LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS
The Surprising Benefits of Online Study
Can relational professions such as teaching, counselling and social work really be taught online? Is distance study an option chosen for convenience but characterised by compromise? Kathryn Overall explores the surprising dynamics at play.
Sarah Chesswas has a super-human gift. She can write an assignment sitting in her living room surrounded by the happy chaos of radio, television and the voices of her four children. “I have learnt to tune them out,” laughs Sarah, who is currently in the third year of a Diploma in Teaching (Early Childhood) at Bethlehem Tertiary Institute (BTI).
Sarah and her family live in rural Waikato, “in the middle of everywhere and nowhere”, and while she originally wanted to study onsite, she realised that travelling one to two hours each way would not be sustainable. She opted, instead, for studying byBTI’s distance study option.
“I’m very much a people-person. I like the relationships you can build up in person, but I could never have done the travel,” says Sarah. “With the reality of family life, I honestly think I would have had to pull out if I had studied onsite.”
As we chat at Eden Café in Bethlehem, between the fresh green foliage and the chattering coffee-drinkers, Sarah tells me that studying teaching is the fulfillment of a life-long dream for her.
“I love working with kids. My Mum used to say that from when I was two years old, if anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I said I wanted to be a teacher,” she says.
Sarah was a first year teaching student at MASTERS Institute in Auckland when she met her husband, a fellow student teacher. They decided that she would put her own study plans on hold while they began a family. With her youngest child heading off to school, it’s now Sarah’s time to study and pursue her teaching dreams. “I’d really like to own my little community preschool,” says Sarah. “Everyone who knows me says ‘of course, that is just so you’.”
Distance study options make gaining a qualification an achievable dream for people who are geographically isolated. But it can equally appeal to people who desire flexibility in managing multiple commitments.
Sandy Miller is in her third year of a Bachelor of Social Work at BTI. She is a widow with two busy teenage girls and though she lives only six minutes drive from BTI, she has chosen to study by distance.
“Studying online was the only way that I could begin my qualification and still parent the way I want to,” says Sandy. “The best part about it is that it fits around my life, rather than life fitting around study. Having access to course material 24/7 means I can totally dictate my study time for what works best for me, my family and my other commitments.”
Dr Andrew Smith, Dean of BTI, says the institute first embarked on the journey of distance education ten years ago in support of the Diploma of Counselling programme. “Generally speaking, counselling students are older, and therefore many of them have families and can’t relocate,” says Andrew.
While they may have had study options closer to home, many of them particularly were drawn to studying from a faith-perspective. Opening up a distance study option made this possible for them.
BTI now offers a distance study option for all of its programmes. The final programme to come online is the three-year Bachelor of Education (Teaching) for Primary and Early Childhood, which will be offered online for the first time in 2016, subject to Education Council NZ approval.
“Over the last decade we have seen the trend for students who want to study from where they live and work grow significantly,” says Andrew. “This growth has been particularly evident over the past four years with around 75% of our students studying some or all of their programme from a distance.”
Of course it makes sense that in our fast-paced, hyper-connected world we would study online. We buy our shoes and our food online; find recipes, advice, inspiration and dates online – why shouldn’t the way we teach and learn evolve accordingly?
But before we say ‘times have changed’, or, ‘distance study is as inevitable as a teenager on a smart-phone’, let’s pause to consider the implications.
Can relational, people-helping professions like teaching, counselling and social work really be taught effectively by distance? Isn’t it instinctive that you need on-campus, face-to-face relationships to have a truly transformational educational experience - one that shapes not just your ideas but who you are as a person?
In choosing convenience, are we actually choosing compromise?
Andrew understands all of these questions. In fact, he had them himself ten years ago. He swivels on his chair as he reflects, looking in the direction of the rising green slope of the lawn through his corner office windows.
“I was a bit of a skeptic as to how we could do this,” says Andrew. “But ten years on I think I am truly a convert. It’s amazing how much attitudes and abilities and technology have changed in that time.”
Andrew says that while the initial driver for offering BTI programmes online was convenience and pragmatics, experience has shown that the benefits extend far beyond the convenience factors. In fact, the surprising data shows that BTI students who study by distance are on the whole more engaged learners and often perform better than those who study onsite.
“Some of our onsite students tend to be reliant on being spoon-fed by the lecturer, so they think they can just come to class and that’s all they need to do,” says Andrew. “Whereas, the distance students have to be more self-motivated and therefore have to manage their time better and read more. As a result they do better.”
