Dual-mode faculty's frame of reference and evolving approach to teaching over ITV: A phenomenological study.

Abstract

Distance education used to mean the learner and teacher were separated by time and/or geography. The advent of telecommunications technologies has changed this typology. Now, teachers can teach their traditional students while reaching out and teaching remotely located students via interactive television. This phenomenological research provided an emic view of an experienced and beginning dual mode professors' frames of reference as they taught in an ITV classroom. Specifically, this research asked: how these professors perceived the dual mode teaching experience over the sixteen-week class, how they perceived themselves altering their teaching strategies and behaviors to cope with this experience, and what pedagogical changes they made after reflecting on what they perceived to be happening in their ITV classroom. The themes revealed by the data were: loss of interaction, lack of sufficient faculty support, professional dis-empowerment, changes in teaching approach, and technology problems. Both professors professed a dialogical pedagogy going into the study. However, the novice ITV professor coped with the technical problems and "disembodied" students by reverting to the traditional lecture mode. The more experienced ITV professor used adaptive strategies to resolve ongoing problems; she used a "more structured" dialogical approach to teaching while promoting a sense of community with all of her students.