Abstract
This study examines faculty views concerning the appropriateness of teaching specific undergraduate psychology courses in an online format. Faculty express concern about teaching methodology and counseling/clinical content courses online, but endorse teaching introductory and nonclinical content courses in either format; faculty report diverse views on the extent to which capstone and integrative experiences in psychology can be facilitated in a virtual format. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the growing demand for online psychology course offerings.
Proponents of online learning are staunch defenders of the process and its successes. Faculty favoring virtual education claim there is more interaction online than in face-to-face classes and that online students are more actively immersed in the course content. Opponents counter that online course creation is too time intensive and that there is limited contact among online students compared to face-to-face learners. When it comes to the topic of online versus face-to-face classes, almost everyone has an opinion.
Regardless of individual opinion, there is a growing trend (and in some cases, administrative pressure) in higher education for programs and departments to offer online courses in addition to traditional, face-to-face courses. As discussed by the American Psychological Association (APA) Task Force on Undergraduate Psychology Major Competencies (Halonen et al., 2002), “the rapid proliferation of distance learning courses and programs brings new pressure to clarify goals and outcomes to promote learning expectations comparable to traditional classrooms” (p. 6). In response to this concern, academics have created a flurry of research examining the educational equivalence of online and face-to-face courses. Thus far, substantial evidence exists to support the assumption that, in well-designed learning environments, there is little, if any, difference in the educational impact of either online or face-to-face instruction (see http://www.nosignificantdifference.org for a collection of research on this topic). However, a major discrepancy exists regarding perceptions of online courses. Tanner, Noser, and Totaro (2009) compared the perceptions of faculty and students regarding online classes and found that although students were very excited about the possibilities of online education, faculty were much less favorable. Although educational equivalence is undoubtedly essential in examining online course offerings, of equal importance are faculty beliefs that course content and skills are appropriate and amenable to an online delivery format.
Faculty perceptions matter for at least three reasons. First, because faculty members play a significant role in the successful implementation of a class, it is of the utmost importance that they are onboard with technologically related initiatives. Second, if faculty view online courses as “second best” to on-campus options, they will not perceive those classes as having the equivalent content or rigor. It also follows that faculty with negative opinions of online education will be less likely to consider those courses as satisfactory prerequisites for their own, more advanced course offerings. Third, as online programs become more prevalent options for their graduating students, faculty with negative perceptions of online learning may be less likely to recommend those programs for their students.
Although faculty perceptions are essential to ensure curriculum decisions are met with support rather than resentment or resistance, there is minimal research regarding faculty perceptions of online courses in psychology. Of the few available studies regarding faculty perceptions about online courses (e.g., Dobrin, 1999), most examined perceptions of the value of online learning as a whole, ignoring differential course type or nature of learning objectives associated with some courses and not others. Although faculty perceptions are only one factor in the decision of whether or not to offer a course online, faculty’s role as a key stakeholder in the success or failure of online course offerings makes their perception particularly important. As discussed by Levenberg (1999), “The fact is that many faculty members remain skeptical about the quality of online education, are leery of anyone who has online credentials, and, in general, espouse lukewarm support for the process . . . at best” (para. 11). In the search for explanations regarding faculty resistance to online education, an examination of business faculty perceptions pinpointed various reasons including, but not limited to, lack of interaction, lack of a structured classroom, fear that students teach themselves the material, and difficulty in administering exams (Totaro, Tanner, Noser, Fitzgerald, & Birch, 2005). However, it might also be that faculty perceive certain courses as less amenable or appropriate for online formats. In those cases, faculty may give less credibility to courses deemed inappropriate for online learning and more credibility to courses considered acceptable in the online format. The current investigation examines faculty perceptions about whether various undergraduate psychology courses should be taught across formats, online only, or face-to-face only.
Current Investigation
When determining the effectiveness, value, and appropriateness of offering a specific psychology course online, it may be beneficial to examine the fit between the primary learning objectives of a given course and the mode of course delivery. The purpose of this study was to examine faculty perceptions concerning the relative effectiveness of various undergraduate psychology courses taught in either a typical face-to-face or online format. Based on the existing literature concerning faculty perceptions in online education as applied to curricular designations within psychology, we hypothesized that:
overall, regardless of the specific course, faculty would be more supportive of the effectiveness of teaching undergraduate psychology courses in a face-to-face format compared to online instruction; faculty with experience in the online classroom (as either an instructor or a student) would be more supportive of online instruction regardless of the specific course than would faculty without online teaching and learning experience; faculty would be more likely to endorse the teaching of content courses in an online format compared to methodological or integrative capstone courses; and within the advanced content courses, faculty will be less likely to support the effectiveness of teaching classes emphasizing applied-vocational skills (e.g., counseling or clinical psychology) in comparison to the other content areas.
Method
Participants
The sample included 102 faculty (M age = 46.19) currently teaching undergraduate psychology courses and members of psychology-related listserves. Faculty represented a range of academic rank with 27.5% full professors, 17.6% associate professors, 13.7% assistant professors, 7.8% instructors, and 31.4% adjunct instructors; institutional information was not collected. An examination of online course experience within the sample indicated that 47.1% had taught an online course, 41.2% had developed an online course or curriculum, and 30.4% had been a student in an online class. Regardless of their direct experience with online education, faculty respondents reported a very high level of comfort with the Internet (M = 9.07 on a self-report scale from 1 to 10, with 10 representing completely comfortable).
