Annie Blazer, College of William and Mary, and Brandi Denison, University of North Florida

Annie Blazer is an assistant professor of religious studies at the College of William and Mary. Her scholarship examines post-war Evangelical Christians and popular culture. She is currently completing her first monograph, Faith on the Field: Sports, Gender, and Evangelical Christianity in America.

Brandi Denison is an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Florida. Her teaching and research interests include North American religions, religion in the American West, race and ethnic identity, and theories and methods of religious studies. She is currently a coeditor for the Religion in the American West blog and is working on a manuscript titled Remove, Return, Remember: Ute Land Religion and Reconciliation in the American West.

From the Lecture Hall to the Computer Screen

As PhD students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, we were employed by Carolina Courses Online (CCO) to teach online courses. While we greatly appreciated the opportunity to teach online courses as a means of securing funding, we encountered a number of challenges that made online teaching a far different experience than traditional classroom teaching. Namely, we were unable to educate students about acceptable academic behaviors and had increased cases of plagiarism and proselytizing in online forums. We argue that the Internet can offer new and innovative pedagogical tools, but some models of online teaching constrained our flexibility and creativity as teachers to the detriment of our students. Our experience indicates that all instructors of online religious studies courses need to prepare for the issues of proselytizing and plagiarism that may emerge in discussion forums.

Blazer: In 2006, after several semesters as a teaching assistant and teaching my own course, the religious studies department allowed me to teach online courses to fund my final year at the University of North Carolina. I was glad for the opportunity because funding was limited and the opportunity to teach online courses was a relatively recent development. I designed two courses to be taught over the 2006–2007 academic year. The timing worked out well for me because I was able to use the year to conduct fieldwork for my dissertation research.

The second course that I developed, “Introduction to Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Religion,” was popular in its face-to-face form at the university and was also in demand as an online course, enrolling 25–30 students. I designed the online course using the same course design as the face-to-face large-scale lecture class. It dealt with canonical debates within philosophy of religion such as the existence of God, the problem of evil, the relationship between faith and reason, and ideas on the afterlife. Each week, students were responsible for reading excerpts from a textbook and a posted lecture. The course content was due to CCO months before the semester began and mid-semester revisions were difficult. Should I have wanted to change these lectures, I would have had to submit my revisions to the course designer. Since I was a graduate student, my lectures needed approval both from the faculty member who taught the face-to-face version of the course and the department chair. These levels of oversight made mid-semester revisions untenable. I could, of course, post additional content to the course website, but this would appear as external to the lecture content.

I designed this course in 2006. YouTube, founded in 2005, was not the teaching resource it is today. Religious studies blogs were few and far between. I was given access to another CCO course to use as a model and that course was entirely text-based. So, as a result, my lectures included no images or media.

Denison: In the fall of 2010, I was offered a position teaching the same “Introduction to Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Religion” course. In my conversation with CCO, I learned that just as Blazer was paid to initially develop the course, CCO would pay future teachers to revise the course, provided that there had been significant changes in the field. This standard applies to all fields, but when applied to philosophy of religion, this rule is laughable. What would significant progress at the introductory level look like? A definitive proof (or disproof) of the existence of God? Even though new examples and commentary exist, the canon of texts remained relatively static, so it was not possible to argue that online pedagogical advances necessitated a substantive revision of the course.

The inability to revise the course meant that I could not respond to the changing Internet or pedagogy. For example, one of the more effective teaching tactics used in the face-to-face class was linking pop culture examples to philosophical arguments. In class discussions, these examples became a shorthand for students struggling to recall the particulars of an argument. It also allowed the instructor to respond to the learning styles of a class, something that can’t be anticipated during the course creation. However, the constraints on revision meant that I could not incorporate current events and video clips into the lectures. Furthermore, the restrictions on revising a course based solely on its content overlooked the rapid developments in online pedagogy and the shifting nature of the Internet. Given these restrictions, I found the teaching and learning experience unsatisfying.

Offering online courses makes financial sense for universities. It is also in the best financial interest of CCO to discourage substantial redesigns to courses because these would not only require additional funds for updating the content, but would also create a substantial amount of work for the full-time staff. So what we see here is a conflict of financial and pedagogical priorities. To further illustrate our pedagogical challenges, we present two case studies from our courses that emerged from our inability to properly socialize the students regarding proper academic behavior — proselytizing and plagiarism.

Blazer: In my course student interaction occurred in Blackboard forums. As part of my original course design, a major assignment for the course required weekly forum posts and at least one formal response to a classmate’s post. This weekly assignment was due by the end of the week and I graded them on Monday mornings.

