Making online teaching
commonplace: the role of
staff support

Stephen Sheely,
Team leader, Flexible Online Learning Project

In her discussion paper, Anne Forster notes that online teaching and learning focuses not only on the design of effective pedagogical environments, but also on the efficient management of the learning system and the design of services that leverage scarce resources. The Flexible Online Learning Project was established in 2000 within the Major Projects Group to address these issues at an institutional level.

Guiding Principles of the Flexible Online Learning Project
The FOL Project brief was to provide an infrastructure which would support the widespread, effective use of online teaching and learning and provide the economies of scale made possible by centralising support activities. The project drew heavily on a set of principles (some of which are listed below) which were first identified by Sheely, Veness and Rankine (2001).

Web teaching is essentially different
Online communication is written, computer-mediated and unsupported by familiar clues such as tone of voice and non-verbal language. Teachers and learners are often separated by time or space, or both.

Web teaching is essentially the same
There are certain educational principles which remain common to both face-to-face and online education. The most useful of these centre on student learning, and in particular on students’ tendencies to adopt deep and/or surface approaches to their learning.

Teaching online is not an individual effort
The design and conduct of online teaching requires more collegial support than face-to-face teaching, and is ideally a collective activity involving both academics and a range of support staff.

Workload
Teaching online is often represented as a way of reducing workload, yet there is evidence that, unless carefully managed, online teaching can increase staff workload.

Focus on supporting teaching and learning
The infrastructure needs to be as transparent as possible so that teaching staff can focus on the educational aspects of what they are doing, not on the technology.

Dispersion of expertise and control
Online education has a lot in common with Distance Education (DE) but many DE models result in the teaching staff losing control of projects they have initiated. In online teaching the project should remain with the teaching staff who initiate it. This is particularly important in institutions such as The University of Sydney where the majority of online teaching is blended with on-campus teaching.

Formalise hardware & software maintenance
Technical difficulties can deter both staff and students from using the online environment. These need to be minimised in a number of ways, which include standardising the software being used across the University, using existing central IT services to maintain the hardware, and ensuring that staff support and student help are available.

As long as the technology is perceived as novel and difficult, it will remain the focus of discussion. Only when online teaching and learning is regarded as commonplace, will our discussion focus on what we can do with the medium - and not the medium itself. However, for teaching staff, maintaining a focus on education while also learning and using the new technologies is a most challenging issue. To be able to focus on the teaching-learning dimensions, teaching staff firstly need to have confidence in the technical system, and they need to know that help and support are available to sustain their efforts.

The Flexible Online Learning Project at The University of Sydney
Managing hardware software and databases locally is the sort of thing that can keep staff focussed on the technology, rather than the teaching. To counter this, The University of Sydney has adopted WebCT as the university standard platform. A single institution-level installation is being run off machines supported and maintained by ITS. Administration of the software and integration with other university systems is managed by the FOL Project.

The FOL Project team has focussed its energies on providing support for staff developing their teaching in the new medium, tempered by a commitment to allowing teaching staff to retain control of the process. The project team not only manages a technical web-based system that works, but it continues to support staff acquisition of the skills necessary to use that system. It is reassuring for staff to know that if they run into problems, there is somewhere to go for help. The FOL Project provides a helpdesk service for staff using WebCT which fields over a thousand helpdesk enquiries each semester by both email and phone.

In conjunction with colleagues in the ITL, the FOL Project team runs a program of generic Introductory WebCT Workshops for teaching staff. Discipline-specific, customised versions of this workshop program have also been offered in a variety of faculties. Intermediate WebCT Workshops are now being offered to explore specific issues and skills in online communication and online learning. A series of weekly Designers’ Workshops, providing one-to-one assistance to staff members who are developing units of study, runs throughout each semester. In total, over 600 staff, representing every faculty at the University, have received some form of training via these workshop programs, since October 2000.

Evaluation feedback from university staff has highlighted the effectiveness of the support strategy and identified the positive role these support mechanisms continue to play in enabling the University’s lecturers and tutors to teach effectively in the online environment.

Maintaining the focus on teaching and learning is both the most important, and the most difficult, strategy for the FOL Project. As we continue to work towards a technical system that is completely transparent, our extensive staff user network encourages us to maintain our commitment to the principles and goals of quality online education for the University.

Stephen first became interested in online education when he worked on the 1998 DETYA report "An Evaluation of Information Technology Projects for University Learning". He then spent 2 years building an institutional infrastructure to support online teaching and learning at The University of Western Sydney. Since July 2000 he has been working as the team leader for the Flexible Online Learning Project, building an institutional infrastructure at The University of Sydney.
Email: ssheely@mail.usyd.edu.au

Copyright ©2002 Institute for Teaching and Learning