Materials
We created an online survey to measure faculty perceptions about the effectiveness of teaching various undergraduate psychology courses in an online format. To determine courses for inclusion in the survey, we randomly selected 20 academic catalogs from an Internet search of undergraduate psychology programs. After recoding the original psychology course names into generalized topics to eliminate linguistic title differences between departments, we included those courses that appeared in 25% of the sampled catalogs in our study, resulting in a list of 48 undergraduate psychology courses (see Table 1). Our course list compared similarly to the 30 most frequently listed courses in the undergraduate psychology curriculum (Perlman & McCann, 1999b), with 29 of the 30 courses appearing in both lists. The only course reported by Perlman and McCann (1999b) that was not included in this study was “adjustment psychology” (a course noted in 1999, as showing a considerable decline). The additional 19 courses included in this investigation were likely a result of sampling differences, increased subdivision of course designation, updated course offerings (e.g., psychology and law, health psychology), historical changes in the core psychology curriculum, and the lower threshold of inclusion used for this study.
Psychology Courses Divided by Curricular Designation and Subdiscipline
We asked survey respondents to “indicate the degree to which you believe the following psychology courses can be effectively taught in various instructional modalities. Specifically, for each course, indicate whether you believe the course is generally more effective in promoting student learning when taught in a typical face-to-face or online classroom.” Participants rated each course on a scale from 1 (course is much more effective in a traditional/typical FACE-TO-FACE classroom) to 5 (course is much more effective in an ONLINE/VIRTUAL classroom), with 3 indicating equal effectiveness.
In addition, faculty completed background information concerning personal demographics (i.e., age, ethnicity, comfort with computers) and academic history (i.e., academic rank, experience teaching/developing online courses, experience as an online student).
Procedure
We e-mailed a request for faculty to complete an anonymous online survey; in addition, we asked all e-mail recipients to forward the request for participation to other interested psychology faculty. Per the nature of the snowball participant solicitation process, the response rate is unknown, as there are no data on the number of faculty that ultimately received a request to participate. Potential participants had access to the online survey for 4 weeks.
Analysis
Prior to data analysis, we recoded specific courses into categories reflective of the curricular guidelines made by the National Conference on Enhancing the Quality of Undergraduate Education in Psychology that recommended that psychology curricula include requirements in an introductory course, methodology courses, advanced content courses, and an integrating capstone experience (Brewer et al., 1993). These curricular recommendations were then subdivided by the primary content areas to reflect the major subdisciplines in psychology (based on the designations made by Perlman and McCann, 1999b). For example, introductory courses include survey courses in introductory or general psychology; methodology courses include statistics, research methods, psychometrics, and experimental (as discussed by Brewer et al., 1993); advanced content courses target issues relevant to personality, abnormal, learning, physiological/biological, and developmental psychology (highlighted by Perlman & McCann, 1999a, as popular required content areas); and integrating capstone experiences including history/systems, internships, research projects, and senior seminars (as defined by Messer, 1997 and Messer, Griggs, & Jackson, 1999). This distinction provided a generalized overview by which to examine individual courses and subdivisions of courses according to their relevance, purpose, and objectives within a given psychology curriculum. Due to the high number of specific courses in our sample that would have originally fit within the Perlman and McCann’s (199b) original designations, we divided the social/developmental subdiscipline category into 5 major content subdisciplines: applied-vocational, natural science, clinical, social, and developmental. Table 1 shows the distribution of specific courses into these categories.
Results and Discussion
The mean effectiveness perception score was calculated for each course, curricular area, and subdiscipline categorization; lower scores favor a face-to-face format and higher scores show preference for online format. Grouping individual courses into curricular designations, methodology courses (M = 1.70, SD = 0.70) showed the least acceptance for delivery in an online format followed by advanced content courses (M = 2.21, SD = 0.74), integrative capstone courses (M = 2.28, SD = 0.80), and introductory courses (M = 2.42, SD = 0.85). Further analysis of the advanced content courses by subdiscipline shows the least support for online delivery of applied vocational courses (many of these courses target clinical and/or counseling related topics; M = 2.05, SD = 0.69) followed by natural science (M = 2.23, SD = 0.75), clinical (M = 2.25, SD = 0.79), social (M = 2.29, SD = 0.79), and developmental (M = 2.29, SD = 0.81).
As predicted by the first hypothesis, faculty are generally more supportive of teaching undergraduate psychology courses in a face-to-face format compared to online instruction. Simple descriptive analyses reveal a large majority of faculty in this sample (n = 83) rated none of the classes as preferred in an online format (score 4 or 5).
