Sloan ALN Summer Workshops: Learning Effectiveness and Faculty Satisfaction

Topics

Learning Effectiveness

The media-rich environment of ALNs offer an abundance of pedagogical approaches to faculty and staff who create courses and programs. However, there is little good information on which teaching methods and technologies are the most effective in helping students learn. Among the issues that need to be explored are:

• What learning styles are best supported by ALNs?
• Which students are best suited to perform well in ALN courses? Which students have the most difficulty?
• What kind of content is best delivered in an ALN course?
• When should collaborative learning tools be employed? When should didactic methods be utilized?
• Which technologies support effective learning? Which technologies do not perform well?

Case studies that address these and other questions should begin to uncover a set of best practices for designing and deploying ALN courses and programs. With critical discussion by the workshop attendees, important themes for creating effective learning experiences in ALN environments will be identified. Burks Oakley will organize the sessions involving learning effectiveness.

Faculty Satisfaction

The primary target group of the faculty satisfaction session is mainstream faculty. There is ample evidence that early adopters are enthusiastic about ALN and eager to push the envelope further. Does any of that translate to mainstream faculty? What are the obstacles in getting mainstream faculty to adopt ALN? Roxanne Hiltz, for example, presented some evidence from "second round" NJIT faculty at the 1998 ALN conference - to wit, these faculty complain more and are less satisfied with the results. Assuming that generalizes to other campuses, are there strategies that can minimize these complaints? If so, is this about training, faculty expectations, rethinking teaching, or something else? Are there other things that can be done to hasten adoption by mainstream faculty? For example, should one push for adoption throughout an entire curriculum or focus on those most likely to adopt within their specific course? Should support be provided by academic professional help only, or should those faculty who have already adopted ALN be used to provide some of the support - a non-traditional role for the early adopter faculty? If not in a support capacity, can early adopters nonetheless be fruitfully used in an exemplar capacity? The presentations on faculty attitudes will examine these and related questions, focusing both on results in existing Sloan programs and the various strategies that have been pursued to tackle the broad adoption issue. Lanny Arvan will organize the sessions on faculty satisfaction

There will be two presentations devoted to faculty satisfaction in high-enrollment courses where ALN has been used to attain some efficiency in instruction. Both Edwin Kashy of Michigan State University and Lanny Arvan of UIUC have argued that ALN can improve instruction in high-enrollment courses while simultaneously making these courses more cost-effective. But what of the faculty teaching these courses? Are they burning out? Do these instructors really have evidence that learning is enhanced? Can the teaching efforts of the pioneers be sustained by other instructors and will these later adopters be willing participants in the enterprise? Presentations by Kashy and Arvan will address these and related questions.