2008 PROCEEDINGS - Public Relations Society of America

Barriers to Online Course Delivery
In the past few years, the number of students enrolled in e-learning programs has more
than doubled. Currently, 65 percent of universities offering face-to-face graduate courses also
offer graduate courses online (Romano, 2006). But, given benefits of online course delivery, why
aren’t even more schools offering online courses?
For one, creating good online courses can be costly and take a lot of time (Romano,
2006). The added workload seems to be a particularly important barrier to the development of
online courses. A study that polled division chairs and faculty at a community college in the
Southeastern part of the United States reported, “The factor which posed the greatest concern to
all faculty and division chairs regarding their participation in distance education was the
workload that faculty incur as a result of participating in distance education” (O’Quinn & Corry,
2002). Therefore, O’Quinn and Corry (2002) recommended that institutions should offer
incentives for faculty who are willing to teach a distance course for the first time and that those
faculty members should receive time off to receive the appropriate training.
Beyond that, a lack of first-hand experience teaching online courses may make professors
less likely to want to instruct them. A survey administered to faculty members at The State
University of West Georgia, in Carrollton, Georgia, revealed that the respondents who had taught
online courses had much different attitudes about distance courses than those who had not. It
proved to be true that “experience breeds acceptance” (Clay, 1999).
Also, another possible barrier to online instruction is related to the tendency of some
instructors to assign collaborative work. An online learning environment may not be the best
forum for such collaboration. Collier and Morse (2002) reported “serious problems” with a
collaborative writing assignment for an online course at Lesley University. When the
assignment was restructured to allow for more individual work, things improved. To maintain
some sort of collaborative element in the assignment, students had to engage in a peer review of
another student’s work (Collier and Morse, 2002). Student satisfaction, instructor satisfaction,
and the quality of the students’ papers all showed improvement after the restructuring.
This research sheds light on the fact that some “online students strongly prefer to work
independently” (Collier and Morse, 2002). Yet, according to Collier and Morse, discarding
online collaborative assignments is not the solution. Instead, it means instructors need to
separate the components of an assignment that must be done collaboratively to ensure
achievement of the assignment’s goals from those parts that can be done independently without
sacrificing the achievement of those goals (Collier and Morse, 2002).
Challenges in motivating students can serve as an additional deterrent to online learning,
because as Dereshiwsky (2002) noted, “Anything new and different is bound to be scary.”
Because the stress from such a new experience could deter students, it is essential for instructors
to motivate those students to persevere. Also, it should be noted that the findings of Cronje et al.
(2006) indicated at least a possible link between academic stress and sense of achievement.
Motivating Students in Online Learning Environments
The decisions online instructors make play a key role in whether or not their students will
succeed in an online classroom. The Commission of Public Relations Education (2006)
advocated that the student plays a more central role in the learning process than the online
instructor. Specifically, the report noted:
The instructor is much more a course manager, rather than the center of the learning
process. The more the student can be involved with the course material through
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