All it takes is one meeting with RIT Associate Professor of Statistics Tom Barker and you come to the obvious realization that he really cares about his students. "My students become my friends," he says. "I like to take a very personal interest in what my students are doing. I get calls from students that are not in my class anymore, and they look at me as kind of a mentor. That is what I love to do. This is my job, to work with people in learning, because learning is an ongoing process. It’s not something that ends after an 11-week quarter. It goes on forever."

That philosophy extends to Barker’s online classes in Statistical Experimental Design. The very first extra-credit assignment in this class is what Barker calls a "Pre-Test" where students are required to fill out a form with questions such as "Where do you work and what do you do?" and "What are your spare time activities?"

"This way I get a better feel for who my students are," he says. "I might get to know them better than the students I have in the classroom because (online)I have to probe even more to find out who they are than I often have to do in a traditional classroom."

Students in Barker’s online classes also get to know him pretty well. Since he has a background in film and video, he has made it a policy to incorporate film clips of some of his personal hobbies - such as collecting Gilbert American Flyer trains or kayaking on Irondequoit Bay - into his videotaped lectures in order to attract his students’ attention in what can often be considered a challenging subject. For example, filming the workings of his entire train set at home (with engineering cap on), helps Barker illustrate a data collection and measurement method called "nested design," which is used for studying the effect of sources of variability that manifest themselves over time.

"The idea is to make the statistics lively, vital and not just a bunch of static formulas seen on a blackboard," he says.

Taking that concept to another level, Barker has also altered his online power point presentations through an ongoing experiment he conducts on colors. "I actually did an experiment to find out what colors people like best when they watch TV," he says. The result is that each one of Barker’s online power point presentation slides has a blue background with yellow or orange lettering.

Barker also likes to ensure that his online students participate in his regularly scheduled chat sessions, so he integrates discussion topics with his videotaped lectures - in effect making his lectures not quite over until the synchronous chats take place. "That’s what makes my chat sessions so lively; people come to them because the lecture is not complete until we have a dialogue. In our chat sessions it’s wonderful to watch the streams take place and the tangents we go off into. That’s what learning is all about. Plus they can go back and review, because the chat sessions are recorded, and I archive all chats."

To overcome any possible problems with students in different time zones being unable to attend chat sessions, Barker will schedule at least two different chat sessions on any particular module. "If they can’t come because of work load or because they are somewhere else in the world, I’ll schedule a different chat for them so it’s more convenient.

Additionally, Barker says for any email communications with him, students will usually get a response within three hours time. "It’s like I have an open office all the time, except I don’t have to go there," he says. "I read my email at least four times a day because if I don’t I’ll get too far behind. I think that this is what happens to a lot of people who are new to teaching distance learning. They may not be used to reading emails so often and then they get overwhelmed."

Regarding his communications with students, be it electronically or face-to-face, he adds that "there are no dumb questions, except the ones you don’t ask."

Barker has a lot of short quips that explain his philosophy of education. At his personal website, visitors can be engaged by such words of wisdom as "ignorance is curable with education. . . stupidity is forever," or "knowledge can’t be poured in, but I can enable knowledge to grow."

As far as helping students who may be a bit hesitant to take a statistics class online, Barker says "it’s like anything new. You have to jump in with both feet. Once you get into it, you begin to understand how it works, and when you get into a routine, it’s not as dreadful or scary."

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