Professor Presence

with
Dr. David White

Walters State Community College

 moderated by

Skip Sparkman & Mary Nunaley
Volunteer State Community College

a Tennessee Board of Regents
Regents Online Campus Collaborative Podcast

Sparkman: Welcome to our event today.  The title of this is Professor Presence and Nonjudgmental Rigor.  My name is Skip Sparkman at Volunteer State College.  I have with me on my far right Doctor David White, who is a professor of English at Walters State Community College.  David is developer of English 1020 in the RODP program and has been an online instructor for years now – several years – since probably even prior to RODP, David, if I’m not mistaken.  He is also a member of the Regents Online Degree Curriculum Committee.  To my immediate right is Mary Nunaley.  She is an instructional designer at Volunteer State Community College and an assistant professor of Hotel and Restaurant Management, and each of the three of us are mentors in the RODP program for many other of the instructors in the program.  David, it’s wonderful for you to be with us today; Andrea Sanders will be joining us later in one of our podcasts on nonjudgmental rigor.  But professor presence is our topic today.  I don’t suppose there is an instructor anywhere in education who hasn’t at some point said, “You know, a former teacher had an impact on me.  A former teacher may be the role model that I used to decide on a career in education.”  And I was thinking about that before we began today.  I can probably identify several teachers that had a major impact on my decision to get into education.  Probably the same for you; and I think those are the people I think of who have professor presence.  How would you describe professor presence?

White: Skip, the term that I use is professor presence just to say that in online teaching you’re able to create a person, a professor, that’s better than your on-ground version of your presence in the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom.

Sparkman: So it’s be-all-you-want-to-be, huh?

White: It can be be-all-you-want-to-be.  It takes a while to develop.  I think most of us who’ve taught on-ground in the traditional brick-and-mortar classroom have the experience of teaching a class, developing a class, getting it going.  We teach it again; we teach it a third or fourth.  By the time we teach it five, six, seven times, we really come to be able to go in and give lecture thirty-seven over and over again.  It’s a performance that we’re able to pull out of our hat.  We get it down to sometimes sort of a routine, and we get to know the pauses that we need to give inside the classroom. We know the kinds of things that we can say that will elicit student input and discussions, and so on and so forth; and as we keep working on that and working on that, we become more and more polished in our presence inside the regular, brick-and-mortar classroom.  But when you switch over to teach online, you find that teaching online is a very different medium.  And when you switch over to teach online, when you begin to do that, you really see that there are new possibilities, and it is a different medium; and the different medium brings out different things for us as professors.  And so, as we teach and begin to teach online, we’re oftentimes concerned about “How do I do this?” or “I don’t know how to do that,” or “What’s HTML?” or “What do you mean by that third-party vendor software?”  I thought I was going to teach a class.  And so as you begin working with those sorts of things, and you get that sort-of under control, I think, at least for me, my attention shifted to, “Let me think about myself as a more polished performer, like I did in the classroom.”  But, online is different in the sense that you develop a course, you put in lectures inside what might be a course content or a course module, and you get those things sort of under control, you get testing under control and under your belt, and class discussions work so much better, and then you have a little time to start thinking about, “How do I come across to my students, and is that something I can consciously control?” And in the same way – you do that in the same way that you do when you’ve been teaching for a while in the regular brick-and-mortar classroom.  So by the time you’re teaching five or six or seven years in the online environment, you start thinking about issues other than just the simple technology, and you start thinking about issues of, “How do I come across to my students?  Am I the best professor I can be?  What sort of tricks do I have at my disposal that could make for a better classroom?”

Nunaley: Well, Dave, you’ve made it very clear that teaching online [and] teaching in the traditional classroom are different.  What about learning?  Do you think there’s a fundamental difference between learning online and learning in that traditional brick-and-mortar classroom?

White: Absolutely.

Nunaley: OK.

