Teaching a course entirely on the Internet is not for the faint of heart. It is, however, an experiment worth trying for those interested in the uses of technology in teaching.

After first experimenting with the Internet in 1996 in a philosophy of law course, I decided to develop an "all-Internet" course in philosophy of art. The attractiveness of on-line courses seems to be either "mass-market" courses that will draw huge enrollments because most students need to take them or specialized "niche" courses that are not regularly available on the typical campus. For those of us who teach these specialized areas, we have the bonus of getting to teach our specialties more frequently if we have a delivery mechanism on the Internet that can attract students from somewhere other than our own campus. Aesthetics is so marginalized, that many campuses rarely offer such a course, leaving interested students in art and philosophy with no options other than an Internet course.

Another factor in deciding to experiment with aesthetics is the wealth, almost from the beginning of the Web, of art-related materials on-line. I knew it would be easy to design class projects requiring students to identify works and discuss them philosophically using the theoretical materials we were developing in the course.

In spring of 1997, I taught a prototype of the course. We met in person once a week but all other course elements were on-line--readings, discussion groups, sending in papers as e-mail attachments. I needed to test those course elements, and I recommend this step to anyone thinking about an all-Internet course.

The most important attraction of the Internet was the opportunity to solve a major problem in teaching aesthetics in any format. Well-written philosophy of art uses extensive examples from the art world to analyze and apply theoretical alternatives. Yet virtually none of these examples is known to all students in a typical class, whether Warhol, Beethoven, or Balanchine. In-person classes become endless show-and-tell exercises. Students struggle through readings discussing examples they have never heard of. The instructors haul in tapes and reproductions and videotapes to show them examples of what is being discussed in the assigned readings. But the quality of discussion suffers from the "disconnect" between theory and example.

To solve this problem, I put all the readings for the course on-line, with hyperlinks set up throughout to sites where students could look at examples of the works being discussed and make sense of the theoretical points.

We have an advantage in philosophy that so much of the material we assign is now in the public domain, something unavailable in most disciplines. Admittedly, I still found myself distorting the reading assignments to adapt to what I could find or place on-line. I was able to find a few articles on other sites where I could send students for recent material, but this is risky. Articles have a way of moving or disappearing without warning, disrupting the reading list.

Putting all of the readings for a course on-line was enormously labor intensive, but that work is done and could be used in the future. I also wrote study questions at the end of each article that students could use in self-study, all the more important because I could not alert them to things to watch for in an in-person lecture.

It would have been vastly easier to simply have everyone buy the same print textbook and put on-line a list of recommended sites for them to explore in conjunction with each reading assignment. For many subject areas, this would be the only viable alternative, and it would have been a far easier approach for me in retrospect.

Another teaching problem in aesthetics is providing sufficient opportunity for discussion. Learning how to think "on their feet" in dialogue about important issues is an essential part of any philosophy class. The greatest loss in teaching entirely on the Internet is the loss of the development of oral communication skills. But the typical classroom is hardly ideal for that either. I normally have 30-40 students in this course. With class time totaling barely three hours a week, that leaves precious little time for each student to actually say very much in the classroom.

In an in-person class, I receive a steady stream of e-mail from students who were either afraid to bring something up in class or who want to follow-up in more detail on an issue. E-mail is a huge advantage of the Internet in any teaching setting. Communication with students improves dramatically, rather than becoming depersonalized, as some fear.

In the all-Internet class, I received far more individual e-mail, about both technical problems and substantive issues. That is an enhancement to student learning, but it also dramatically increases the labor-intensiveness of this form of teaching. Students expect prompt feedback, especially when you never see them in-person. With students working at home on their computers, the flood of e-mail continues seven days a week. It helps if the instructor is an Internet junkie.

In addition to e-mail communication, I wanted to exploit the potential of on-line discussion groups with the all-Internet class. As they would have no in-person discussions all semester, this became considerably more important than in a traditional class. I required each student to participate at least once a week on the class discussion group and I assigned grades to the quality of their participation.

Faculty participation in the discussion group was another demanding task all semester. Students need feedback as quickly as possible. I also was concerned that I would need to intervene immediately if any flaming episodes erupted. I set out strict ground rules at the beginning of the semester on civility and a ban on ad hominem arguments, but I had learned the hard way a year before how ugly flaming can get in a class if it is not nipped in the bud. I found myself checking into the discussion group at least once a day, seven days a week, often twice a day.