Andrew teaches a number of online courses and feels that he is able to provide more responsive teaching to students online. “If I have a group of onsite students and I get them to divide up into small groups, I can really only monitor one group at a time. The other groups could be talking about what they are going to have for dinner,” he says. “Whereas online I can see the discussions and actually interact with all of them one way or another. That gives me greater access to some of the things that are going on within the group.”
Dr. Bev Norsworthy, BTI's Head of Teaching & Learning, agrees whole-heartedly. “Face to face can be very reliant on the teacher figure, and you as the learner can be almost invisible in the class,” she says as we settle into our conversation in her office lined with books, ring binders and folders.
“I find that it’s so much easier for me to differentiate my teaching for the students online because you are engaging with them individually.”
Bev’s desks are covered with papers awaiting her attention but she is fully present and unhurried with me during our conversation – a testament to her loving and relational way of being in the world.
“If you had have had this conversation with me 20 years ago, I would have been saying, ‘no, teaching needs to be face to face, it’s such a relational endeavour’,” says Bev.
Her ‘moment-of-truth’ occurred several decades ago when a student she was supervising had to stay in Kaitaia due to family reasons. Bev agreed to supervise her via email from Auckland. Before long she felt that she was connecting with this student in rich ways and getting to know her far better than she had face to face.
“It was a challenge to me,” says Bev. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to believe this’ because I was wedded to these ideas that teaching is relational. I think I prefer the word connected now – that teaching requires connections and those connections need to be in authentic situations. But it doesn’t need to be with me necessarily, and it doesn’t need to be face to face.”
Going through the process of bringing the Bachelor of Education (Teaching) for Primary and Early Childhood online is giving the BTI Teacher Education team the chance to freshly re-examine these ideas. “Everything is up for very careful thought about how we prepare teachers in the best way possible whether they live across the road or in Invercargill,” says Bev.
Bev says the team are having many discussions about blended learning and creating multiple learning spaces – offering a blend of online study, onsite intensives, community involvement and host school practicums, where students are placed within a school or Early Childhood centre one or two days per week over an extended period of time.
This innovative host-school practicum model has already proved to be very successful in the secondary teaching programme. “The host school experience is an authentic context in which student teachers can take what they are learning in say, classroom management, and play with the ideas in their host school classroom,” says Bev.
“This model requires educators to pay more attention to designing learning experiences in authentic contexts – setting students up for being successful in those – rather than counting on the power of the face to face relationship.”
That is not to say, however, that the relationship between student and lecturer is not important. Research about effective online learning affirms that the presence of the lecturer is crucial.
The online learning environment is the context in which these relationships are formed and this space needs to be created carefully for effective learning and to allow genuine connections to form between students and the lecturer.
Suzzanne Barthow has worked as an educator in BTI's Counsellor and Social Work programmes. She's designed multi-sensory learning experiences for her online students, which take into account the different intrinsic learning styles of her students. She took a break from her pile of marking, braving the winter rain in a bright red coat to meet me at Nourish Café to discuss her approach.
“I want whatever I am doing online to be a mix that works for people who are strong visually, people who are strong kinesthetically, and people who are strong aurally - who need to talk to make sense of their learning,” she says.
On one of the papers Suzzanne teaches she has students work with a visual paper diary. “For those people who are kinesthetic, I have them do a collage, or write in their diary, so there is some sense of using their body to respond to whatever they are learning,” says Suzzanne. “For those who are visual I include video-clips into my learning.”
It is easy to under-estimate how rich, robust and transparent online connections between educators and students can be online. With both her onsite and online students, Suzzanne chooses to be quite open about her own life. She finds these conversations tend to be even more transparent online.
“I will use my own personal experiences to talk about or to illustrate something. If students are having a forum discussion about grief and loss, or domestic violence, I will share some of my own experiences about growing up around that,” says Suzzanne. “What matters most to me is my students learning, so if a student asks me a personal question in a forum, and I feel it will be beneficial for them, I will answer that.”
Suzzanne regularly posts video-clips, which feature herself speaking to her online students. However, she believes that onsite intensives also provide an important component to distance learning. “It’s about trying to help these students get some sense of who we are so they can ‘feel us’ not just hear us or see us,” she says.
As they journey through their study experience as a cohort, distance students often form meaningful relationships, not only with their lecturers, but also with each other. “I’ve seen that the distant student group develops an amazing camaraderie online,” says Andrew. “I enjoy seeing them come together for intensives. I think the relationships across the distance groups can be as strong as across the onsite groups.”