White:  I really think, having dealt with the online classroom for quite a while now, that when we get the right learner with online, making sure that there’s a mesh there – and  there does need to be some prior issues taken came of before those students come into the online classroom – “Does he know how to e-mail? Does he have some basic competencies?  Is he motivated and self-disciplined enough in order to carry out the projects, the assignments of the classroom without somebody standing in the front of the room each Monday for him?” – after we get to that point, then, yes, I think that learning online is fundamentally different for the students.  Many students in my regular brick-and-mortar classroom would come in, and I would ask a question, we would proceed with what I would call class discussion.  And, I would have four or five students who contributed brilliant contributions to the discussion.  Woe to all of us on that day when they weren’t there!  It fell flat.  Now, move to the online environment and you put up an assignment that says, “Students must post to the discussion board at least once a week.  The posting must include a quotation from the textbook, a citation in the correct format, and it should be interpretive, rather than summative, and it should include at least three hundred words by the end of the week.  Please make one reply to one other student (“I agree” is not a reply).”  And when you get to that point you see that students are participating.  Students who are in online cannot passively, as I like to say, drag 185 pounds of meat into the classroom, put that down in the front desk, and then drag that 185 pounds of meat out of the classroom in an online environment and expect to learn.  Students have to be actively engaged; they have to read.  And that also brings up the issue that the online environment in fundamentally different for learning in the sense that it’s a stable environment.  I put up a lecture, students can go back to the lecture, can look at it again, can think about it again, can reread it.  I’m not going to flatter myself that he’s going to read it twelve times, but he can go back and read it endlessly if he wanted to.  However, in the regular, traditional classroom, the student comes in, listens to what the teacher says, takes a couple of notes, may look over to see what someone else has written, takes a couple of notes, and then goes out of the classroom.  What’s left of the lecture in the regular brick-and-mortar classroom is the notes.  Now, in online learning, learning is not mediated by student notes.  Learning is there; learning has to be active.  The student has to go in, the student has to do.  So it’s much more active, and I do say to people who will listen that it’s much broader learning, much deeper learning, and much more complex.  Again, with the proviso that we have the right student inside that classroom.

Sparkman:  Dave, I from time to time visited with faculty members who have focused primarily on the face-to-face classroom setting, and I’ve said to them this, “I sometimes get to know my students in a deeper fashion in the online environment than I do in the classroom environment, and they look at me with a little glimpse of surprise there.  But I tell them in the face-to-face classroom experience, there will be, in today’s hectic schedule, about seventy percent of those students who are there for class time only because, not that they don’t want to spend more time with the instructor, they have to go.  They have family obligations, they have work obligations.  And there will be three or four students who will hang around and you get to visit with, and you get to know those students.  In the online environment, I feel like I get to know each of those students a little more deeper simply because they’re able to express themselves to me in post discussions and send e-mails on a schedule that fits their lifestyle.

White: Well, that is the promise of asynchronous learning, and I think that most online learning (today at least) is asynchronous.  And that is that people learn when they have time to mesh their schedule of learning, studying, writing, reading with their schedule they have in their real life that they have.  And I agree with you entirely about getting to know your students better in the online environment that you ever do in the on-ground environment.  Students do have time and leisure to compose a nice, long introduction of self.  Technically, I tell my students, “Compose it in Word, highlight, copy, post to discussion board, right click, paste.  And so I see a much more reflective sort of introduction of self.  And if I could for just a minute, I’d like to go off on that and say just this week a student of mine, I had a little question about whether he was actually the student doing the work that I was seeing, although those of us like myself who teach English feel that we really understand voice inside the writing, and so we really don’t worry about plagiarism, et cetera, except when that voice we talk about is not there in the writing.  And this – Garland is his name – Garland had given me wonderful postings, enormous amount of discussions; I asked for three hundred words, he probably gave me three thousand a week – in-depth, analytical, interpretive, correct format, flawless grammar.  He did that week after week after week, essay after essay after essay, and I thought, “Hm, absent a retinal scan, do I know that Garland is Garland and Garland is doing Garland’s work?”  So I asked the question – e-mail – “You did a really nice job in X work.  I was really surprised at the depth of analysis, and I really commend you on how well you’ve done throughout the course.  Would you tell me a little bit more about yourself?  I know that. . .”  And then I proceeded to talk about the things that I knew about him.  And Garland gave me three thousand words two weeks later about his history of being in parochial schools and being the son of a quite wealthy family, and he had been ostracized by the family for misdeeds, and now he’s forty-two, he’s living in the hills of East Tennessee, he has no access to a computer, but he comes to the branch campus in Greeneville.  And he proceeded to tell me personal issues, and so on and so forth.  Garland will stick with me for the rest of my life.

