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This article is directed to teachers who are making preparations to teach online courses. It discusses the need to re-learn teaching techniques as one makes the transition from teaching in a classroom to teaching through a computer. The examples are largely from experiences the authors had in designing their own online courses. The literature on online learning includes many articles on technical issues, course design, and studies comparing online and traditional courses with regard to such things as learning effectiveness and student preference. However, little coverage of the challenge to professors to re-learn how to teach is available. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap in the literature and to highlight the areas in which traditional teaching will be challenged. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

INTRODUCTION

The online professor should be a facilitator, not a "sage on the stage." The online professor is required to be adept at using technology for a computer based course. This entails a whole new course design. Plus, an online professor should create many useful interactions between students to enhance their learning. The literature is replete with these suggestions. Yet, traditional professors are finding it difficult to make the transition to online teaching. Holding up the goal does not outline the path to that goal. This article describes the experiences of two traditional professors as they moved towards the goal of becoming online instructors. One course was a hybrid course (half online, half classroom) in International Business. The other course was a totally online course titled Spanish for Business.

LITERATURE REVIEW

There is a growing body of research on online teaching. One topic area is the comparison of online teaching with traditional teaching. Most research finds that learning effectiveness is much the same in both styles. One study compared exam scores of students from both types of class and found little difference (Anstine, 2005). Some researchers found online students scored lower than students in classroom courses (Terry, Lewer, and Macy, 2003). Another category of research is about students. Many studies have been conducted testing various aspects of online learning from the student point of view. One study found that "students' level of satisfaction in applying e-learning for business courses is pretty high as a whole (Cheng, 2006)." The results of another study showed "technology does enhance student learning (Krentler and Willis-Flurry, 2005)."

Another area of research is the new technology required for teaching online. Instructors and students grapple with learning the technology for online courses: e-mail, Web assignments, games, course software, mailing lists, bulletin boards, blogs, and multi-media. All authors agree teachers need administrative support and training, especially since technology changes continuously. "There has been an unrelenting cycle of technology promotion and adoption in classrooms since the 1920s, where technology was introduced by enthusiastic advocates, such as administrators and researchers, only to fail because teacher lacked equipment, time, and training (Hara and Kling, 1999)." Even after one has learned the technology, it is only a tool to be used to improve instruction. One study pointed out that teachers need guidelines on how to teach with the technologies available (National Center for Education, 2001). Ultimately, teachers want to become very proficient with technology tools. "Tools for distance learning need to become transparent, almost invisible means to learning rather than ends in themselves (Stankiewicz, 2000)."

The goal is to be able to crate an effective online learning experience. This is the task of course design. Khan crated a model of many interrelated factors that can be a guide to online teachers (Khan, 2001). Although helpful for setting up an online course, it is a little broad to resolve detailed issues. The challenge in course design is "what is required is not a wide-ranging understanding of technology but, rather, specific knowledge of how this technology can be used with these students to accomplish this purpose(Wallace, 2004)." "This calls for a shift in the academic role from the intellect-on-stage toward a learning catalyst.(Volery, 2001)." There are a number of articles recommending course designs: Clark writes that an online instructor is a facilitator or coach (Clark, L., 2001). Swan recommends facilitating peer interaction with the goal of building learning communities (Swan, 2002). Marquardt heralds the action learning process wherein students take initiative and ownerships for the research and problem solving process (Marquardt, 2004). Others recommend discussion forums for connecting students (Tham and Werner, 2005), games to keep students interested (Palloff and Pratt, 1999), and cases so students can share their experiences (Tham and Werner, 2005).

However, little attention is given to how the professor learns to teach a new way. The tasks are covered in the research, but not the learning process for the new online teachers. For example, the instructor is told to be the "guide on the side, not sage on the stage (Arbaugh, 2000)." But this change is difficult to accomplish. The traditional teacher knows how to be the sage on the stage, but does not have experience being the guide on the side. This article details the experiences of two professors who went through this learning process.