Sandy Miller says that one of the best things about her study journey has been connecting with another student during the first intensive and forming a great friendship. “Without the regular texts, emails and Skype chats, I would not be enjoying this time nearly as much,” she says. “The online friendships are as real as class ones, or perhaps even more treasured. Perhaps this is as a result of intentionality to catch-up and support each other, rather than just turning up to class and sitting beside people.”
Despite the positive and surprising benefits of distance study, there can also be some challenges and limitations.
In the grand scheme of things, distance study works best for Sandy Miller, but she does feel that the onsite students have more opportunities to observe the ways the tutors interact with people, their question formation and delivery, and way of 'being'. “I would find this increased opportunity to watch skilled communicators in action very beneficial at this stage of my learning,” says Sandy.
Andrew acknowledges that the distance way of working will not suit all people. “I think if someone knows that they are strongly relational – and relational to them means actually seeing someone face to face – then probably they are going to find it hard,” he says. “ My perception is that we are pretty good at asking those questions in the interview part of the application process.”
A particularly interesting dynamic that has shifted as a result of distance education is the emergence of a decentralised learning community. It used to be that often students left their own hometown and community and became immersed in the world of an institutional community that formed and shaped them.
However, with distance study, more and more people are being formed within their own communities, contexts and support systems. “That sense of community is more embedded and organic within their own community,” says Bev. “The role of educators now is not to provide that whole world, but to support them as they make connections within their own local worlds throughout their learning journey. We know that teaching and learning are deeply relational and I think when face to face teaching was the model, we thought about that as being relational with me, the teacher. But the research shows that your relationships with the people in your own life - your church group, your family group, your communities of support – are just as important.”
Andrew thinks that this shift is good for people’s local communities and helps to keep the learning more real for the student. “Often, people talk about the academic ivory tower – that you’re going into this community which is a bit distant from real life,” says Andrew. “That’s not going to happen, at least not to the same degree, if people are still located within their own community.”
All things considered, distance study seems to simultaneously open new horizons and return you to your own communities and contexts with fresh eyes. As counter-intuitive as it may appear at first glance, distance study facilitates deep and transformative learning relationships, even if they are long distance relationships.
Convenience may always be the dominant factor in choosing to study by distance, but it is edifying to know it is a convenience that students can embrace with a sense of confidence, not compromise.
Sarah Chesswas has a super-human gift. She can write an assignment sitting in her living room surrounded by the happy chaos of radio, television and the voices of her four children. “I have learnt to tune them out,” laughs Sarah, who is currently in the third year of a Diploma in Teaching (Early Childhood) at Bethlehem Tertiary Institute (BTI).
Sarah and her family live in rural Waikato, “in the middle of everywhere and nowhere”, and while she originally wanted to study onsite, she realised that travelling one to two hours each way would not be sustainable. She opted, instead, for studying byBTI’s distance study option.
“I’m very much a people-person. I like the relationships you can build up in person, but I could never have done the travel,” says Sarah. “With the reality of family life, I honestly think I would have had to pull out if I had studied onsite.”
As we chat at Eden Café in Bethlehem, between the fresh green foliage and the chattering coffee-drinkers, Sarah tells me that studying teaching is the fulfillment of a life-long dream for her.
“I love working with kids. My Mum used to say that from when I was two years old, if anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I said I wanted to be a teacher,” she says.
Sarah was a first year teaching student at MASTERS Institute in Auckland when she met her husband, a fellow student teacher. They decided that she would put her own study plans on hold while they began a family. With her youngest child heading off to school, it’s now Sarah’s time to study and pursue her teaching dreams. “I’d really like to own my little community preschool,” says Sarah. “Everyone who knows me says ‘of course, that is just so you’.”
Distance study options make gaining a qualification an achievable dream for people who are geographically isolated. But it can equally appeal to people who desire flexibility in managing multiple commitments.
Sandy Miller is in her third year of a Bachelor of Social Work at BTI. She is a widow with two busy teenage girls and though she lives only six minutes drive from BTI, she has chosen to study by distance.
“Studying online was the only way that I could begin my qualification and still parent the way I want to,” says Sandy. “The best part about it is that it fits around my life, rather than life fitting around study. Having access to course material 24/7 means I can totally dictate my study time for what works best for me, my family and my other commitments.”
Dr Andrew Smith, Dean of BTI, says the institute first embarked on the journey of distance education ten years ago in support of the Diploma of Counselling programme. “Generally speaking, counselling students are older, and therefore many of them have families and can’t relocate,” says Andrew.
