Overcoming the Distance in Distance Education, 2

First Teaching Objective: Administrative Warmth
The school will set up a classroom (OLS news folders), materials folder, chat folder, and Learning Team folders for training. The administrators have many tools for communicating quickly with everyone. This teaching plan would focus on true personal interaction with the faculty and ways of implementing it. Some concepts would include such methods as an annual personalized birthday card sent to faculty members. Another approach would be to have a second annual contact, either by phone or email, which encourages the faculty member and elicits that individual’s concerns. The current online meeting program has some advantages in getting new information to faculty, but is completely inadequate in reaching people personally. Learning Team assignments would include collaborative planning in ways to implement warmth. The materials folder would include some research on how to counter alienation among online faculty, but also essays on how to make a positive impression by treating faculty as individuals with important contributions to make.

Second Teaching Objective: Faculty Warmth
If the administrators interact with faculty individually and personally, the instructors will experience and mirror that approach with students. The University of Phoenix tries to encourage this kind of attention in the online classroom, but the results seem to be mixed, based on student comments and the author’s experiences. The online classroom would be set up with newsfolders, as mention above, with one for the main classroom, one for chat, one for materials, and others for Learning Teams. Collaborative learning would work well with this kind of experience. Faculty could share their methods of being personal and showing concern in the classroom. Their positive experiences would stimulate the same kind of approach among the other faculty. The trainer could use experiences and studies from UOP to illustrate how this influences teaching success and student retention. The materials might include studies, but they would focus more on examples of what to do and what to avoid, some of which is already being done in the faculty development classes.

Third Objective: Better Feedback
Professional writers have often experienced a severe backlash from publishing what they imagined were mild comments about one problem or another. Many instructors do not realize how their brief comments often seem abrupt, rude, ill-founded, and absurd. The worse the feedback is, the less a student wants to respond to the boilerplate statement, “Please respond if you have any questions.” Flattened insects do not ask questions and probably never consider the faculty member being exhausted, sick, in the middle of a medical crisis, or just clueless.
This objective could be addressed with the second objective in the same class. The two concerns are addressed differently but in the same spirit – making the technological online class more personal. Collaborative learning would pool the intellectual resources of the faculty with effective leadership from the trainer