Sloan-C - Publications - Journal: JALN - Vol 5:2:
Assessing Teaching Presence in a Computer Conferencing Context
"ABSTRACT
This paper presents a tool developed for the purpose of assessing
teaching presence in online courses that make use of computer conferencing, and preliminary results from the use of this tool. The method of analysis is based on Garrison, Anderson, and Archer's
[1] model of critical thinking and practical inquiry in a computer conferencing context. The concept of
teaching presence is constitutively defined as having three categories - design and organization, facilitating discourse, and direct instruction. Indicators that we search for in the computer conference transcripts identify each category. Pilot testing of the instrument reveals interesting differences in the extent and type of teaching presence found in different graduate level online courses.
Marshall McLuhan is famous for his insight that "the medium is the message," implying that the impact of the medium is integral to and in some cases determinant of the message. Certainly teaching in an online environment is influenced by the absence of the non-verbal communication that occurs in the face-to-face settings of conventional education, and the reduction in the amount of paralinguistic information transmitted, as compared to some other modes of distance education such as video or audio teleconferencing. However, McLuhan also noted that each new medium takes a preceding medium for its content, and that the process of interpreting a new medium in terms of an older one (horseless carriage effect) filters our conception of the newer medium.
Conclusion: "This process of viewing the new medium through the conceptual filter developed for the older medium necessarily colors our understanding of the teaching process in a computer mediated communications (CMC) context. Part of the challenge, as mentioned above, is to develop compensatory behaviors for the relative lack of non-verbal and paralinguistic communication in a text-based medium such as computer conferencing. Another part of the challenge is to overcome the difficulty of conceiving the role of the teacher in online courses within the long established conceptual framework that we have built in the context of conventional, face-to-face teaching. Feenberg [36] suggests that this is problematic because teachers have difficulty transposing leadership skills developed in the rich medium to the leaner medium of the text-based conference. We are not convinced that the function of teaching changes, though certainly its manifestation looks quite different in this mediated context. Especially in these "pioneering days" of online learning the thoughtful design of learning activities is critical to the attainment of educational outcomes. In the process of designing and using these tools, teachers are forced to be learners themselves and like all who experience learning, the learners themselves are changed. As Kiesler [37] notes, "skill changes, though triggered by the adoption of a technology, less reflect the technology itself than they are outcomes of setting up and putting in technology, and of the structure of the workplace and groups into which the technology is deployed" (p. 162)."
http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/JALN/v5n2/v5n2_anderson.asp retrieved 10.21.07 by JMS