Sparkman: You’ll know Garland.

White: I’ll know Garland.

Nunaley: You will always remember Garland.

White: Exactly.  And going back to what we said a little off camera earlier – how small life is, how small the world is – the director of the center in that campus had asked me to come and do some training for teachers who were moving to online, and so I was in the room.  It was a very small classroom or lab situation.  Faculty members were there.  Scrawled on a chalkboard – remember chalk?  Remember chalkboards?  Scrawled on a chalkboard was, “Lab is closed for faculty training.”  And in the middle of the training a young man walks in expecting the lab to be open, and under his arm is the textbook for the class that I teach.  And I know that the class that I teach online that semester is offered at our college only online that semester because it doesn’t conflict with the on-ground versions of that class.  And so anyone who has under his arm the textbook for my class has to be taking my class online.  So he walked in and I said, “Garland?”  “Yes?”  And so the one day the entire semester I had been at this campus, there he was.

Sparkman:  That’s phenomenal.  You’ve made mention a couple of time already in our discussion about the student in the online course who is the right student for online learning.  How do you handle a student who is not ready to handle the content in an online course?

White: Well, let me first address that issue by backing up and saying there are some things that I don’t think we can address.  If the student is not motivated, if the student is not self-directed, if the student is not the kind of person who can forge ahead on his own, put himself on a schedule to do and so on, quite frankly I don’t think I can change that.  I can encourage that, and I can encourage the kind of behaviors that I think are symptomatic of motivation, self-direction, and self-discipline; but I don’t really think I could make a huge change in an adult who comes to me with those sorts of motivations and intentions.  However, that student who does come to me in online with a good self-discipline, motivated, wants to learn, I can really do much more with him or her online than I ever could on-ground.  Back in the old brick-and-mortar days, if I wanted to show students how to go back and understand something that they were already supposed to know – let me take my discipline for example – if I were teaching a sophomore literature class, the students had to have two semesters of freshman composition before they came into the class as a prerequisite.  So I would assume the students knew how to do certain things: cite; integrate quotations from a source into a paper; analyze a piece of literature; and so on and so forth.  If that is not true, than I need to go back and do some sort of remediation.  And so in the old brick-and-mortar classroom, I would have to drag in books, and I would have to pull in handouts, and I would have to pull him or her aside, “Can you wait for me after class?  I need to see you before next class, next time.  Can you come to my office?”  And as you were saying earlier, oftentimes in the regular brick-and-mortar classroom, that’s just not feasible given the schedules that both faculty and students have.  Online – totally different.

Nunaley: Alright.

White: It’s all there.  All I do is say, “Do you need help on this?” Hyperlink, and I pull them out to websites and explanations, and of course if I don’t find the website that’s exactly right, I can build it.

Sparkman: And in doing so, you don’t have the conflict of holding other students back or making them wait or finding separate times to deal with this.

White: Exactly; all of that’s taken care of in terms of the individual student is off doing what the individual student needs to do at that time.  In some ways it’s like the industrial paradigm of just-in-time inventory; in the same way that businesses have that just-in-time inventory, now they don’t keep things in stock, you hyperlink from a class and you go to enormous amounts of information for students that they can find to bring them up to speed, to review something that was there.  And the same thing was true of enrichment.  There are certain things that only one or two of my student will really be able to understand.  When I teach Inferno, there is a website by Princeton University which is called Digital Dante – enormously funded, beautifully done, extensively researched, peerless website.  Three or four of my students would appreciate, understand, and be enriched by going to there.  And so I don’t ask every student.  I just say, “Optional: available on the web” – hyperlink.

Nunaley: And also, in addition to remediation, prevent some embarrassment –

White: Right, right.

Nunaley: For students that perhaps are shy to ask a question, or they are embarrassed because they forgot something (they may have been an A student).  So to avoid some of that or that peer pressure in the physical classroom.