TEACHING TECHNIQUES, MOVING FROM TRADITIONAL TO ONLINE

Lectures

Traditional Technique. In traditional teaching of an international business course, lectures are the main vehicle for transmitting knowledge from teacher to student. The professor customarily spends a significant percentage of course preparation time on lecture development. Effort is made to make lectures informative and interesting. As Stephen Yelon says, "since kindergarten we have learned from face-to-face teaching (Yelon, 2006)." In addition, the professor uses the lectures as a motivational tool, hoping to transmit a love of the subject matter or at least enough curiosity to inspire the student to continue studying outside of class. New professors struggle to learn how to create and deliver lectures that are effective in transmitting knowledge. In fact, professors may feel the quality of their instruction is directly related to the quality of their lectures.

In contrast to the methodology used in teaching international business, modern language instruction has used different techniques over the years. The most recent trend has been to teach languages using the principles of communicative competence. This is a teaching methodology that emphasizes student interaction and the adaptation of the curricula to subject matter of interest to the student. Oral communication is the goal of current modern language instruction. A successful classroom setting in modern languages is one in which the students are interacting constantly and speaking the foreign language all the time.

But what happens in a totally online course where there are no lectures or opportunities for the student to be constantly using the foreign language? What happens in a hybrid course where a professor has half the class time to deliver lectures and half the time to communicate in the foreign language with students? Online teaching uses different ways of learning. Through online instruction, a student can learn by reading text, listening to audio, observing either still or animated images, watching video, interacting with a virtual environment, or communicating via electronic mail. One can also learn by taking advantage of the power of the computer and watching graphs and charts instantaneously change when one manipulates variables. Online instruction can be used anytime and anywhere there is the required hardware, software, and server connections (Yelon, 2006).

In totally online courses, teachers and students may never meet face-to-face, or they may have an introductory meeting at the beginning of the semester. Sometimes, they are required to take the final exam in a central location. In hybrid courses, students meet for class half the time of a regular class. Universities are using hybrid classes when classroom space is limited - two classes can be held in the same time block, in the same room, when each class meets every other class period. Hybrid learning is also a way to insure professors, students, and the curriculum are technologically current.

Transitioning to Online. When the author who teaches international business started teaching a hybrid course, her first approach was to compress all the lectures of the semester into the reduced lecture time available in a hybrid course. Since the quizzes and exams were moved to online, it seemed like a feasible approach. The outcome was, though, that all the classroom activities besides lecture were removed to make time for a complete, semester's worth of lectures. There were fewer class discussions, cases, in-class exercises, student reports, and videos. This was a less enriched version of a traditional course.

At first students received hybrid courses well because they were required to attend school only half the time. But after comparing notes with students in traditional courses, they began to see that they were receiving a diluted version of a regular course. Of course, the author felt this way, as well. It became apparent that the new teaching tool of online learning required very specific training. One could not simple make a physical move from standing in front of a class to typing on a keyboard, and keep everything else the same. Fortunately, it became apparent to other professors and the administration that a new way of teaching had to be developed. In effect, new tools had to be made. The task was the same, teaching, but new tools had to be developed to teach via the computer.

New Online Teaching Techniques. When lectures disappear in the transition to online teaching, how does the professor transmit knowledge? When Spanish language courses that have depended on much verbal interaction are taught online, teachers can not hear the students speak on a daily basis, how can teachers teach? How does the professor motivate students to study? Some professors look for a substitute for lecturing. They make audio or video tapes of their lectures. Most professors do not like to tape their lectures and avoid this approach. Those who do use them find that something is lost in the transition to the two-dimensional electronic medium.

Experienced online teachers, however, suggest a different approach - a new tool. The first part of the new tool is to change to thinking about learning instead of teaching. These ideas are based on the differences between two common instructional strategies: direct instruction and guided discovery (Clark, R., 2000). Direct instruction is more like the lecture format in that the instructors tell learners what they need to know and what they ought to do. Guided discovery is more appropriate for online learning. In guided discovery strategy, students learn on their own by observing the phenomena, asking questions, allowing time for inquiry, or conducting activities and experiments followed by feedback. All the while, the professors are supplying appropriate levels of guidance (Yelon, 2006).

