Tri-University Conference
Developing a 12-Hour Women's Studies Program
Through Distance Learning

Notes from Tuesday, May 22
Erika Giesen

A Women’s Studies Course On-Line (Reyes):

• Institutional constraints: tech requirements from UW; phone line limitations; restricted access for potential students to browse on-line courses; required course template - ECollege
• An instructor’s picture on the course website somewhere personalizes it
• Promoting student interactivity in her course: group project that can be conducted through a chat room (she set up group chat rooms) or elsewhere online; group presentations in a chat room; a webliography that students can add to; a document sharing space that students can add to
• Chat rooms can be constraining technologically, i.e. server kicking people off, delay between posting and responses (especially when the chat group gets large)
• In order to help frame a more constructive, in-depth student response in the threaded discussions section, she created guidelines (“Argument Notes”) for them to follow, which elicited much more thoughtful, analytical postings. Also, she would stay out of the threaded discussion that the students were having. Her presence was mostly as a facilitator, where she checked in once a week and responded to students’ questions
• Successes: threaded discussions and student interaction; small group chat rooms
• Failures: teaching statistics; chat rooms with extended groups; office hours (no one came)
• She had no lectures or class notes, but she has an intro each week to class readings and sometimes she asked specific questions each week
• There was a high drop out rate among students because they expected on-line courses to be much easier
• There’s a trade-off on-line – although there are students who are more comfortable writing and expressing themselves on-line, there are also students who have a much harder time composing on the computer than they do speaking
• For one person teaching a course, 12-15 students seems to be the maximum possible

Administratively/logistically structuring our certificate program (Jackson and Bassnett):

• Registration support/problems:
• ARU (Arizona Regents University) is an enabling device for the Tri-Universities, a coordination framework for expanding access to technology
• There is $2 million to be spent on administrative costs, ?, and academic development
• azdistancelearning.org – an inventory of on-line courses from the 3 Universities
• Once a student decides on a course they want to take, they have to choose a home university to register with
• Most of the students registering for on-line courses are students already on campus, which is why partnering with community organizations is interesting to Jackson
• Cross-registration – enrolling at a course at 2 or more universities, which now has many administrative glitches, especially costs, i.e. double billing
• Because of these glitches, they have not pushed on-line gen ed courses
• Proposed ARU framework: each students selects a “home” university, which is the only place they are admitted; each catalog lists courses from 3 universities (a single, unified catalog, which can be filtered to an expanded home catalog); home u handles all the red tape and tuition (a single, unified set of business procedures); FTE is counted by course provider, which requires no faculty paperwork;
• On average, it’s about $70 per credit hour per student including students with wavers, etc.
• The departmental homepage becomes very important in attracting on-line students
• As of now, there are no provisions for distance students who are paying fees for the rec center, the library, the bookstore, etc.
• ARU features: uses existing structures – no ARU faculty, students, programs or courses
• As of now, the cap on distance students is 15 students, but in the future that will get larger because of technologies that make it possible to not survey all student work
• The administration and Deans are seeing that there is simply a swap between “regular” courses and on-line courses, although teaching at a distance is much more labor intensive (but quality can also be better). Right now, without funding incentives for faculty, the motivation for faculty on-line course development is simply ethical. Jackson acknowledges that there needs to be a shift in resources, but right now they are suggesting that faculty first deal locally within the departments and with the department heads. From there, they can argue higher up to the ARU rather than starting top down.
• Offering courses through a semester basis through EU, traditionally a student will register through EU and 30% goes to them, 70% to the department. The problem with this is with financial aid, except that generally fin aid is only helpful to full-time students, which may not be our demographics. This financial aid problem may lead us to not want to go through EU.
• The costs through EU can be very different. EU is much more flexible than the regular U because bureaucratically they aren’t constrained.
• A benefit to working with EU is that they can do the marketing, registration, and advising, “customer service”, tracking students through the certificate process, advice about how to get courses on the web
• Right now, Bassnett is not sure that we can offer a course both through EU and through regularly admitted students. This may be possible with out of state students.
• A non-degree seeking student still has to go through the admissions office, but can take 15 semester hours before they become a fully admitted student
• We might look at our certificate as a type of carrot to entice students to “fix their deficiencies” and finally get enrolled into the University
• There is no standard tuition rate through EU – extremely dependant on what services our department would need; they will charge “what the market will bear” (i.e. the MA in Engineering charges a $200 technology fee while other distance programs do not)
• The UA SBS Dean is loathe to count summer session, winter session, EU, etc. count as part of a faculty load, but the Department head can argue for it
• If we offer our program through EU, these courses can count for a regular degree/graduation – 15 undergrad, 12 grad
• There is no “seamless” anything through EU
• There’s a big draw of non-traditional students to distance ed
• Retention is a big issue – there is a higher drop out rate – sense of community essential
• Issues for incarcerated women – do they have to pay on their own? Do they have access outside of a certain range on the web? Do they have access to computers, especially women vs. men? We may want to consider a CD ram course to counter these issues. Also, might want to target medium or maximum security prisons because longer sentence institutions may be more likely to fund educational programs.
• Brainstorming our 12 unit curriculum
• Regular interface – 3 credits like regular to transfer (4 credits for faculty
• One credit for technological learning, but not without Women’s Studies content
• Would we meet once a week? Asynchronous
• We shouldn’t close off a whole variety of media yet (compressed video, cd rom)
• We should focus on our target audience and let the traditional students follow as they m
• We may be able to get money out of ARU to do a “market survey
• What is the nature of our certificate? Discussing gender, race and class may not be possible to teach on the web and even immoral. Bernardi is an example that this is actually possible. Maybe the question is a process question, not content. Maybe it’s who’s teaching it. A 15 student class may make it more possible. People have had experiences where students form stronger communities and bonds than in face to face courses.
• There is research that shows that women are shut down on the web and there are some gender inequalities. Assignments and code of conduct can challenge this. Also, avoiding or banning anonymity on-line – students have to take responsibility.
• Who is our audience? Before deciding that we have to decide whether we are distance or distributed. This may even include one or two face to face meetings, but research shows that communities form with people who have shown up at those meetings, which leads to disparities within the class.
• Maybe we want to not focus on the incarcerated population – too many obstacles at this point. Maybe we want to encourage the homebound to not be so homebound. Maybe that’s another argument for satellite community center.
• Each campus might partner with community centers – what resources and needs do they have?
• We can’t restrict, but we can save seats and advertise in target area.
• Possible curriculum:
• Identity issues;
• Activist issues- placing people in sites to promote face to face interaction, counting volunteer work students are already doing, email activism
• In the intro course – history, community history, identity (are they the same thing?). Maybe we don’t want to have an “intro” course and not think linearly
• Technological skills course
• Women in the Southwest – 2 credits of content, 1 content of skills. Sexier titles? We should ask students what they’re interested in.
• International feminism?
• Feminism and gender issues in Chicano communities
• Feminism and disability
• The workforce
• Feminisms and Nationalisms
• Special topics course at the end? Activisms?
• How do we want to conceive of this 12 unit thing? A “Certificate” will enhance a GED. It can’t count for gen ed. We could do 100, 200, 300, 400 or 100, 100, 200, 200 to count for an associate’s degree.
• We might create courses that aren’t already being taught because the goal is to bring students here to take the courses already offered here.
• We might want to teach one class face to face and one class on-line, so that the content would overlap
• We need to bring in Chicanas to facilitate our partnership with Chicanos por la Causa
• Because our classes won’t count for gen ed, resistant students probably won’t be taking these courses
• We should all meet at ASU in the fall for a meeting to discuss the possibilities – maybe just a morning.