Introducing Religion to Cyberstudents Print

Erica Hurwitz Andrus, University of Vermont

Erica Hurwitz Andrus is a lecturer in the religion department at the University of Vermont. She received her PhD from the University of Santa Barbara in 2006, where her researched focused on religion in America and her dissertation examined the connections between Southern Protestant evangelicalism and bluegrass music and culture. She now teaches the comparative introductory course as well as intermediate-level courses in religion in America and religion and popular culture. Her teaching interests include the incorporation into the classroom of "service-learning" — in one instance beginning a dialogue between university student and local public school teachers and administrators about the importance of addressing religion in public schools — and technologies such as Blackboard. Her research lately has focused on religion in film and television, and she is co-organizer of a one-day conference on science fiction in the academy. Andrus is presently working on articles on Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and The Big Lebowski. She lives on the first commercial-scale rice farm in New England with her farmer husband, two sons, and a variety of animals. She has taught an online version of her introductory class for the past three summers.

Focusing on Text, Not Technology

There’s been a lot of noise in the news lately about MOOCs, and when people hear “online course” that’s often the first thing to come to mind. And no wonder, what with all the breathless press they’ve been getting. However this essay is not going to address the MOOC platform/phenomenon/philosophy. In fact, my online teaching experience is at the other end of the spectrum — adapting a course that during the year meets face-to-face with up to 130 students to an online summer version with 6–10 students. In my experience, the online setting creates a strange, paradoxical world of faceless intimacy. This has both advantages and disadvantages, pedagogically speaking.

The course is “Introduction to Religion: Comparative” and I have taught it many times here at the University of Vermont. Inheriting a departmental ethos from the work of our illustrious emeritus chair, William Paden, the comparative nature of the course is essential. For case studies I draw on Buddhism, Islam, and Native American religions, and for an organizing principle, I use six of Ninian Smart’s seven “dimensions” of religion.  This way of structuring the course translates extremely well to the constraints of the online context. Each “dimension” is a unit/week of the semester and can be neatly compartmentalized into its own folder on the “course materials” page of the Blackboard site for the class.

When I first started teaching online, it was a great advantage to me that I had already used many of the functions of Blackboard and was familiar with the platform. I also had an advantage in the form of the Center for Teaching and Learning, a resource for University of Vermont faculty and staff managed out of the main library on campus. The Center offered a paid course, funded by the continuing education department, which led professors and lecturers from all over the university through the process of converting a course from a face-to-face format to online only. The most valuable part of this course was Wendy Verrai-Berenback, the person who was assigned to me, to answer any questions I had and to run interference between myself and the media department to arrange for films to be available and to handle copyrights. Without Verrai-Berenback, my course would not have succeeded. Having good professional development support is essential to creating a good online course.

As I took that course myself (a hybrid-style course, partly online and a few meetings in person), I began to realize that some of my preconceptions about “distance learning” or online courses were in fact the opposite of what actually occurs. In my mind, I had worried that the online version of a class would be too lightweight — too much video and web browsing, and not enough text. The reality of it is that it is almost nothing but text. The students write more than they ever would in my face-to-face version of the class, because they never literally speak — all their speech is written speech. So there is no such thing as an informal conversation or the back-and-forth of a classroom discussion; there are only written words. Even the most casual discussion board assignment is open to editing and revision. This realization seemed like a paradox to me — the most tech-oriented version of the course was also the most text-oriented.


I made a decision early on not to try to “lecture” to my students. I began to examine what exactly I wanted the students to do, to learn, and to write. I believe that it is reading, not lecturing, that holds the highest value for learning in my courses, so my job becomes that of a guide — asking questions and pointing the students’ attention toward the central concepts and arguments being made by the authors of the texts I have assigned. With that in mind, I was able to condense my usual classroom lectures into short, written “mini-lectures” that I posted at the top of the folder for each week’s units. This meant I did not have to struggle with new technology of podcasts or vlogs (video logs). The students seemed to be content not to hear my voice or see my face, just as I did not see or hear them.

