When RIT Assistant Professor Anne Barker reviewed a sample data set on wildlife research involving wild black bears, which was part of the MINITAB^TM statistical software being utilized in her online Fundamentals of Statistics course, she took an extra step to illustrate to her online students how data is collected. To emphasize her point, she filmed a wildlife researcher measuring the head length and width of an anesthetized wild black bear in the woods and included the footage on one her videotaped lectures on statistics. The researcher, however, was not a real researcher; the bear was not a real bear; and the woods happened to be located in her backyard.

"We were hoping to find just ordinary Adirondack-style black bears, and we assumed that we could go to the Rochester Zoo and take pictures of bears, but there were no black bears at the Rochester Zoo," says Barker. The next best thing was to rent a bear costume and enlist her daughter’s visiting father-in-law, who happens to be an actor, to act out the part of an anesthetized wild black bear. She also collared her husband Professor Tom Barker (who is also an RIT statistics professor) to play the part of wildlife researcher. The data-collection scene was set and filmed in her back yard, which has a small wooded lot. "I know this sounds crazy," she says, "but it was creative. I think it made a much better clip than taking a few pictures of bears in the zoo."

Barker says she tries to occasionally liven up her videotaped lectures, which are primarily filmed inside an RIT studio that mimics an office-like setting, with live film clips of people in the field actually gathering data for statistical analysis. "Instead of me just talking about it, here is a person gathering real data," she says. "Let’s see how they go about it, and let’s see what they think about in terms of how many observations they take and so forth."

Barker likes to try new methods to enhance her online teaching style. In addition to in-the-field film clips, she’s working at incorporating a different approach to what she has done in the past for getting students more actively involved in synchronous chat sessions. She used to schedule weekly non-mandatory online chat sessions, but next fall that should change.

"The problem with chat is that you can set one or two chat times for the week and the students usually don’t’ show up, and it gets worse as the quarter goes on," she says. Through the advice of a colleague, Barker plans to arrange her online students into groups of two or three, and encourage each group to participate in either synchronous or asynchronous discussions on a regular basis. "They will be able to go into their own sub conference and work together," she says.

Barker will provide assignments to each group and ask students to help each other both create and answer relevant questions as she monitors the discussions and provides her input. "It will almost be like having a small group of students come in and talk with you during office hours," she says.

In addition to participating in small group discussions and watching videotaped lectures, students in Barker’s class are required to read from the "Introduction to Probability and Statistics" textbook, hand in regular homework assignments that are regularly faxed or emailed to her, and take two proctored tests over the 11-week quarter. She also takes telephone calls and emails from students at any time.

She says that her online classes "requires more of my time just because of the logistics." For instance, in her last online class, the many faxed homework assignments started to overwhelm the departmental office’s fax machine, so she had to have students reroute their homework to the Educational Technology Center’s (ETC) dedicated fax line. That meant she had to pick up the assignments at a different building that was more than walking distance from her office. Unfortunately, like most college campuses, parking can be a problem, and Barker found herself frequently parking illegally near ETC’s office to pick up her student’s homework. Fortunately, she was able to avoid getting a ticket by somehow staying one step ahead of the parking lot attendants. (The faxing situation has since been resolved.)

Se also likes to stay one step ahead of her class. Her class syllabus, for instance, always goes live well in advance to the start of her online class. "We are trying to emphasize the fact that students are not getting a different kind of education, so I use the same syllabus that I would use in an ordinary class," she says. "But one thing about distance learning is that you have to get going ahead of time, so I post the syllabus a couple weeks ahead of time, which makes the semester seem longer than it really is."

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