instructor hasn’t taught online before, PhiferMcGhee’s staff offers a two-week summer training session. The sessions are based on a set of standards for online courses developed by the Quality Matters Program, a nationally recognized, faculty-centered, peer review process. Instructors also learn the ins and outs of using Blackboard, a suite of software products that constitute a “learning system management platform.” Blackboard is used by more than 10,000 institutions worldwide. It allows faculty to build an online course and provides a variety of ways for faculty-student and student-student interaction. A program called Blackboard Collaborate provides video and audio conferencing capabilities for use in synchronous classes. “At the conclusion of the two weeks of training,” Phifer-McGhee says, “a professor has the tools to build a course.” Throughout the academic year, PhiferMcGhee and her staff provide training seminars as needed and one-on-one sessions with instructors to deal with specific problems. Two staff members focus on student issues, often troubleshooting on administrative and financial matters on behalf of students who cannot be physically present on campus. One of NCCU’s big selling points for online instruction is the low cost. In 2012-13, tuition and fees for an online course totaled $379 for North Carolina residents (about $1,400 for nonresidents). “Our prices are competitive — students tend to be drawn to us because our tuition is reasonable,” Phifer-McGhee says. Structure and expectations
Jim C. Harper II, chair of the History Department, says online classes can be effective with freshmen and sophomores, too. “It’s all about structure,” he says. “If the syllabus is not structured, and the expectations aren’t clearly stated, the students will be lost.” Harper has been teaching “The Black Experience Since 1865” every semester since 2006, in both online and face-to-face formats. It is a required General Education Curriculum course, so the level of engagement from students can vary considerably. “I love teaching this class,” he says. “You get a range of students in the online format, just as Student Ebonee´ Roberson, left, who takes a combination of face-to-face and online classes, gets assistance from Dana Moore, a member of the distance education staff.
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Online courses come in two basic flavors: There are “synchronous” classes, in which professor and student are online at the same time and interacting in ways that have much in common with a face-to-face class. And there are “asynchronous” classes, which don’t convene at a specified time.
you do in a face-to-face class. If you provide good direction, about 90 percent of them submit their work on time.” A typical class has 25 to 30 students, Harper says. “It’s important that I put them in groups and provide creative assignments that make them interact.” His first assignment every semester is a family genealogy paper. “I require them to talk to their parents, grandparents and relatives about where they came from. This is not a simple family-tree assignment — I want essays and family history stories. The students learn things they never knew — and they learn a lot about their classmates.” Harper says the technology can sometimes be a challenge, but help is always close at hand from Phifer-McGhee and her staff. “Kim’s office is great at providing support — to students and faculty,” he says. “They’ll help you negotiate Blackboard. They’ll walk you through it on the phone.” Lifelong Learners
Back in 1995, Kristin Hamann dropped out of NCCU’s program designed for Registered Nurses to earn a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) degree. She was young and single at the time, but “I was too busy,” she recalls. Hamann is back. “So now that I’m married with three children and have elderly parents and a full-time job, I’ve decided it’s a good time to get back for the last 18 hours I need for the degree,” she says with a laugh. But she adds, “I’m 45. I know my job and my goals. It’s easy for me to be in school now.”
For the spring 2013 semester, NCCU is offering 240 courses online, with enrollment of 2,573 students, including 735 who are enrolled exclusively in online instruction. As health care grows ever more complex, many hospitals are requiring all their nurses to have the additional training the BSN requires. Studies repeatedly link better-trained nurses to improved health care outcomes. Hamann, who has been working as a Registered Nurse for 20 years, says she does not need the degree to keep her job, but she is returning to school on her own initiative to learn how to do it better. She works at Raleigh’s Rex Hospital as a breast cancer navigator, which means she works with patients just diagnosed with or undergoing treatment for breast cancer — as an advocate, coordinator of care, educator and trouble-shooter. “It’s amazing how the program has helped me in my career,” she says. “It has forced me to dig deeper. It is leading to changes in our whole cancer center. It’s helping my patients.” An online course Hamann is taking this spring is taught by Erma J. SmithKing. In it, each student is required to create and carry out a community health project. Hamann’s project, identified in collaboration with a supervisor at Rex, is to learn more about where the hospital’s breast cancer patients come from.” “Our uninsured and underinsured patients are mostly referred by county health departments,” Hamann says. “My project is to make the transition smoother — steer them through screening, mammography, biopsy and into treatment quickly.” Smith-King has been teaching this and other online courses at NCCU since 2007. And she has a lot in common with her nontraditional students. She earned a nursing degree from N.C. A&T in 1974. Since then she has collected a Master of Public Health degree from UNC–Chapel Hill, an MBA from Meredith College and, last year at age 60, a Ph.D. from N.C. A&T in leadership studies. Smith-King applies her lifelong-learning attitude to her online teaching, continually trying new forms of instructional
software as they become available. She is proficient not only with the Blackboard Collaborate the university provides, but also with VoiceThread and Adobe Connect. “Education is a journey,” she says. “I try out these new programs as they become available. It challenges me to keep learning, and also to see what works and what is effective at promoting learning and a sense of community.” A Rapid Pace
Master’s program students in Gabriel M. Peterson’s course at the School of Library and Information Sciences need to be awake and alert when he convenes the two-hour weekly class. He moves quickly through the material. Working from his tiny office in the James E. Shepard Memorial Library on a February evening, he prepares for the session by uploading a group of PowerPoint slides and fielding a few questions by email as he waits for students to join via Blackboard Collaborate. “Blackboard Collaborate is great for promoting interaction,” Peterson says. “It creates a shared environment. I can lecture, show videos, present slides and share programs running on the desktop. Students can raise their hand, take the mike and ask questions. It simulates the classroom experience — and that’s a hard thing to simulate online.” The class this particular evening is Health Reference for Librarians. Reference librarians today get fewer face-to-face queries, and a growing number via text, email or Skype, Peterson says. “In this class, I teach how to do online live reference — how to provide the desired information to a live user who’s not sharing your physical space.” The class has 20 students, most of them already working in an information-related field. They are generally in the master’s program because they need the credential to get a promotion or are looking for
a change. On this evening, about half of them are able to take part in the synchronous class, which Peterson records and then posts a link so the others can view later. Live attendance is recommended but not mandatory. Peterson launches into his presentation — a lecture, liberally sprinkled with PowerPoint slides and other visual aids, pausing when questions arise from the class or when he asks a question. It is an extended tour of online health and medical resources. His central message, repeated several times during the class: “Learn what’s out there. Spend some time with these resources.” He and the students move on to bioethics and medical ethics, and spend some time poking around the National Library of Medicine, a site operated by the National Institutes of Health. “It’s highly reliable and wellvetted. You can depend on this information,” he says. He reminds the student-librarians that the American Library Association has an ethics code of its own. “You need to tread carefully. You may not offer medical advice. You cannot diagnose. You must protect confidentiality. You can and you should point people in the direction of the answers and information that they seek.” And on it goes for two contentcrammed hours. If this were an old-fashioned lecture, it would be too much to absorb in one sitting, and hard to keep up with taking notes. But Peterson and the students all know that it’s being recorded. They can go back and review it later, as often as they need to. And that’s another important advantage of high-technology instruction: A course can cover much more material. Before he adjourns, Peterson issues the week’s assignments, which will require research and about 2,000 words of writing. The class may meet just once a week for two hours, but it’s clearly no “easy A.” Peterson teaches this course in a live face-to-face class as well. There’s a difference, he says. “The distance classes take more work. They must be very organized. If you wander off, your students will wander off — they’ll start playing video games or texting friends.” spring 2013 NCCU NOW
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