issue that needs to be investigated. With this particular population of high school students who, at times, required private, one-on-one guidance from the teacher privacy was an issue that has presented itself, and it will present itself again with this particular age group because of this student populations' level of social development. Policies should be developed to provide a protocol for dealing with these issues in the distance courses because this age groups socialization issue will most likely be a prominent factor in any type of educational community development and particularly in one with distance education technology as a factor.

Because a distance course is systematic (Keegan 1996), the lack of face-to-face student teacher and teacher-teacher interactions is to be expected. However, the effect this lack of one-on-one interaction has on secondary students may significantly effect their course performance (Lauzon, 1991). What should be noted for future rural school district distance courses is that field trips and social interactions in class should not be an option; rather they should be required activities.

The primary goal of distance education in general and for this distance education calculus course was to increase course offerings and provide the opportunity to gain college credit in high school. This study showed that the overall goal was achieved and suggested that future distance education courses in high schools similar to this program's would be beneficial to high-achieving rural high school students. In this research, the students reported that the technology medium did not influence their ability to learn the course material. Rather the technology provided the opportunity to learn the course material.

Each distance education program involves the designated distance coordinators, who were the administrators in this case, in different ways (Mark 1990). This points to the need to explore the extent to which administration's involvement or lack of involvement, in the daily distance classroom is appropriate. Will this "subsystem" (Gibson 1990), or "distance learning unit" model (Mark 1990), be as successful in another school system?

Time issues that were linked to the two-way audio and video classroom were numerous and should be examined further. Some, however, are obvious problems and easily remedied. To avoid time loss, schools involved in distance education could synchronize their bells. Another drawback that should be further examined is the students' lack of privacy in the classroom due to the microphones and cameras. Also, a system that allows students to socialize as a part of the distance education routine, needs to be investigated, especially for the secondary school age group, and put into place. A positive effect of technology may have been that some time was actually saved by the use of Elmo, videotaping, and faxing, which should be considered with other "time" issues. Further investigation could show how to avoid losing class time and notice where class time is gained due to technology. The findings point to the need for further exploration of how to prepare the teacher to deal with the challenges the medium, or technology, present during class. And future research could examine aspects of videotaping in the classroom to understand how maximum effectiveness can be assured using this medium.

The research was intended to give a description of a specific distance classroom that would provide understanding, questions, and direction for future distance education studies. The participants indicated that, in spite of a lot of unanticipated work and effort, the distance course was generally a positive experience. Additional research needs to be done that will help any school system considering the use of distance courses and technology better prepare their teachers, administrators, and students for a distance course within their own educational system.

Future Research

The findings of this study are limited in generalizability; however, they illuminate the need for additional investigation of distance education classroom community and student socialization for secondary school students. Additional research needs to be done to determine: 1) to what extent the teacher's style, in tandem with two-way audio and video technology, is an issue for student learning; 2) how would the findings be different with another teacher and distance classroom or a larger sample population?; and 3) how does a teacher's style have to change in the distance classroom compared to the style he or she uses in the traditional classroom? Distance learning is a positive force and a useful tool in education when it addresses the students' needs. These needs are dependent upon the age and motivation of the student: (a) the motivation is dependent upon the education goal, and (b) the needs of members of particular age groups are dependent upon their stage in social development. Therefore, the implementation of distance learning in global educational systems should be developed where these criteria apply.

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