White: Exactly, and also the back-talk that you have in an online class enables that to happen.  If I sent an e-mail to Susie, no one else knows that I sent an e-mail to Susie.  However, if I’m in a regular brick-and-mortar classroom, everybody sees our conversation.  They may not know what the content is, but they’ll see whether we’re happy or sad as we talk.

Nunaley: Right, they’ll know that Susie’s been picked out of the crowd.

Sparkman: Even if you say, “Could you see me after class for a second,” there’s still some –

White: There’s a stigma attached.  It’s like being called to the principal’s office.  Nobody wants to be called to the principal’s office.  Everybody wants to look like everybody else. No one wants to be a special student.  But in online, all of that is back-talk; and all of that goes on flawlessly, seamlessly, while instruction takes place elsewhere.

Nunaley: Excellent.  Well, you’ve talked a lot about the seamless transition, the benefits to the students.  You’ve been teaching online since 1999.  Have you seen any changes in your own teaching?

White:  Yes, absolutely.  When I talk to folks about those kinds of changes that have come along to me, I like to talk about two things of outward show that show me that those things have come about.  But I’ve become much more reflective; I have much more time now.  I’m not tyrannized by waiting for 10:15.  Is it 10:13, or is it 10:19?  Am I late?  Do I have time to think about my next place to be?  With teaching online, the schedule is back in my corner in the same way it is for students.  They can learn at the time of day or the day of the week – as long as due dates and deadlines are met – that’s most beneficial to them.  And in the same way for me, I’ve become – I have now sections of three, four, five hours to think and to plan and to work on student papers and to think about improving my class.  So I’ve become much more reflective, I think, about the experience that students have.  I think I’ve become a much better professor.  I think I’m a better professor online than I ever was a professor in the brick-and-mortar classroom.  I really think I’m transformed by using the online environment.  Two pieces of information that tell me about that change inside myself is I had a colleague who came down the hall one day – and I do still go to the hall, to the office, the brick-and-mortar office – and she said, “I had a dream about you, Dave, and in the dream you were just sitting back with your cup of coffee.”  And she would say, “I am so frantically rushing and trying to do these things, and you’re just content.”  And I said, “Carla, this is what you’re dream meant.  You’re dream meant you’re in the right place.  You’re a young faculty member. You’re working for promotion.  You’re working for tenure.  You’re working for your professionalism in your career.  You’re working, that exactly what you need to do.  But I am content.  I am happy.  I’m much better a professor, much better professional, inside the online classroom.”  So that was the dream that showed to me that these changes had taken place in me, and some people had recognized it.  The other piece of evidence that I offer that I’ve undergone a sort of a radical shift, a transformation, is that about four or five years ago I went to the chair of my department and I said, “Jim, I have a file cabinet, and I don’t need it any more.”  It was a very nice file cabinet; this is a status symbol for professors, you know.  It wasn’t this kind, it was this kind [motions to indicate wide-drawer lateral file].

Nunaley: Nice, yes.

White: So, as I moved online, everything was electronic.  And as I have been putting more and more things inside online learning, everything is now in my jump drive, and so my life is inside the jump drive and in the servers and in the WebCT courses –

Nunaley: Instead of the file cabinet.

White: So the file cabinet could go.  So those two things show me that there’s an inward change.  Those are just outward signs of that inward change.  So yes, I think I’ve become much more deliberative, much more reflective, a much better person, much better professor online, and a nicer person.

Sparkman: Let me follow up on that for a second.  If in fact this professor presence has evolved for you in the online environment, how does that make you change your teaching style in the brick-and-mortar classroom when and if you go back?

White: I hope I never go back.

Nunaley: Wow, that’s a good answer.

Sparkman: But there are other faculty members who like to go there some.

Nunaley: Right, and you do training as well, and that’s a type of teaching.

Sparkman: They like to merge to two.

