General Education Issues, Distance Education Practices: Building Community and Classroom Interaction Through the Integration of Curriculum, Instructional Design, and Technology

Introduction

The review of a case study of the design and development of a single undergraduate course would be a small step toward determining the role of distance learning in the implementation of the best practices in general education. For the purposes of this postmortem, key instructional design decisions, including the choices of distance learning methodologies, will be discussed in relationship to general education objectives. The role of distance learning in general education can best be determined with further critical analysis of the role of distance learning in the broader context, with a review of a variety of cases using each of Jones’s and Ewell’s (1993) areas of best practice as one template for evaluation.

Our approach to designing a distance education course was to learn by doing. What follows is a discussion of what worked and what didn’t work within the context of general principles outlined by researchers in the area of general education and distance learning. As members of the Innovations in Distance Education (IDE) project at The Pennsylvania State University, our team members were action researchers; they started with a real teaching-learning problem, proposed solutions, and tested our assumptions along the way. We suggest that An Emerging Set of Guiding Principles and Practices for the Design and Development of Distance Education (Innovations in Distance Education, 1998), established as part of the IDE project, might serve as yet another important template for evaluation of the role of distance learning in effective general education.

The Case: Problems and Solutions

This case study examines the issues surrounding the integration of videoconferencing and Web-based instruction to bring the literature of journalism to life for undergraduate students. Getting students to interact with each other in a course in which the instructor is present is difficult sometimes, so taking what had been an undergraduate seminar on the literature of journalism and offering it at a distance raised the bar even higher.

This case study involves the redesign of a resident course called The Literature of Journalism, which is aimed at sophomore students. It has no prerequisites and, during the time of this writing, nonjournalism students and even non-College of Communications students enrolled in the course. In the past, the course had enrolled mostly senior journalism majors. In this case, of the 12 students enrolled, only two were graduating journalism students; the level of classroom interactivity and sophistication was not as high as in previous course offerings.

Adjustments were made in the course design to accommodate the student skill levels and maturity of the students, as well as to support their students’ transition to the new curriculum. Before the course was redesigned for distance learning, the instructor distributed weekly five or six questions about the next reading, which provided a framework to help the students complete their essays for the next week. The instructor would then open each class by giving a brief background lecture on how the book being read came to be written. Discussion followed. The instructor had an informal evaluation, a midsemester evaluation, and an open-ended focus-group-type evaluation at the conclusion of the course.

In redesigning the course, the first problem the four-person team tackled was an analysis of the learners. This was a relatively simple task because the instructor had taught the class before.

The second problem the team needed to solve was the selection of instructional media and tools that would help them to achieve course objectives and to create the level of interactivity required. These media and tools would need to build a learning community that supported the weekly videoconference seminar, where the instructor is alone at a video desktop unit and the students are at another location on campus. The support tools the team selected were (a) the Internet and a course Web page, (b) E-mail between the students and instructor, (c) guest subject matter experts (either resident or distant), (d) the books the students read weekly, (e) library resources, and...