Sometime in late 1998 I decided that there was something missing. I was teaching primarily professional courses in business and information systems, but was finding myself increasingly separated from practice. I was questioning the relevance of my knowledge. In addition, I was feeling a little distant from the “public service” mission that had originally drawn me to higher education. I was doing a lot of teaching, and I think making a difference with at least some of the learners I was working with, but there was something larger that was missing.

As already mentioned in earlier postings, many of my teaching experiences took place in developing countries and at financially fragile universities; in addition, many of the learners had financial challenges. The environment provided some challenges in terms of accessing modern textbooks and other learning materials. For example, when I first started teaching at Comenious University I was asked to prepare a syllabus and provide it to my department chair and the dean. This was my first teaching assignment, and admittedly the course was a little “over designed.” There were lots readings, plus a textbook.

My syllabus was positively received, but I was told it was not realistic to expect students to purchase a western textbook. I was told, for example, that a teaching assistant would earn less than $40 for a whole semester’s work. Unfortunately the students did not have any other access to systems-design texts of sufficient quality. My first reaction was to contact publishers, explain the situation, and get some sort of a “developing country” discount. They were not very interested. I contacted a few other publishers and found no interest there, either. There really did not seem to be much concern for students who could not pay retail price for their books.

At that point I figured I could just create a “reader,” supplement the readings with notes and assignments, and have it all photocopied and distributed in packages. The solution seemed acceptable to everybody, and the package for week one was printed and distributed—but no others followed. When I asked the office administrator why there were no more packages, explaining that this was impacting the quality of the class, she was very apologetic and indicated that the problem was a simple oversight. Yet it still took a few more weeks and a few more visits to the print center and the office administrator until my department chair finally pulled me aside and explained that the college was subject to paper shortages throughout the academic year. He thought perhaps we should rethink how we could get quality learning materials to students.

I had experienced similar, if less systemic, challenges at the International University in Vienna. There the books would be ordered and stocked in the bookstore, but many of the students could not afford the textbooks and would just buy what they could and photocopy the rest—or just hope that the text was not “that important.”

These and other experiences prompted me to start investigating why it was so hard to find affordable educational resources. I studied, read a lot of books, talked with learners who were not respectful of intellectual property (IP) law, and even presented a few papers on the subject. I was captivated by the prevailing and dominant intellectual property regime, its origins, rationale, enforcement mechanisms, and corporate influence, the United States’ role in developing global policy, and the very real problems it caused for a vast majority of the world’s learners. Until I taught in a developing economy, the problem was never real to me – never visible.

During the fall of 1999 I made two of the best professional decisions in my life. I became so interested in IP policy and law that my first decision was to apply to law schools, eventually deciding to attend the Law program at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law (which had a great IP program) in New York. My second great decision was to withdraw from the program and university after only one semester.

I quit for a few reasons. First, I realized pretty quickly that even after earning a JD and passing the Bar I would probably have to serve as an indentured servant for a few years to earn my stripes, which did not appeal to me as an adult learner who wanted to have an immediate impact on improving society. In addition, I could not see a clear path to making a difference as a lawyer, but I could see a promising one as a teacher, which I was already qualified to do. This was reinforced each time I would visit faculty and advisors at the New School of Social Research (now the New School University, which was located across the street from Cardozo on 5th avenue); they always asked why I was studying law instead of making a difference doing what I really wanted to do.

So … I left, became unemployed, and moved back to Massachusetts, where I set my sights on making a difference. I continued to read about IP and wrote a bit, but spent most of my time looking for work, which after nearly six months I found with Harcourt Higher Education —my first brush with for-profit education.

Wow … this posting was supposed to be about the short-lived Harcourt Higher Education project, outsourced learning design, flexible learning ambitions, corporate values, and the results of being bought by an even-larger publisher that did not really understand what they bought. Instead, I’ve told you about problems of accessing educational resources, which I think points to a recurring theme in my experience with distance learning.

Next time, the uncertain terrain of for-profit education and being bought and sold by two publishers in 24 hours!

Continued from Introduction, Part 2… These were the halcyon days of online education for me. There were no approvals, or administrative overhead; I was the instructional designer, course developer, and teacher/facilitator; nobody really knew what I was doing, so I did not have to ask permission. There was immediate gratification.