White: I understand absolutely.  There was a time when I was all online; and there was a change at my institution, and I had to go back and pick up a classroom in the regular brick-and-mortar.  And it did change some of the things I did.  I’m an English professor, so I deal with papers.  The big change in my on-ground class was that papers were no longer papers.  I graded electronically, and all of that went into the old online version of the class.  And I think it did give me much more communication with students when I was in a regular on-ground classroom after being in an online classroom.  Much more instantaneous, we didn’t have to wait till next class time to clear up a confusion.  I never took a paper paper.  I never took a handout into the classroom.  I never took a syllabus into the classroom.  It was all up there in our online companion site for our on-ground classroom.  So it made some changes there, too.  I forgot your question.

Nunaley: Well, it was just about going back into the classroom and how it changed you.

White: So, yes, going back into the classroom, I was different for my on-ground version, and I think I was a better man for it.  I think I was a better professor there for it also.

Nunaley: Along those lines, too, you talk about revising classes and making them better.  Now that you’ve taught online for several years, what changes do you see in the “classroom,” for lack of a better term, that you’ve made, and how do you continually develop or look at that class?

White: My online classes now are a little distant from me in the sense that I am not the classroom.  When I was in brick-and-mortar classroom, I was the classroom.  I was on a stage.  I was performing.  And I might give a bad performance one day and a better one the next day.  When you have online, it’s an object, and that object can be revised.  Just as you have a paper that has a rough draft to it and then another draft and another draft and another draft, my online classes are up there in my files, and my HTML files are given to revision.  I can revise that.  So they are capable of being endlessly revised; so I think I have a better classroom now online than I had when I first began.  Also, the other thing I have done is I have given my class to other faculty members.  In the regular on-ground classrooms or back in the days when I began teaching and there was no other classroom other than on-ground (maybe a couple of video tapes here and there) you - as a young professor, you might hope to aspire to the syllabus of one of the old hands, or you might hope that he or she would allow you to adapt the handout that they had on Faulkner or might use or pick up a trick that that person has.  Now, I give my entire class to other faculty members.  So I say, “Here’s the class.  Would you like to teach it?”  And I developed it; I can instantly import, backup, import, plug it in, change the name, you’re ready to go.  So they’re not teaching from my syllabus, they’re not teaching from my handout, they are teaching my entire class.  It’s a whole thing that I’ve given over to them.  And when you move to that sort of model, when that happens just as it happens in RODP with master copies [and] sectional faculty, you get input from people about the class.  One person said, “This assignment right here is a leap from the last assignment, and before we take the paper I would really like for us to do Y.” “Yeah, you’re right.  Now, how can we do that?”  So that collaboration that takes place really takes place on a very deep level, takes place on a very detailed level, and it’s very hands-on even though it’s electronic, it’s very hands-on about the exact instruction, assignments, and so on.  So that has taken place with me, and that’s really given me a little distance to know that I am not my class, my class is not me, but I can look at the class because it’s out here.  And so can other people.  And as those other perspectives keep coming in to the class, and other people with other stances on instruction in English and so on talk with me, I have a better informed, more privileged (if you like) position, of looking on my class and seeing how it works.

Sparkman: Let me follow up on that for a second.  Since 1999, have you had to deal with the emotional ownership of that class?  In other words, was it difficult for you first to give other people your class to teach?

White: Well, mostly, the emotional component was fright.

Sparkman: OK.

White: It’s like having twelve people in your brick-and-mortar classroom lined up across the back with camcorders and notepads –

Sparkman: Right.

White: And thinking, “How am I doing this moment?  How am I doing this moment?  I’m not really sure.”  So it does have a lot of emotional investment to it, and you’ve also – if you’ve developed your course, and you’ve worked on it since 1999 or since the last three years or even the last one year – you really feel, “I’ve really got a lot of investment, energy, time, effort, thinking, reflection, doing, learning some new technologies, and so on.  Am I ready to hand this over?”  And it does take a leap of faith to say, “I think I will be OK.  On the other side of this river – the river is called Giving Up Control of My Class to Someone Else – do I have the faith down here to pull that out and stand naked professionally –

Nunaley: Right.

White: In front of other folks.

Sparkman: Now let me approach it from the standpoint of those other faculty members using “your class.”  Are they able to establish their professor presence in your class?

White: If they want to.  If they want to.

