More Time for Teaching

Faculty Adapt WebCampus Tools to Fit their Classroom Needs
By ERIN O'DONNELL

When Patti Shock started teaching online courses through WebCampus three years ago, she was surprised to find most of her students were logging in during breaks from their busy lives in Las Vegas.

"I expected more of the online students to live outside Las Vegas," said Shock, chair of the tourism and convention administration department in the Harrah Hotel College.

Today, Shock ranks as a pioneer among the growing number of faculty members who conduct part or all of their courses through WebCampus, UNLV's system for teaching online. More than 14 percent of the courses offered during fall semester had an online component, up from about 7 percent the previous fall.

WebCampus coordinator Wonda Riner describes WebCampus as a course management system that gives faculty members dozens of tools to help them handle the business of teaching more efficiently. With that taken care of, faculty members can focus on the content of a course, she said. And it satisfies the expectations of a generation of students for whom the Internet is as basic as running water.

Now housed in the office of information technology, WebCampus (short for Web Course Tools) is available for every course, every semester, and faculty members can use as many or as few of the tools as they wish. It works on three main levels:

• Informational: Instructors can upload materials such as syllabi, lecture notes, or PowerPoint presentations for students to view or print — and once they're posted, the materials are accessible thereafter. "When you're teaching the same course again and again, that's where the time savings comes in," Riner said. Rosters, updated daily, are online, and the electronic gradebook lets students view their grades confidentially.
• Interactive: The discussion and chatroom tools can help instructors require participation that they can't always achieve in person. Assignments can be submitted online, and the system enforces due dates by rejecting late entries. And, students can have a direct line to professors through WebCampus e-mail.
• Evaluative: Online quizzes can be given in multiple-choice, matching, fill-in-the-blank, or even short-answer formats, and they are graded instantly. "There's that instant feedback that students love," Riner said. Although not graded instantly, essay questions are also an option.

Training Available
The Teaching and Learning Center offers WebCampus training on a regular basis for both beginners and advanced users. Riner said that once instructors have the basics down, they're encouraged to innovate.

"The thing I've always told faculty members is not to focus on what WebCampus can do. Rather, focus on how you want to teach and make WebCampus meet your needs," Riner said. "They shouldn't modify their teaching or content to fit a tool; they should modify the tool to fit their needs."

For example, the School of Nursing wanted its students to use WebCampus for journaling, but the assignment function wouldn't accept ongoing submissions. So they adapted a different tool in the system for their purposes.

The Nursing School has been enthusiastic about WebCampus, and created a staff position to support faculty in their use of it. Assistant professor Roseann Colosimo, who is leading the search for the WebCampus and web manager, said the debut of the nursing Ph.D. program was a major impetus for creating the position; that program is offered almost exclusively online.

"We know more and more courses are going to go online," Colosimo said. "And sometimes you have a problem that's just such a simple thing to fix if you have someone internally who knows how to do it."

Teaching Online Advantageous
Some faculty members may still be intimidated by the technology and the way teaching online differs from the classroom setting, but some WebCampus converts have found unexpected advantages. 'With WebCampus e-mail, students ask a lot more questions that they might not ask in front of their peers," Colosimo said. "You have a lot more dialogue with more of the students in class."

Shock has experienced the same effect, and said teaching online has improved her rapport with students. She makes her students create an online profile with a photo: "This way, if a student asks me a question, I can go and see who they are."

Online courses have the added benefit of helping the university serve a growing student population at a time when resources are limited.

University officials eyeing the bottom line appreciate the way online courses save on printing costs and classroom space.

And Shock loves that WebCampus allows instructors as well as students to go mobile. It lets her department bring in expert instructors — professionals in the field who can offer their expertise without taking a semester away from the careers that make them such valuable resources. She said many regular Hotel College instructors also keep teaching while attending conferences, traveling, or going on sabbatical halfway around the world.

"I travel a lot. I've taught from Hong Kong and other places, as long as I can get online," Shock said. "We had one professor who taught for us online while on assignment in Turkey, and another who has taught online various semesters from China, Korea, and the Philippines."

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