This post is getting a bit long, so I will break it up into another… and here it is…

While I was working in Slovakia at Comenius and for the UMUC, European Division, I was also teaching as an adjunct professor at the International University of Vienna, which at the time was called the International Christian University (ICU)—founded decades earlier as a mission of the Church of Christ. By the time I arrived in 1996 ICU was more college than mission, offering a reasonably secular curriculum of business programming on the undergraduate and graduate levels. I would guess that around a third of all our learners were Islamic, about half had spent some of their lives in an environment that included military conflict, around 90% were from economically developing or least-developed societies, and many were in Vienna on refugee status as a result of the Balkanization of the former Yugoslavia and violence in east central Africa. As you can imagine, the student body was absolutely fascinating.

The first class that I taught at ICU was an evening graduate course supporting the master’s degree in International Business Management. It was a survey course titled something like International Business Relations. In typical lecture fashion I found myself standing at the front of the class addressing 20 or so learners, facilitating introductions and reviewing the course syllabus. While reviewing the course protocols and assignments I touched on the fact that papers were to be individual efforts and that too much collaboration among learners in the class would be considered cheating. Within a few seconds of making this point a gentleman sitting toward the back of the room raised his hand and informed me that the standard at ICU was that papers were done in teams. As I learned later, the vocal student was a “dominant” male force in the program named Ali, who was from Southern Lebanon. While debating with Ali about my pedagogical rationale for having some independent (non-group) work assigned to the class, I noticed that a number of the half-dozen or so women wearing headscarves were sitting quietly in the very front of the class, moving their heads side-to-side, slowly, eyes cast down, so as not to draw any attention from the male and Western students sitting behind them. Their behavior told me that Ali was trying to take advantage of my being a new faculty member and that I should not take his assertions as fact. This provided a hint that there were dynamics within the class that I was not accustomed to.

During the next few semesters I noticed that a single comment by a male student would quiet a female’s argument or dialog. I also noticed that when two males would have a disagreement, it could be very disruptive, resulting in intense and incessant bickering. It was in large part because of these dynamics that I first started thinking about the use of distance technologies to enable more open discussion. I had gotten a National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) “collaboration tool” called Habanero installed, but we could not get our deployment to run reliably enough to actually use it. The idea was to create an opportunity for anonymous interaction among students, reducing the role of status in social interaction. As a poor substitute, we used Web e-mail to facilitate some discussion. This way the learners could open their own accounts and communicate without exposing their identities. Although Web e-mail did not work very well, it was under these somewhat challenging circumstances that I started seriously and practically thinking about the pedagogical and social impact of online learning. Until this point, the reason for online learning from my perspective was about achieving enhanced access in a rather traditional and obvious sense (geography and mobility), not about the impacts of cultural norms on “access” and expression—in this case, access to the learning process with equal status.

Well this post is getting too long. All of my online learning experience to this point was very craft-like. My use of online learning at the University of Maryland, European Division, Comenius University, and ICU had been very independent. There were few organizational expectations about scalability, quality, and service. This, of course, had to eventually change. More on this in future posts.

Once again, if you would like to share your experiences, please feel free to post comments, or write and submit your story.

Continued from the first introduction… This is how I was introduced to online education. I was a facilitator, lived in Europe, and saw ways for online learning to meet my travel reduction needs, create a more coherent learning experience, and to meet the needs of a highly mobile and motivated group of adult learners. What could be more perfect? I’ll tell you …

Well, these were pretty early days for online learning. Our learning environment was a program called Majordomo, which was designed to automate the management of Internet mailing lists. It is a list server. So, for my first semester, it was all about communicating through group email. There was no point in pretending that we were in a virtual “classroom” because there was no physical space metaphor, it was all Greenfield. At first, until I managed to negotiate a little server space at a local research center to set up a web site, there was no graphical interface or persistent bulletin board. It was all about quasi-structured dialog. This was incredibly empowering. While I used to lose learners for weeks at a time because they were deployed into the “field” or for whole terms when they were deployed to combat sites, I would now be hearing from them every night.

I soon found that I was increasingly extending my face-to-face classes, posting materials, accepting electronic submissions, and leveraging email. It was all pretty primitive, it was mostly about learners downloading content, and me pushing email, but still it allowed learners to get access to resources more or less conveniently. While I was teaching for the University of Maryland European Division, I was also teaching on the Faculty of Management at Comenius University in Bratislava Slovakia.