Sparkman: And that will take an effort, will it not?

White: It will take an effort.  A lot of – I don’t want to pick on administrators – but a lot of administrators think that when we build these classes and hand them off to be taught by somebody else that it’s a machine, that you wind it up and then you hand it to some other person and then to another person, and it’s the first day of class and you hit Start –

Sparkman: Yeah.

White: And it goes.  It doesn’t work like that.  That’s not how it happens.

Sparkman: They’re not off-the-shelf products.

White: They’re not off-the-shelf products.  They’re not automatons.  They’re not self-contained universes.  They are things that have been developed that might help somebody in teaching.  And even though it’s the entire course, it can still be ruined, sabotaged, wrecked –

Sparkman: Or improved.

Nunaley: Or improved.

White: Or improved by someone else teaching it.  And my experience has been mostly that it is improved by having somebody else teach it.  But you have to have the dialog surrounding the class.  The open communication has to be there between the developer and user.  I’ve done that several times in RODP.  I keep lists each semester of everybody who’s teaching my class – a distribution list – send out e-mails, and I usually title the email “Error #12.”

Nunaley: Good way to do it.

White: Send it out. “Error #35,” and, of course, they will all talk back to me collegially, “Could we do this?” And I say, “That sounds fine if that’s what you want to do in your classroom.  I’m not sure I want to do it now, but I might do it next semester. And if we did that, what would it take to do that?”  And it’s that developing, following through, making new HTML pages, and setting up new assignments that’s the tough part of giving energy to planning and designing and carrying it out.

Nunaley: But it also sounds like the students, because of this process, end up with a much better course, if it’s well designed, than in the face-to-face classroom or traditional brick-and-mortar when you don’t necessarily get that feedback.  So you think you’re giving a great performance, but you really don’t know if you are.

White: Absolutely right.  So it’s a struggle, I think, for the profession to deal with assessment and evaluation, on-going, continuous improvement of online instruction.  One little thing that I do right now besides getting the feedback from instructors teaching my class – and I’ve also handed that class over to two other people on my campus and said, “Here’s the class; you can teach it,” and I’ve been working with them and hearing their input – they’ve only taught it once online or twice online, so they’re not fully comfortable with technology and so on – but, inside my classroom I build an anonymous discussion board, and I post a message there that says, “Evaluate this class.”  I put it up the last two weeks.  I give them the objectives for the course, and I say, “This is what we were trying to do.  What helped you learn?  What didn’t help you learn?  What other suggestions do you have for the course?”  That’s much more immediate feedback for me than waiting half a term until I get my print-outs from whoever gives me my print-outs about how to think about changing the class.  So I try to get input from students.  Also, you usually have a frontiersman in your class who is going ahead of the pack –

Sparkman: A scout.

Nunaley: Right.

White: Yes, exactly.  And I will find that person because he or she would say, “Can I go ahead?  It’s not time to do X, but I would like to do.  Is that OK with you?”  And I would say, “Sure, fine, just know that I’m not going to release the test until X day or so on and so forth, but if you’d like to work ahead that’s fine with me.”  And so then I go back – and again in the back-talk that nobody sees – and I say, “If you find a link that’s broken, if you find a page that is mistitled, if you find something wrong, if you see a misspelled word, please let me know, and I’d appreciate it.  So, I try to get the feedback from the students in an informal way, and from the scout student – also, one of the things we did at Walters State recently was to have a panel of students who were online students, and we asked them to come in and talk to faculty about what they liked online, what they didn’t like online, and what they would like the online professor to be – and it was very informative to us. [A text transcript is available.] And what we found was that students want immediate contact with a faculty member defined as at least within twenty-four hours.  How prescient of RODP!

Nunaley: That’s right.

White: They wanted a replete class – the class is fully developed when they come in.  They want an alternate way of communicating with the professor just in case their course management system is down – an emergency phone number, a secretary’s phone number, a college e-mail, an outside e-mail.  And they wanted the professor to be just as firm, with just as high of standards, in the online classroom as those firm, demanding professors in that on-ground.  Not that they’re expected to do something that’s totally outside their capabilities, but that deadlines are firm, and we will do this, we’re not going to change things in the middle of the stream.