Our second hypothesis that faculty with experience in the online classroom would be more supportive of teaching courses online than faculty without experience was tested in multiple ways using independent samples t tests. First, the overall support for online instruction between faculty with experience and faculty without experience in the online classroom was compared. A comparison of mean rankings for all courses indicated that faculty with previous experience either teaching or developing an online classroom (n = 48) reported more support for the online format (M = 2.57, SD = 0.58) than faculty without experience in the online classroom, M = 1.80, SD = 0.62; t(99) = 6.46, p < .001, d = 1.29. An additional independent samples t test compared the number of courses reported as being effectively taught online between faculty with experience and faculty without experience in the online classroom. Faculty with online experience rated more courses as preferred in an online format (M = 2.06, SD = 5.88) than faculty without online experience, M = 0.19, SD = 0.68; t(99) = 2.31, p = .023, d = 0.45. Even when adding in the courses that were rated as being equally effective in either format, faculty with previous online experience rated more courses (M = 30.58, SD = 15.21) as an effective for online delivery than faculty without previous online teaching/development experience, M = 11.32, SD = 14.28; t(99) = 6.57, p < .001, d = 1.31.
Our third hypothesis that faculty would be more likely to endorse the teaching of content courses in an online format compared to methodological or integrative capstone courses was partially supported. A repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA), using a Huynh-Feldt correction for a sphericity violation (epsilon = .85, chi-square = 20.95), that compared the mean ratings for courses indicated that there was significantly less support for methods than advanced content (M = 2.22, SD = .74) and integrative capstone (M = 2.28, SD = 0.80) courses to be taught in an online format, F(1.70, 166.64) = 81.44, p < .001, ηp 2 = 0.45. A post hoc pairwise comparison indicated that although there was no significant difference in ratings between advanced content and integrative capstone courses (p = .243), methods courses were rated significantly lower than both advanced content (p < .001) and integrative capstone (p < .001).
Finally, our fourth hypothesis that faculty would be less supportive of classes that emphasized applied vocational skills (e.g., counseling or clinical psychology) in comparison to the other content areas was also supported. A repeated measures ANOVA, using a Huynh-Feldt correction for a violation of sphericity (epsilon = .885, chi-square = 37.80), that compared the mean ratings for courses indicated that there was significantly lower support for applied vocational courses than any other type of content course, F(3.54, 346.90) = 17.25, p < .001, ηp 2 = 0.15. Post hoc pairwise comparisons indicated that there were no significant differences between the remaining courses.
Given this observation, we pursued an analysis isolating clinical courses from all other applied courses because we thought there may be a distinction made between clinical and other applied vocational classes. A dependent sample t test compared mean ratings for clinical courses (i.e., clinical psychology, introduction to guidance and counseling, and systems of psychotherapy) with all the other applied psychology courses (i.e., community psychology, educational psychology, field placement, and industrial/organizational psychology). Results indicated a significant difference in means for clinical courses (M = 1.88, SD = 0.74) and the other courses (M = 2.18, SD = 0.74); t(98) = −6.40, p < .001, d = .41.
Implications and Conclusions
Tanner et al., (2009) compared the perceptions of faculty and students regarding online classes and found that faculty were much less favorable toward online education than students were. Our results suggest that although there is a lack of support for teaching all courses online, most faculty report that at least one course could be taught equally as effectively in either format. Perhaps the real reason for the lack of support is due to a fear of teaching applied skills, such as methods and vocational skills, in a virtual environment that does not allow for an informal assessment of one’s interpersonal abilities. Specific to psychology, faculty may prefer an opportunity for face-to-face engagement with students when teaching skills that will ultimately rest on one’s ability to interact effectively with others.
Regardless of faculty concerns about the ability to teach specific psychology courses online, the reality is that many departments are facing administrative pressure to increase online course offerings (often due to the decreased costs associated with online course offerings and/or student demands for increased schedule flexibility). So, the next question is, how can we increase faculty support for online psychology courses? Based on the findings in this study, this challenge can be proactively addressed in two primary ways.
First, departments can create programs in which content-based courses are available online and skill-based courses are reserved for the face-to-face format. Additionally, hybrid programs have the advantage of combining the convenience and flexibility of online learning along with the hands-on, synchronous interaction of face-to-face contact. Unfortunately, these two benefits may work against one another, as those students who wish to pursue online courses often do so because they are unable to take face-to-face courses (i.e., challenges in schedules, family and work obligations, or geographic location). As such, hybrid programs may fail to attract the desired number of potential students due to the restrictiveness associated with face-to-face course requirements.
Second, a more effective strategy may be for departments to design initiatives to change faculty perceptions about the effectiveness of online learning. There is a body of literature (e.g., www.nosignificantdifference.org) that has examined the educational equivalence between online and face-to-face courses; the majority of findings indicate that well-designed online courses produce learning that is equivalent to their face-to-face counterparts. Despite the prevalence of these findings, psychology faculty members are either unfamiliar with this body of research or are still resistant to the idea of some online course offerings. The next step, it appears, is to take a closer look at the rationale behind this resistance. If the specific reasons for resistance can be identified, it is then possible to address the concerns and increase faculty support of online course offerings in psychology. As the findings in the current study can attest, faculty with experience developing and teaching an online course are more supportive of online formats. Perhaps just increasing the amount of experience each faculty member has with teaching online can increase their support of those virtual formats.
Footnotes
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.