While they may have had study options closer to home, many of them particularly were drawn to studying from a faith-perspective. Opening up a distance study option made this possible for them.
BTI now offers a distance study option for all of its programmes. The final programme to come online is the three-year Bachelor of Education (Teaching) for Primary and Early Childhood, which will be offered online for the first time in 2016, subject to Education Council NZ approval.
“Over the last decade we have seen the trend for students who want to study from where they live and work grow significantly,” says Andrew. “This growth has been particularly evident over the past four years with around 75% of our students studying some or all of their programme from a distance.”
Of course it makes sense that in our fast-paced, hyper-connected world we would study online. We buy our shoes and our food online; find recipes, advice, inspiration and dates online – why shouldn’t the way we teach and learn evolve accordingly?
But before we say ‘times have changed’, or, ‘distance study is as inevitable as a teenager on a smart-phone’, let’s pause to consider the implications.
Can relational, people-helping professions like teaching, counselling and social work really be taught effectively by distance? Isn’t it instinctive that you need on-campus, face-to-face relationships to have a truly transformational educational experience - one that shapes not just your ideas but who you are as a person?
In choosing convenience, are we actually choosing compromise?
Andrew understands all of these questions. In fact, he had them himself ten years ago. He swivels on his chair as he reflects, looking in the direction of the rising green slope of the lawn through his corner office windows.
“I was a bit of a skeptic as to how we could do this,” says Andrew. “But ten years on I think I am truly a convert. It’s amazing how much attitudes and abilities and technology have changed in that time.”
Andrew says that while the initial driver for offering BTI programmes online was convenience and pragmatics, experience has shown that the benefits extend far beyond the convenience factors. In fact, the surprising data shows that BTI students who study by distance are on the whole more engaged learners and often perform better than those who study onsite.
“Some of our onsite students tend to be reliant on being spoon-fed by the lecturer, so they think they can just come to class and that’s all they need to do,” says Andrew. “Whereas, the distance students have to be more self-motivated and therefore have to manage their time better and read more. As a result they do better.”
Andrew teaches a number of online courses and feels that he is able to provide more responsive teaching to students online. “If I have a group of onsite students and I get them to divide up into small groups, I can really only monitor one group at a time. The other groups could be talking about what they are going to have for dinner,” he says. “Whereas online I can see the discussions and actually interact with all of them one way or another. That gives me greater access to some of the things that are going on within the group.”
Dr. Bev Norsworthy, BTI's Head of Teaching & Learning, agrees whole-heartedly. “Face to face can be very reliant on the teacher figure, and you as the learner can be almost invisible in the class,” she says as we settle into our conversation in her office lined with books, ring binders and folders.
“I find that it’s so much easier for me to differentiate my teaching for the students online because you are engaging with them individually.”
Bev’s desks are covered with papers awaiting her attention but she is fully present and unhurried with me during our conversation – a testament to her loving and relational way of being in the world.
“If you had have had this conversation with me 20 years ago, I would have been saying, ‘no, teaching needs to be face to face, it’s such a relational endeavour’,” says Bev.
Her ‘moment-of-truth’ occurred several decades ago when a student she was supervising had to stay in Kaitaia due to family reasons. Bev agreed to supervise her via email from Auckland. Before long she felt that she was connecting with this student in rich ways and getting to know her far better than she had face to face.
“It was a challenge to me,” says Bev. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to believe this’ because I was wedded to these ideas that teaching is relational. I think I prefer the word connected now – that teaching requires connections and those connections need to be in authentic situations. But it doesn’t need to be with me necessarily, and it doesn’t need to be face to face.”
Going through the process of bringing the Bachelor of Education (Teaching) for Primary and Early Childhood online is giving the BTI Teacher Education team the chance to freshly re-examine these ideas. “Everything is up for very careful thought about how we prepare teachers in the best way possible whether they live across the road or in Invercargill,” says Bev.
Bev says the team are having many discussions about blended learning and creating multiple learning spaces – offering a blend of online study, onsite intensives, community involvement and host school practicums, where students are placed within a school or Early Childhood centre one or two days per week over an extended period of time.
This innovative host-school practicum model has already proved to be very successful in the secondary teaching programme. “The host school experience is an authentic context in which student teachers can take what they are learning in say, classroom management, and play with the ideas in their host school classroom,” says Bev.