In general, students are drawn to online classes because they allow flexible scheduling. In theory, this weekly assignment could have been completed at any time during the week, but in practice, the majority of posting took place between 10:00 pm and 2:00 am on Sunday evening/Monday morning — a time when it was understandably difficult for me to moderate or intervene in the discussion. Given this, it took substantially longer than my face-to-face classes to establish appropriate discussion practices. Particularly if a student has never had a religious studies class in college, that student may be unaware that it is inappropriate to quote the Bible as philosophical evidence or to respond to a classmate’s post with Christian theological statements such as “It doesn't matter. God has a plan.” or “God is real.” When these kinds of statements appeared, I intervened by posting in the discussion forum why such statements were inappropriate for our class. I referenced the introductory lecture that explicitly stated that the academic study of religion is not interested in proving theological truths but in investigating the multiple facets of theological debates. I would also send the student a personal e-mail stating that I would remove the student’s posts from the forum if they did not reflect academic rigor.

Since this activity was happening in the middle of the night, I never intervened as it was taking place and, as a result, it took substantially longer to establish the kind of respectful, tolerant classroom atmosphere that I have been able to cultivate relatively quickly in face-to-face teaching environments.

Denison: In my Fall 2010 course, I had similar problems establishing appropriate classroom behavior. In addition to persistent proselytizing, I had several instances of plagiarism. In the second week of class, I had a student cut and paste an article from Wikipedia as a forum response. Aside from the egregious violation of the university’s honor code, this caused problems in the class discussion. Students responding to the plagiarized post were confused by the tone of the post and became concerned that they were not doing the assignment correctly.  When I woke up on Monday morning, my inbox was full of questions about whether or not their posts needed to include historic information about the philosophers they had read and if they needed to do outside research. I handled this by directly contacting the offending student and letting them know that they had plagiarized and that their work would not receive credit. The student acknowledged the error and it didn’t happen again.

This could have resolved the issue, but the public nature of this case resulted in further complications. In a face-to-face course, this case of plagiarism would have remained a private interaction between me and the student. However, because of the nature of the online classroom, students were immediately alarmed by what they perceived to be the accurate way to write responses. I ended up responding to each of the e-mails individually, assuring the students that they had completed their responses correctly. In my weekly e-mail to the rest of the class, I reemphasized that they did not have to do outside research, and if they did, they needed to cite it correctly. However, due to the confidentiality related to grades, I did not “out” the controversial post as plagiarized. Unfortunately, after this incident, several other students also plagiarized their posts from other Internet sources.

In a face-to-face class, socialization towards writing and citing expectations can happen quickly. Through the tone of my voice and body language, I am able to convey the gravity of plagiarism effectively, even to students sitting in the back row. Furthermore, isolated instances of plagiarism remain private, protecting the student and shielding the student’s classmates from their example. An online class does not have the same advantage, as the course syllabus can contain information about plagiarism and tips on how to avoid it, but there is no guarantee that students will read it.

The greatest challenge that we faced in shifting from a lecture to an online format for “Introduction to Philosophical Approaches to the Study of Religion” was establishing social parameters in an online space effectively and quickly. Despite this challenge, we found that a small number of our students thrived in the online course environment. These students took the assignments seriously and crafted thoughtful responses. In particular, we noticed that students who did not have access to campus for reasons such as health, work obligations, or international travel were grateful for the intellectual engagement and exceeded our expectations. With this in mind, we see online courses as an important opportunity to expand education beyond traditional campus borders.

These students were a minority in our courses, however. Overall we were struck by the problems that emerged from a lack of classroom socialization, like proselytizing and plagiarism, and frustrated by our limited ability to adjust the course to respond to these problems. Given the incidences of proselytizing, we would encourage online religious studies courses to include content on appropriate ways to talk about religion. We recommend an assignment that asks students to put this into practice, perhaps through an online quiz asking students to identify scholarly and nonscholarly statements. To address the problem of plagiarism, we suggest an assignment that would require students to evaluate each other on proper citation practice and to check for possible plagiarism. This could be done early in the semester using students’ online posts. In order for this to work well, students would need to be provided with a checklist of tasks including Googling key phrases and checking for proper citation format.

Online pedagogy is a rapidly expanding field, and we are confident that teachers are developing creative ways to respond to just the sort of problems we experienced, but the model of online education that we experienced disincentivized seeking out these pedagogical tools. While we understand the financial reasoning behind these policies, we can't help but wonder about the priorities: Are the students being adequately served? Are graduate students given the opportunity to develop into the kind of professors that an institution like the University of North Carolina would hire? We argue that these questions need to be taken seriously by institutions providing online courses. Even though the field of philosophy of religion, for example, changes very slowly, online instruction requires innovation and flexibility. We encourage institutions to incentivize online courses to evolve with the pace of changing technology and pedagogy.