What Do Instructors Think About the Impact of E-Learning on Time?

What is this research about?

What is time and how do we organize it? Is it just a linear and absolute mechanism or is it dynamic and based on the beliefs and customs of individuals? Time can be perceived in many ways. Contemporary social theory proposes that time is made up of many forms that are interconnected. These forms include the day-to-day life of mundane tasks and the larger timescale of biology and institutions. There have been multiple studies looking at the relationship between time and work in different contexts such as healthcare, but there is limited information on how time is related to e-learning and its management/administration in an academic setting. The authors of this paper sought to understand time from the perspective of academics that administer e-learning courses and how they interact with the temporal features of e-learning to carry out their teaching.

What did the researchers do?

In this study, 62 a cademics in Portuguese public Higher Education Institutions were asked, through semi-structured interviews, to describe and reflect on their experiences with e-learning and its temporal properties. The researchers drew on grounded theory and symbolic interactionism to capture how e-learning practice and its temporal features influence how academics adjust, plan, and implement their instructional activities. Grounded theory is a type of research methodology used to create a theoretical framework based on data that is systematically categorized into different themes/concepts that interrelate. Social interactionism is a theory centered on meaning and how the meaning of something is different between people and can change based on social interactions.

What did the researchers find?

Through analysis of academics’ experiences, the researchers theorized the overall concept of Polychronicity and its 3 interrelated components (Temporal Structures, Temporal Processes, and Temporal Linkages).

Polychronicity is defined as “the doing of two or more things at the same time”. This theme is used to reflect the overarching need to do multiple tasks at the same time including navigation of multiple teaching and social structures, adaptation of course material to the online format, and determining timing of course delivery.  This contrasts with a linear and one-dimensional idea of time in traditional face-to-face learning.

1. Temporal Structures: This theme relates to how institutions are unable to keep up with the demands of e-learning.  It is comprised of several subthemes:

• • Academic Roles Duality: Academics perceived themselves as playing a role in two cultures: Research and Teaching. Institutions value the research-intensive culture more than the scholarship of teaching culture. This valuing is not reflective of academics’ workload, which is mainly focused on teaching.

• • Online Instructional Design: Academics felt there was insufficient support in the creation of online learning environments and that they were expected to know how to design courses using educational technology and pedagogical principles on their own.

• • Uncredited Online Activities: According to academics, the increased time converting course content and activities to online delivery was unaccounted for by academic institutions. Academics also saw a shift in their interaction with students, with online learning students usually needing the most help outside of work hours.

• • Technological Agility: Academics felt a common pressure to quickly adapt to new working timeframes in order to complete educational tasks while still fulfilling other professional duties like research and administration.

2. Temporal Processes: This theme refers to how e-learning involves different working patterns and processes compared to traditional in-person teaching. It is comprised of several subthemes:

• • Functional Agility: Many academics found that the material used for traditional face-to-face learning needed to be tailored to fit technology-based learning and that more time was also allocated towards course administrative tasks.

• • Functional Adaptability: When shifting courses online, academics had to think about whether certain activities originally planned for the in-person setting could still work online. Many found that their students had more technological issues that needed assistance in order to effectively teach them online.

• • Increased Formal Teaching Presence: This included an increase in tasks such as encouraging participation, providing feedback on assignments, facilitating group discussions, and offering guidance/support to students. Academics also felt that students had a false expectation that instructors were remotely available all the time because they were online.

3. Temporal Linkages: This refers to the relationship between instructors and students and how navigating social interactions, increasing visibility, and establishing rapport with students are time-consuming tasks in e-learning environments.

• • Establishing Rapport: Academics felt that they needed to find time to provide individual support on a continuous basis both synchronously and asynchronously as opposed to the strict cycles created by traditional in-person learning where most students asked questions during set office hours or after class.

• • Effectiveness of Interaction: The academics perceived themselves to exert more effort and time in providing personalized feedback, enhancing deeper thinking through reflective questions, and expanding on student contributions.

• • Continuous Awareness and Visibility: Academics perceived a daily task of regulating their course online environment (e.g., answering questions, posting comments, creating discussion prompts) in order to reduce confusion about the course.

How can you use this research?

This paper provides a conception of polychronicity to describe academics’ views on time in e-learning. Furthermore, it outlines the temporal properties and additional activities of e-learning that may not have been recognized before and highlights challenges that academics face in online learning due to time constraints . The paper also reveals the importance of instructors being immediately available and responsive in order to create a meaningful learning environment – yet recognizes this as a difficult task that is not reflected in how instructors are paid or in the policies of academic institutions.

Moving forward, the authors suggest bridging the gap between the temporality of e-learning (based on events) and the timeline of academia (based on semesters, lecture times, and credits) by using two types of norms:

• The first norm involves creating a legitimized workload allocation framework to provide academics with time to focus on the scholarship of teaching online and regulate their virtual teaching presence.

• The second norm is to outline the expectations for interactions between students and teachers. This can be done by first discussing students’ expectations and levels of expertise at the beginning of the semester to inform the instructor’s approach to delivering material. Then, some rules regarding messaging and communication can be set to regulate the interactions between students and the instructor outside of work hours.

Authors:

Jorge Tiago Martins, PhD, was, at the time of publication, a Lecturer in Organisational Informatics in the School of Information at The University  of Sheffield (UK). He is now a Senior Scientist at VTT Finland. Twitter: @jtmartins.

Miguel Baptista Nunes, PhD, was a Senior Lecturer in Information Management in the School of Information at The University of Sheffield (UK), and is presently Professor and Dean of the School of Information Management, Sun Yat-Sen University (China).

Reference:

Jorge, M., & Baptista, N. M. (2016). The temporal properties of e-learning: an exploratory study of academics’ conceptions. International Journal of Educational Management, 30(1), 2–19. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-04-2014-0048