Old Paradigms, New Learners

Introduction

When I first contemplated writing this chapter, the challenge was to illustrate what it was like being one of the early fully online learners and later becoming an online faculty. According to Simmons (Simmons, 2015), the best way to get the point across with power and emotion is to tell a story. I began as an online learner in 1998 while an active flight nurse in the US Air Force. I already had a nursing career and degree, a bachelor's and master’s degree from a traditional brick and mortar university. I had my first taste of online learning during my master’s degree in psychology for a computer statistics course. Even the traditional universities had started coming on board and embracing the inevitability of computer and technology innovations. During the course, I was required to upload my statistical data into the university's mainframe to run overnight. I would stop in at the computer center to retrieve the results. To accomplish that with a transmission rate of about 13 baud a minute in 1990, I had to dial into the university's mainframe and leave my receiver off the hook overnight to transmit the data. I started my first master’s degree with an electronic typewriter that I was delighted had a memory card that held one page of data. That certainly improved the ability to edit without a massive rewriting of every paper. By the time I finished the degree, I had purchased my first desktop computer. To my delight, the hard drive held 20meg of data. I could store additional data now with a floppy disk. Now, this seemed at the time better than sliced bread.

By 1994, the newer generations of computers came online along with access to the World Wide Web, developed by the US military, and accessible through American Online, or AOL, if you recall. As computers gained clock speed and memory capability, I continued to upgrade at will, buying my first laptop shortly before deciding to pursue a purely online master’s degree in Computer Information Systems at the same time I was teaching adjunct for a traditional university offering courses on the base where I was stationed. As I got more adept at using computers and navigating online, it occurred to me that should I want to venture out into Corporate America on my departure from the military, it would be in my best interest to get a degree in computers and networking. In 1998, I enrolled at the University of Phoenix. At the time, the access was purely dial up per DSL into the servers that were housed in San Francisco, CA. Many of my colleagues were skeptical, not to mention superior officers, of online education programs and the value of such as education, which must surely, they decried, be inferior to traditional university learning. However, I was an active flight nurse at the time, which made attending a traditional on-ground class set days or nights of the week impossible.

Undeterred, I enrolled. One thing that it might have been challenging shifting from the tradition to the online. However, the course design, in many ways, was like the on-ground setting. The primary difference was that there was no faculty lecturing for most of the hour. The onus of the learning was on the student who had to master the self-discipline of his/her knowledge acquisition. After all, the days of staying after class for additional explanation of some point in the lecture was no longer a possibility. The course design was somewhat similar to the traditional classroom with required text and articles to read, classroom discussion, and weekly assignments. The weekly assignments were quite different from many traditional master’s programs, where term papers were more the norm. Discussion was no longer an option but a requirement. A student could not merely be a wallflower in the classroom absorbing the lecture and taking notes. The online student was provided with weekly questions and expected to provide an initial response and then respond to other learners in the online class. One of the most significant changes in the online classroom curriculum was the group assignments. Working in groups was probably one of the more challenging adjustments for me, as I preferred to be in complete control of the grade earned and preferred to work alone. I suppose that I did learn a great deal about team cooperation and learning how to team lead in the process, but it was painful for me all the way through.

I completed the online degree in Computer Information Systems in 2000 and decided to enroll in the new doctoral program offered by the University of Phoenix in Management and Organizational Leadership. By then, I discovered that I preferred the online classroom. I was so determined that I was to reach my final educational goal of having a doctorate, I took an early out from the Air Force, much to the consternation and words of warning from my commander about how I was making the biggest mistake of my life.