I had students write three short papers analyzing one of a choice of works of art on-line, writing similar to in-class essay exams in previous years. I wanted students to send in their papers as e-mail attachments, a skill that is easy for the computer literate, but not for most students. In response, I developed step-by-step instructions which worked reasonably well: http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361_h1.html

Every Monday, I sent out lecture notes on the week's assignments via e-mail. So no student could complain about not receiving them, I also posted them to the class discussion group and on a Web page. These were fairly simple to put together, as they were just an overview of things to look for in the reading, the context of the issues we were considering, and things to focus on in the discussion that week.

Each student was required to author and publish a web page as part of their final project. They picked one work available on the Web and presented it from the perspective of one of the theorists we had studied in the course. Surprisingly, Web-authoring turned out to be much easier than teaching them discussion groups, mainly because I already had some step-by-step instructions on-line that I had developed for faculty workshops the year before. http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/composer.html Although I had to do some trouble-shooting, especially for the actual publishing, it was fairly painless. I posted a list of all the URLs for the class so they could look at each other's work and they enjoyed discussing each other's projects.

My campus is enrollment-driven, and a traditional format for this course would require 25 students for capacity enrollment. (My dean gave me a reduced teaching load that semester, in recognition of the labor-intensiveness of this course, but I do not expect that in future offerings. Our campus has no accommodations for smaller classes for on-line teaching.) I took all adds and initially had 40 students. I wanted to show that there was significant student interest in this type of teaching and expected many drops in the first month.

Some students seemed to think that an Internet course meant that they could get academic credit for checking their e-mail once in a while. Others soon realized that it was difficult to "fake it" in an on-line class. With the emphasis on individual contributions to the discussion group, students discovered --often to their horror--that they actually had to do the reading.

Another unexpected benefit from my vantage point was that students were working on their writing much more intensively than in a traditional course. They soon realized that the entire class would read their postings to the discussion group and that those postings could not be "erased" from the group, so they learned to put more thought and care into their writing.

I announced in advance that the course had certain technical pre-requisites--students must already know how to use e-mail, access the Web, and participate in an on-line discussion group. In fact, almost no one knew how to use a discussion group, so I spent the first several weeks of the semester in endless trouble-shooting: some by e-mail, some during office hours. For students who only had access to AOL, which restricts access to discussion groups elsewhere, I struggled for weeks to figure out how to get them into our group. I finally subscribed to AOL myself for my free 30-day trial to figure out the solution and wrote up some step-by-step instructions for AOL users (http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/aol.html) If I had strictly enforced the technical pre-requisites, I would not have had sufficient enrollment to go forward with the course.

I was so exhausted from this experience teaching on the Internet, that I decided not to do the course in 1998-99, but I will probably try it again the following year. Much of the hard work is done, but the teaching of the course itself remains extremely labor intensive.

Future students are likely to need almost as much hand-holding with technical problems as they do now. Even though wealthier suburban high schools are sending us Internet-literate students with high-end computers at home, our campus draws from a large urban area where many students will not enjoy such luxuries for years to come, if ever.

Legislators and administrators are swept up on a wave of enthusiasm for the Internet as the salvation of higher education, but their interest seems driven largely by economic concerns, not pedagogy. Perhaps self-teaching via automated sites or CD-ROMS would be more cost-effective, if it were possible to reduce our courses to this teacher-less format. But the courses those of us in philosophy want to offer are very labor-intensive. New software to grade essays automatically seems geared to essays dealing in factual content, not philosophical reasoning.

Savings also might result from lessened pressure to build more classrooms. But the savings in bricks and mortar from a course taught entirely on the Internet are quickly lost in the high costs of equipment and support. As more faculty realize how labor-intensive Internet teaching can be, the pressure to reduce class size will grow, countering cost-savings elsewhere.

Instead of grousing about the dangers of technology in the abstract--a popular faculty occupation, especially by those who fear loss of faculty jobs because of technology, I urge colleagues to understand technology's potential as well as its limits. The best way to do this is to actually experiment with using the Internet in our own courses. I learned that administrators are more likely to take my recommendations seriously since I have actually tried technology in my classes.

Most importantly, for subjects that I love teaching, however specialized, the Internet promises a way to offer those courses more frequently and more effectively in the future.

Last updated: 12/15/2000