Thiery Volery goes one step farther and defines online learning as a type of distributed learning enabled by the Internet. Distributed learning for him is defined by a learner-centered environment which provides many opportunities for activities and interaction, thus self-learning through the use of technology (Volery, 2001). Experienced online teachers recommend putting the responsibility for learning on the students (Collis, 1995, Volery, 2001). Assign them the readings, projects, and homework and hold them responsible for learning the material. This means the teacher's job is to design the course so that students will have access to material and be able to study it and practice it on their own. In this way, the emphasis in communication changes when a professor moves from lecture to course design.

Course design is the new online teaching technique. For example, instead of lecturing and testing on how to estimate demand in a foreign market, a professor could assign chapters, homework, and then a project requiring the student to evaluate three foreign markets for demand for a product and select the best one. The professor grades the student's assessment of market potential, which is also a desired learning outcome. In this way, the professor facilitates the student learning process without lectures. An instructor in a Spanish for Business class could assign a team of students the task of developing a new company and product in a Spanish speaking country for a Spanish speaking investor. They would have to do their research using the Spanish language, write their business plan in Spanish, and prepare the presentation to launch the new project in Spanish. Or, the instructor could assign the students the task of developing and translating a web page into Spanish for a new product to be launched in a Latin American country. They could also be required to write letters to a list of possible clients in Spain in order to introduce the services of a new company coming from Latin America, which would entail cross-cultural information and language decoding between one Spanish speaking country and another.

The second part of the new tool of course design is the use of new activities. Whereas a classroom teacher may use charisma, humor, interesting lectures, and current cases to stimulate student interest, this won't be possible when lectures disappear. An online teacher can use something else: games, puzzles, flash exercises to stimulate interest. Some online courses have crossword puzzles, which may be based on jargon, definitions, or rules of the discipline. There may be games, like Jeopardy, wherein students must produce correct answers to earn points. There can be flash exercises where students have seconds to match up definitions and words, or dates and events. There can be map, grammar, and vocabulary games. Many of these activities have been used in general foreign language classes. They can be adapted to the specialized vocabulary of Spanish for Business which deals with accounting, finance, and marketing. Ms. Adelia Ruiz, a graduate student at Florida International University, invented a game for students in her Spanish for Business online class in which they would have to learn the vocabulary from the various chapters in the text in order to perform certain tasks which were involved in organizing a new company. Successful completion of each task allowed students to move up in the company until they finally managed to become the CEO of the new firm.

The third part of the new tool of course design is learning new technical skills. Faculty new to online teaching have to learn how to deliver their course material using technology. Some schools offer training and support to faculty; at Simon Fraser University's new technology school, they designed a course just for new online faculty. "All faculty are required to take a one-semester course called Mastering Educational Technology and Learning (METL) to help them gain a better understanding for the what's and the how's of our approach" to online teaching (Leacock 2005). Other schools have online seminars and assistants to help faculty. Administration can lend support by giving adequate time and resources to faculty as they develop their online skills.

Testing

Traditional Technique. In classroom teaching, tests are usually the major tool for evaluating student learning. In fact, in many traditional courses, tests can be 60-70% of the total grade for the course.

Transitioning to Online. But online testing presents several problems. A serious problem is cheating. The authors have experienced students downloading tests and sharing them, working together as a group while taking a test, and even calling, texting, and e-mailing other students to get answers while taking a test. Students might use open books and notes while taking a test online from home or the library. Another problem is verifying the identity of the test taker. Just as students might pay someone to write a paper, they might pay someone to take a test. A survey showed that 82% of students admitted to cheating (McCabe, Trevino, and Butterfield, 2001). Spanish courses usually include oral testing as part of the course. In an online course, it is difficult to know who the person is on the other side of the telephone or microphone during an oral test. It could be the student or it could just as easily be the student's next door neighbor or mother.

