The first online course that Henry Barker taught used threaded discussions as the primary means of communication. He didn’t like the level of interaction and decided to search for ways “to make the online experience as much like the seated experience as possible.”

Barker, who teaches finance and accounting at Tiffin University in Ohio, had a difficult time understanding how his participation in an online course based largely on threaded discussions benefited his students. “If you look at a thread, it’s a tool to provide feedback to a student and a basis for a grade, but where is the value added from the faculty member? What value am I providing as a guy with a PhD? I just didn’t see it. The value added in a classroom environment, in my opinion, comes from two things—the lecture and students’ interaction in that lecture. … I didn’t see that in the online environment. The whole vocal channel seemed to not be there. The students couldn’t see me or hear me, and I couldn’t see or hear them,” Barker says.

This is a fairly common complaint among online instructors (and online students). And perhaps it’s more of an issue in online courses such as the quantitative courses that Barker teaches than in more qualitative subject areas.

Barker began researching other options and developed an approach that embeds video lectures into PowerPoint presentations.

The approach that Barker uses to create these PowerPoint presentations with embedded video lectures is relatively inexpensive and relatively easy to do with some IT support. Barker begins by creating PowerPoint slides. He then captures the lecture with a video camera on a tripod six feet away from him sitting at his desk. He records the lecture associated with each slide as a separate file.

Once the recording is complete, embedding the video within the PowerPoint slides requires some production. He recommends that the IT department provide some support in doing this production work. It’s not difficult, but it can be tedious and most instructors are not likely to want spend time doing this kind of work. But it is pretty basic work that IT support staff or even student workers can perform. “You don’t need a studio or a large staff to do this. You do need computer people to step up and do what’s for them really low-level stuff,” Barker says.

Barker dedicates 90 percent of the screen to the PowerPoint slides and the other 10 percent to the video. It’s his way of making the online experience as close as possible to the classroom experience.

The hardest part for the instructor is being able to give a good lecture in PowerPoint, Barker says. “Forget about online. Forget about the DVD and all that stuff. Can you tell a good story and generate interest using PowerPoint as a tool? I’ve been in lectures where the speaker puts the PowerPoint on the screen and proceeds to read it. It’s just painful.

“I don’t want to say that this approach is a panacea. It’s a way where if you’re good in a classroom, you can be pretty good in this medium. If you’re dull in the classroom, why would you expect that to be different if you put that on a DVD?”

Barker posts these lectures online and also provides students with DVDs to avoid bandwidth issues.

Like his face-to-face courses, Barker’s online courses include three-hour weekly lectures. Using PowerPoint to deliver these lectures offers the following advantages:

• The lectures can be viewed on any computer even if they do not have PowerPoint.
• The finished product is searchable by slide, making it easy to access a specific point in a lecture, which is particularly useful for busy professionals who may not have the time to sit through an entire three-hour lecture in one sitting.
• These lectures can be downloaded and viewed on iPods.

Staff meetings

In addition to these asynchronous lectures, Barker’s courses feature weekly “staff meetings.” Barker offers these staff meetings three times each week to accommodate as many students as possible. The idea of these meetings is to have a discussion based on the lecture that week.

Participation in these meetings counts for one-third of the grade. “I tell students it’s just like work. You can go into staff meetings with one of two strategies. Strategy one is to be prepared to talk about what the boss wants to talk about. Strategy two is, don’t bother. Try to look small and not be noticed. There are only ten people in these staff meetings. So they are required to share their thoughts about what we’re doing and ask questions about the lecture,” Barker says.

In these meetings, participants speak over the computer (students have the option to use video as well) and share documents. “It’s a great way to act collaboratively just like they would if they were here on campus,” Barker says.

Since the lecture and staff meeting are not necessarily in immediate proximity, Barker needs to make some concessions to make the connection between these two course components. During the first 15 minutes, Barker reviews the highlights of the lecture and asks students if they have any questions about the content. If they do, he can go directly to the appropriate PowerPoint slide and clarify that content.

Each of these staff meetings is scheduled for one hour; however, this virtual classroom is available 24/7, and students often continue the discussion beyond these scheduled sessions.

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