Nunaley: Right, so fair, but firm and consistent.

White: Yeah, exactly.  Surprise!

Nunaley: But it’s good to hear it from the students.

White: Right.  It was very revealing to a lot of the faculty members who are just now beginning to teach online, because they thought, “I don’t know what this thing is called online.”

Nunaley: Right.

White: “I don’t know how to respond to it.  I know how to build a class on-ground, but what do I do over here online?  Are students so much different online that I don’t know my audience.”  But they gave us the same sort of answers that if you stopped and thought about what students do and what their life is like – pretty well communicate, communicate standards, let us know exactly what you want us to do, and we’ll do it.

Sparkman: Dave, you already talked some about other people teaching your course, the course you developed, and standing back from it.  Expand on that some for me.

White: When I develop a course, and I send it off into the world, other people talk to me about how the course went for them, how the course went for their students, and it really gives me a better perspective about the course and about possible course improvements and changes to the course that I can make or that we can make or that they can make in their own classrooms or their own versions of that course.  That’s really been a key part for me in my own development as a faculty member and as a designer of online courses.  That is, it lets me get a little distance from my class, it lets me think about my class in a little bit better way than I have before.  When I’m in the classroom and someone coughs in the regular brick-and-mortar classroom, I have to attend to it.  If someone comes in late and says, “Oh, was there anything due yesterday?” or, “Will we do anything important tomorrow?” – those things take me away from my central focus.  But having the classroom as an object that is – it’s an electronic reality, even though it’s virtual, it is an electronic reality, and it is a thing that can be contemplated – it gives me a little stance off to start thinking about making the class more replete, making the class fuller, addressing the issues of remediation and enrichment, of addressing the issues of, “Am I reaching in each student to his or her ability the goals of the class that I want to reach?”  So I’ve got a different vantage point; I can stand back from it.  And sometimes I think of it in terms that we have in literature and in art, a term called aesthetic distance, and I think of that when I think about contemplating my own classroom in terms of improving the classroom and improving instruction.  Aesthetic distance means essentially that I may experience a statue or a painting, or I may read a book, and I may think, “That’s the best book I have ever read in my entire life!” And then three weeks later I think, “Well, now, maybe not the best book, but a good book.”  And then two years later, “Well, one of. . . Well, no, it was OK.  I liked it.”  That’s the aesthetic distance.  You put the object down, the object of contemplation, which is a poem or a story or a statue or architecture or whatever, and you stand back off from it – you get a little distance from the object – and going online and being able to teach online and develop these courses has really been able to give me that distance from the course, and I really appreciate that in terms of I think it’s a much better stance for a professor than being immersed in the class at all times.

Sparkman: It’s both a chronological distance and an emotional distance, isn’t it?

White: That’s true, it is.  Having other people teach the course makes me know that we really have to talk about this thing in ways that don’t offend me, I’m not easy to take offense about those sorts of things, and it also spurs talk about, “Why do you want this change in the course?  What will that bring about?  Is that a personal peccadillo that you have of your own, or is it some larger issue that addresses the discipline, that addresses the learning inside that?”  And it also gives me that time that, since we have master courses that we have on many of our local campuses and on RODP, that object is available at all times, including now, with no students in it, that I can work on it as I see something that’s going on right now in instruction I need to make a change, and in those long breaks that we have.  They’re not long are they?

Nunaley: Well, they’re supposed to be.

White: The winter break, and the summer break, and so on.

Nunaley: Right.

White: I have that classroom available for contemplation, fro reflection, deliberation, and improvement at any time that I want to do that.  So, yes, it’s the emotional, it’s also the intellectual, it’s also the chronological.

Sparkman: Sure.  Our special guest today has been Dr. David White, professor of English at Walters State Community College.  This is Mary Nunaley to my immediate right.  Thank you, Mary, for joining us today.  And I’m Skip Sparkman.  This is a collaborative effort of the Walters State Community College, of Chattanooga State Technical Community College, of Volunteer State Community College, and of the Regents Online Degree Program.  We hope it’s been beneficial to you, and we thank you for being with us.