A related problem with online testing centers on the length of time the test is open to students. If a test is only available for three days, then some students are absent and miss the test. Then the teacher has to open the test for each student and then grade it and this can be a time-consuming chore. If a test is open for 2 weeks, probably everyone will have the opportunity to take the test. But the longer the test is available to be opened, the longer before results can be given to students. Also, it provides a longer period of time for students to cheat.

New Online Teaching Techniques. Since cheating can be a serious challenge in online courses, professors choose to reduce emphasis on testing. Assessment in online learning can use a variety of methods: group projects, journaling, essays, online scavenger hunts, puzzles, and tutorials can be effectively used (Dereshiwsky, 2001). Assigning projects is a substitute tool for testing. Professors have a hard time putting down the testing tool. Many professors feel a test is the only way they can be sure that a student understands the material. But with practice designing projects, they can see that a student is showing their grasp of the material by the quality of their project. The hard part is designing a project that tests all the course material.

How does one evaluate student learning without tests? As with lectures, there are substitutes for this traditional tool. When a student prepares for a test, he/she reads assigned chapters, memorizes some material, and learns how to solve problems or use the course material. Projects can be assigned that require students to do the same things: read assigned chapters, memorize a few things, and learn how to use the material. For example, instead of a test on all the factors determining political risk in doing business in a foreign country, a student could be asked to determine the political risk of five countries and rank order them. The professor would select five countries that covered all the factors determining political risk. Students could be assigned different countries from each other to prevent cheating. They could work together on studying the chapters, doing research, and planning how they are going to solve the problem. But each student could have a different set of countries to rank order. Students in a Spanish for Business class could be assigned the task of explaining political risk to a Spanish client who wants to invest in foreign countries. Thus, they would have to learn the terminology in Spanish for this business issue.

Assignments

Traditional Technique. Homework assignments and term papers are an important part of college courses. They enable the student to practice using the material of the course and for the teacher to see how well the student is learning. Homework is especially important in a foreign language course because practice is necessary to learn a new language. In a Spanish for Business course, the writing of business letters and writing exercises are the skills which the student needs to develop in order to be successful in the business world. Increasingly, e-mails are becoming the vehicle for communicating in business in the Spanish speaking world. Correct style and form in an e-mail can only be taught by having the student produce such exercises.

Transitioning to Online. When homework assignments and term papers are submitted online, problems develop. The first problem is that the instructor faces the dilemma of either printing out every page of student work or grading on-screen. Printing out every page is time consuming and expensive. Downloading attachments introduces the risk of computer viruses to the professor. At the same time, grading on-screen is difficult. The Spanish for Business instructor realized that in this course, the answers to the homework and the individual letters and essays had to be individually graded. In other online courses which had developed multiple choice answers for foreign language questions, the problem of language variance had appeared. That is, students in a Spanish for Business class, or for that matter, any Spanish class, were graded on how they answered something (proper use of vocabulary, grammar, etc) as much as if not more than if they had the correct content. This was not functional for a Spanish for Business course where content is equally important as grammar.

New Online Teaching Techniques. Action learning projects become more important in the online learning environment. A study found that "active learning pedagogy is more prevalent in the online than in the face-to-face classes (Coates and Humphreys, 2003)." A substitute for the hard copy homework assignment is homework that requires students to search the Internet, collect data, discuss with group members, and design a solution. It gives students an opportunity to enter the environment, try out their solutions and see the results.

Homework is even more important in an online course. Weekly homework assignments may be the only way an instructor can insure that students are making regular progress in the course. It can be used to keep the student working regularly on the course, when there are no regularly scheduled classes. It helps avoid the situation where a student ignores the course for 5 weeks, then faces a midterm, having never opened the textbook. In face-to-face classes, the teacher can take attendance, call on students, and monitor class discussions to determine student involvement. But in online courses, there is no classroom in which to do this.