“This model requires educators to pay more attention to designing learning experiences in authentic contexts – setting students up for being successful in those – rather than counting on the power of the face to face relationship.”
That is not to say, however, that the relationship between student and lecturer is not important. Research about effective online learning affirms that the presence of the lecturer is crucial.
The online learning environment is the context in which these relationships are formed and this space needs to be created carefully for effective learning and to allow genuine connections to form between students and the lecturer.
Suzzanne Barthow has worked as an educator in BTI's Counsellor and Social Work programmes. She's designed multi-sensory learning experiences for her online students, which take into account the different intrinsic learning styles of her students. She took a break from her pile of marking, braving the winter rain in a bright red coat to meet me at Nourish Café to discuss her approach.
“I want whatever I am doing online to be a mix that works for people who are strong visually, people who are strong kinesthetically, and people who are strong aurally - who need to talk to make sense of their learning,” she says.
On one of the papers Suzzanne teaches she has students work with a visual paper diary. “For those people who are kinesthetic, I have them do a collage, or write in their diary, so there is some sense of using their body to respond to whatever they are learning,” says Suzzanne. “For those who are visual I include video-clips into my learning.”
It is easy to under-estimate how rich, robust and transparent online connections between educators and students can be online. With both her onsite and online students, Suzzanne chooses to be quite open about her own life. She finds these conversations tend to be even more transparent online.
“I will use my own personal experiences to talk about or to illustrate something. If students are having a forum discussion about grief and loss, or domestic violence, I will share some of my own experiences about growing up around that,” says Suzzanne. “What matters most to me is my students learning, so if a student asks me a personal question in a forum, and I feel it will be beneficial for them, I will answer that.”
Suzzanne regularly posts video-clips, which feature herself speaking to her online students. However, she believes that onsite intensives also provide an important component to distance learning. “It’s about trying to help these students get some sense of who we are so they can ‘feel us’ not just hear us or see us,” she says.
As they journey through their study experience as a cohort, distance students often form meaningful relationships, not only with their lecturers, but also with each other. “I’ve seen that the distant student group develops an amazing camaraderie online,” says Andrew. “I enjoy seeing them come together for intensives. I think the relationships across the distance groups can be as strong as across the onsite groups.”
Sandy Miller says that one of the best things about her study journey has been connecting with another student during the first intensive and forming a great friendship. “Without the regular texts, emails and Skype chats, I would not be enjoying this time nearly as much,” she says. “The online friendships are as real as class ones, or perhaps even more treasured. Perhaps this is as a result of intentionality to catch-up and support each other, rather than just turning up to class and sitting beside people.”
Despite the positive and surprising benefits of distance study, there can also be some challenges and limitations.
In the grand scheme of things, distance study works best for Sandy Miller, but she does feel that the onsite students have more opportunities to observe the ways the tutors interact with people, their question formation and delivery, and way of 'being'. “I would find this increased opportunity to watch skilled communicators in action very beneficial at this stage of my learning,” says Sandy.
Andrew acknowledges that the distance way of working will not suit all people. “I think if someone knows that they are strongly relational – and relational to them means actually seeing someone face to face – then probably they are going to find it hard,” he says. “ My perception is that we are pretty good at asking those questions in the interview part of the application process.”
A particularly interesting dynamic that has shifted as a result of distance education is the emergence of a decentralised learning community. It used to be that often students left their own hometown and community and became immersed in the world of an institutional community that formed and shaped them.
However, with distance study, more and more people are being formed within their own communities, contexts and support systems. “That sense of community is more embedded and organic within their own community,” says Bev. “The role of educators now is not to provide that whole world, but to support them as they make connections within their own local worlds throughout their learning journey. We know that teaching and learning are deeply relational and I think when face to face teaching was the model, we thought about that as being relational with me, the teacher. But the research shows that your relationships with the people in your own life - your church group, your family group, your communities of support – are just as important.”
Andrew thinks that this shift is good for people’s local communities and helps to keep the learning more real for the student. “Often, people talk about the academic ivory tower – that you’re going into this community which is a bit distant from real life,” says Andrew. “That’s not going to happen, at least not to the same degree, if people are still located within their own community.”
All things considered, distance study seems to simultaneously open new horizons and return you to your own communities and contexts with fresh eyes. As counter-intuitive as it may appear at first glance, distance study facilitates deep and transformative learning relationships, even if they are long distance relationships.
Convenience may always be the dominant factor in choosing to study by distance, but it is edifying to know it is a convenience that students can embrace with a sense of confidence, not compromise.