When I adapted the course, I discovered that there were a few things I did in my face-to-face class that I could not do online. I had to give up one of my favorite classroom exercises because I could not figure out how to translate it into a project that could be completed by different students at different times instead of all at once as a brainstorming session. The assignment is simply to come up with the largest possible list of “religions” and then organize it, entailing lots of discussion about what we mean by “religion,” what counts and what doesn’t, and how we group various religions together to make sense of a list of undifferentiated data. Without the vocal, immediate back-and-forth discussion, this list just never got very long, and the students were reluctant to reorder them, even though the wiki tool seemed like the perfect forum for encouraging the students to rearrange the religions into new groupings.

Meanwhile, because I was not only adapting the course to the online format but also condensing a fourteen-week semester-long class into a six-week intensive summer one, I was forced to evaluate very carefully the organization of the course. I found that doing so improved my face-to-face version of the course as well, making it more coherent and focusing my attention on the most important facets of each unit. For example, in the six-week course, I needed to have the students cover more than one “dimension” in a week if I was going to have time to also cover the basic facts of the three religious traditions and have students complete projects and write papers. So, I paired Myth with Doctrine, deciding that beginning with these two dimensions would mimic the way that children grow up in a religion and the way that a convert to a religion would be presented with the creeds and basic worldview. I paired the Experiential with the Ritual, as inward and outward expressions or interpretations of the same event. Finally, I introduced the Social and Legal dimensions as building upon and reinforcing elements of the previous four dimensions. Using the dimensions in this way allowed me to create a series of prompts on the discussion board that the students could use to demonstrate their mastery of the concepts after reading some primary text readings and the textbook — usually Gary Kessler’s Studying Religion: An Introduction through Cases, third ed., McGraw-Hill, 2007 —and often a video or Website for more first-person or primary text examples.


In addition to forcing me to reorganize content more intentionally, I found that creating discussion board prompts and short essays that took the place of quizzes helped me create equally useful Blackboard projects for all versions of the class. Writing prompts forced me to articulate clearly what I wanted the students to get from the readings and how I wanted them to think about key concepts. Using the discussion board function showed me where students were likely to get bogged down by the technology and how I could communicate effectively to help them avoid that (the cumbersome difference between a “forum” and a “thread,” for example). I began to think in terms of applying the successful online course practices to the way I use Blackboard in the face-to-face version of the course. This is one of the great advantages to teaching online. In my experience, however, there is a noticeable difference in the level of resistance to technology in a course that also meets regularly in a classroom. Students in that situation tend to get more easily frustrated by being asked to do tasks online outside of class. The more clearly I articulate the justification for making an assignment online versus handed in or in-class, the more quickly the students overcome their discomfort with the technology and engage the material that I want them to be grappling with.

In all versions of my class, I ask students to think of examples for each of the dimensions and post them to the discussion board. The students in the online version of the class almost always use longer posts and go into greater detail discussing the examples. The students in the face-to-face version of the course see this exercise as some kind of “busy-work” that they can check off their to-do lists after they sit down and write one sentence to show they have completed the assignment. My response to this discrepancy has been to try to explain more clearly in class how I see the discussion board as an opportunity for students to:

  1. Show me they understand the concepts even if they are too shy to speak out during class
  2. Practice using the terms in a low stakes forum and get feedback before they are tested on them. In the online version of the class it seems to be taken for granted that all forms of communication are evaluated and therefore worthy of careful thought and attention.

In conclusion, I am grateful that my online course is a small version of a course I’m very familiar with. Creating the online version took a fair amount of work, but now that it is “up” it is relatively easy to adapt from one summer to the next. Once the summer session starts, the amount of reading and responding that I have to do are not unreasonable. On the other hand, because of the amount of reading involved in the online version of the course, I cannot imagine teaching more than a dozen students at a time. The way I have adapted this course — with no tests, no quizzes, and nothing that could be automatically graded or evaluated by Blackboard — my imagination fails when it comes to thinking of ways to teach hundreds or even thousands of students at once. I think maybe Wendy Verrai-Berenback of the Center for Teaching and Learning could help me if I had to do it, but for now I feel content to avoid that brave new virtual world.