However, the online teacher can find a substitute. Online homework is the new tool for online instructors. If the professor wants the student to read chapters each week, then they can assign a crossword puzzle based on each chapter that must be understood that week. A short case can be assigned with questions that are machine graded or graded by a teaching assistant. It could be something simple, like fill-in-the-blanks, or matching, or multiple choice, easily graded by machine. In short, requiring student performance each week becomes more critical when the student does not attend classes.

"Both asynchronous and synchronous technology options should be considered when designing instructional sequences (Levitch, 2003)." Online chats can be required and monitored by the professor. They can be topic oriented, so that the teacher can review students' understanding of a particular part of the course. Or, they can just be practice for students in a foreign language course with the teacher correcting their grammar and vocabulary on screen. Also, in a foreign language course, students can be required to record conversations so the teacher can hear and evaluate progress in learning the spoken language.

One of the things that a new online professor misses most is a term paper that clearly shows what the student has learned. Since printing and grading on-screen are obstacles for the traditional term paper, a new tool is needed. It is a modified paper. A term project can be designed which requires the student to conduct all the tasks required for a term paper: research, organization, analysis, writing. The difference is that an online project can be designed to be turned in according to a precise format on the computer. For example, instead of writing an eight-page paper in prose, a student can turn in all the results one section at a time according to a predetermined format. It is more like filling in forms, than writing prose.

The advantages are that students do all the work in learning and applying the course material that they would in writing a term paper. They stop short of writing out their work in prose. For example, instead of writing a typical term paper on how to conduct business in a foreign country, and writing eight pages, a student would do all the research, collect and organize the information, then submit it on the computer in an easily gradable format designed by the instructor. The disadvantage for handling homework and papers this way is that it is time consuming to carefully design projects that require students to learn every detail of the course. It is also time consuming to design the entry formats for the submissions.

Grading

Traditional Technique. In face-to-face courses, the teacher has a hard copy of the homework or term paper to view. Professors may scan the papers and arrange them in a rough order of quality. They may use this process of skim and sort, rearranging them until they are ready to take a full read of them. Sometimes, they may go back and forth between papers to verify the consistency of their grading.

Transitioning to Online. But in online courses, there are no hard copies, and ordering them and going back and forth is very hard to do on screen.

New Online Teaching Techniques. It is recommended to use the full power of the computer as a tool for grading. Require students to submit work in a specific format that is easily graded. They can submit work on forms, with blank spaces. They can be taught to use only certain words. Then their answers or papers can be machine graded or graded by a teaching assistant. In addition, discussions, projects, and blogs can be graded. A course blog can be created in which students are encouraged to post their thoughts, confusion, and feedback about the course. A teacher could record the number of entries as an indicator of student participation in the learning community.

Allocation of Time

Tradition Technique. In traditional teaching, one may spend 60-70% of course preparation time on creating lectures. It may be that 10-20% of the time is spent on creating other class activities, leaving 10-20% of the time for grading student work. These are just general measurements and do not cover the full array of college courses.

Transitioning to Online. This proportion changes when one begins to teach online courses. At first, instructors see that they won't be developing lectures, but it takes awhile before they realize they have to work just as carefully at designing projects. They may be used to spending quite a bit of time working on a lecture, but just spending enough time to list term paper assignments on a sheet of paper and then pass them out to students, discussing them in class. But with online courses, since there are no lectures, it is even more important to carefully structure all student work.

New Online Teaching Techniques. There are two issues regarding time when teachers start teaching online. One is the proportion of time that is spent on teaching tasks; 'the overall preparation time for a distance learning course can be much greater than for a classroom-based one (Levitch and Milheim, 2003)." A survey of instructors showed that an online class is between one-and-one-half to three times the amount of work for an instructor as compared to a face-to-face class (Hyslop, 1999). The other issue is when the investment in time is made. Online instructors may be spending 60-70% of their time designing the course, rather than creating lectures. Then they may be spending 10-20% of their time just designing how the student work is going to be submitted and graded. This takes new online instructors by surprise and it may take a few semesters of experience before they appreciate the new proportion of time they need to spend on design tasks.