Comenius University had a 6% admission rate. For incoming freshmen, admission was based on the combined scores on a mathematics and English test. The students who scored the highest were admitted until the class was filled. Of course, whenever high stakes are involved, some favors were granted, but still on the whole, the top 20% of the learners admitted to this programme were among the brightest young men and women I have ever met. I was there in the mid-90’s around 5 years after the Velvet Revolution. The Faculty of Management was founded on the idea of providing a western “business” education, but still operated in a largely Soviet style university system. As I was teaching a mandatory capstone MIS course, I was constantly being asked to negotiate an educational system that wanted students to all take courses together onsite in orderly fashion, and with learners who had opportunities to participate in study abroad programmes and internships across the globe.

I was of course very supportive of expanding learner’s experiences, so I would create a sub-section of my course and have the learners who were studying abroad or involved with an internship, take the course as a group online, once again, using very simple technologies. Students liked it, I felt good about enabling learners to do something important, and compared with their class-bound colleagues, they seemed to produce better work, and at the end of the term, when they were called home, they also performed on average better on a traditional final examination than their counterparts.

I could see all sorts of opportunities and benefits with using the communication technologies to extend the learning space. Learners could be more mobile, I could travel more freely, learners could communicate with each other more easily, and content could be more current. In Slovakia at the time, it was very difficult to get modern western text books that were affordable. I tried to respect copyright by not photocopying textbooks, but instead work within fair use policy. Use of selected web sites and other electronic resources made access to some quality materials economically feasible. These were the halcyon days of online education for me. There were no approvals, or administrative overhead; I was the instructional designer, course developer, and teacher/facilitator; nobody really knew what I was doing, so I did not have
to ask permission. There was immediate gratification.

This post is getting a bit long, so I will break it up into another. In the meantime, if you want to share your formal or informal online, open, distance, or flexible education experiences, please feel free to comment or post your own submission. In addition, if you have any comments or insights about working in Slovakia or Central and Eastern Europe in general, it would be great to read about them.

For the first time ever I am registering for the Sloan-C conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks. Most of my colleagues here at Penn State have been involved actively in one way or the next with Sloan-C for many years. This was true also of my associates at the State University of New York. Although I have referenced Sloan resources in reports and have been tangentially involved with at least one Sloan supported project, I have not been a formal member of the community, which is interesting now that I think about it. I note that the 2006 ALN meeting is the 12^th, which means that when the 2^nd annual meeting was being planned, I was teaching my first online course with the University of Maryland, European Division. At that point UMUC had not yet administratively consolidated much of its international operation in Europe and Asia.

At the time I was living in Vienna, Austria and commuting to Bratislava, Slovakia to teach in the middle of the week. Then I would commute over the weekends to various sites in Germany to teach face-to-face courses on alternating weekends. On the map Vienna does not look all that far from many cities in Germany, but the trips would normally range from 8 to 10 hours each way, which was a significant time investment to spend 2 8-hour days in an education center.

In early 1996 I was asked if I would like to participate in the first effort to facilitate online classes for the U. Maryland in Europe. I enthusiastically agreed. Not only did I see this as a way to reduce a hefty 16-hour commute to work, but I saw it as a way to achieve more consistent contact with learners. The face-to-face courses were run on alternating weekends during an 8 week period, which meant getting together for 4 weekends over 2 months. The online classes would be offered over a 16-week period and my expectations were that we would be working together continuously rather than periodically.

This is how I was introduced to online education. I was a facilitator, lived in Europe, and saw ways for online learning to meet my travel reduction needs, create a more coherent learning experience, and to meet the needs of a highly mobile and motivated group of adult learners. What could be more perfect? I’ll tell you …

During the next few months I would like to share our experiences and together craft a collective story about online learning from multiple first perspectives. So, please feel free to provide comments, make your own contributions through this site, and make suggestions about how we might organize the story and what we learn. For me, the place to start is at the beginning, which, of course, is not the only tact. Since each of our stories has a beginning, even if it starts now, it seems to me that we have a common point of reference.

I would like to use this blog space to craft a collective story as indicated above, but to also comment on things of interest, share experiences and ideas and, when the mood takes you, to engage on those topics as well as we can. In addition, I intend on publishing a series of interviews with colleagues (most of whom I do not know yet) who are doing work at places that tend not to get a whole lot of attention. I would like to publish the interviews and then provide a day or two of discussion using techniques that are most appropriate. More on this later …