The other time related issue is when the investment in course design is made. It may be possible in a traditional course to be one chapter ahead of the students in developing lectures. But an online course goes up on the web weeks before it is offered. All projects, assignments, and quizzes need to be submitted in advance. All the material for evaluating student work needs to be well thought out and available to students before the semester begins. In other words, the allocation of time is largely before the course begins.

Relationships

Traditional Technique. In face to face courses, students have rich communication with each other; they see and hear their classmates. This helps them select groups and support each other. In a traditional course in Spanish for Business, students interact with the teacher and with other students. The teacher gets to know the students and can evaluate their language strengths and weaknesses as a result of the conversation in Spanish in the class. Students get to know other students and learn from them about aspects of how Spanish is used in the Spanish speaking business world. In a multicultural city like Miami the opportunity to learn from other students is large and leads to some excellent studentteacher and student-student relationships. These interactions form a basis for writing recommendation letters for the students later.

Transitioning to Online. In a totally online course, a student feels isolated with just their course materials and the computer screen. Early attempts at class discussion were awkward to use and hard to grade. Professors had to scroll through the whole discussion to grade students' contributions. In Spanish for Business online courses, the student can communicate with the teacher through the telephone but rarely chooses to do so. Oral exams can take place through telephone, though, adding a different dimension to the course experience. When students never see the teacher or the university setting, their online course is just another web site on the Internet. Many websites offer 24/7 response and cater to customer service expectations. A professor does not provide 24/7 response and does not have a customer service representative.

New Online Teaching Techniques. Instructors have recognized the value of having students connect with each other to support each other; they now try to build learning communities. Programs are now available that offer more rich communication than an e-mail. Students can now create their own groups after they have learned something about each other. Professors can require students to create Student Webpages in which they describe themselves and post pictures. Professors can run exercises that ask students to reveal themselves; examples are to post names of five people they admire and explain why, or post the name of their favorite place to visit and describe why. There could be a prize offered to the student who makes the most online connections with other students. After doing these exercises, online students may actually know more about their classmates than face to face students. In a Spanish for Business class, the teacher can require all communication on the part of the students to be in Spanish, thus adding to the educational value of the email exchange.

Interestingly, the online experience instead of reducing interactivity, heightens it for courses. As one writer states, "the Internet allows a new level of interactivity as it eliminates the temporal and spatial rigidity of office hours or class meeting times. It virtualizes the walls of the university, creating 'elsewhere' learning (Volery, 2001)." This can be helpful for international courses, allowing students to pursue information all over the world.

There remains the relationship between the professor and the student. In face to face courses, students see and hear the professor during lecture, ask questions in class, and visit during office hours. In the transition to online, these are lost. However, in online courses, students have instant access to professors via e-mails. In fact, it is a complaint from professors, that students ask every question that pops into their minds and they expect a 24/7 response. Professors are dealing with this by having online office hours in a chat format. Other times, the professor sets parameters for e-mails: no e-mail will be answered if it is on the syllabus, professor will attempt to respond within 24 hours, and all technical questions should be submitted to technical support personnel. "The key to communication is for the instructor to create their unique cyber presence integrated throughout the course. Such a presence will make the recommended clear communication, support and guidance, interactivity, and personal learning, a reality (Al-Bataineh et al., 2005)."

CONCLUSION

Technology is not the only thing new online teachers need to learn. They need to learn how to step off the stage and become a learning coach. They need to consider every part of the course and re-design the course for online delivery. This involves learning new teaching methodologies such as structuring projects to be done online, structuring homework to be graded by computers, and finding a substitute for online testing, where it is too easy to cheat. This entails a significant change in how instructors spend their time; there is a major move from spending time evaluating student work during the semester to spending time on structuring assignments before the course even starts.