Learning the Ropes: Academics in a Distance Education University |
The purpose of this study was to examine the transitional experiences of faculty members as they adapted to the role requirements of an open distance university. Conceptually, the study was approached from the perspectives of work transitions and organizational socialization. Methodologically, an ethnographic approach was used. As new faculty members encountered organizational tasks and environments which differed from other educational institutions, they experienced confusion and stress. After two to four years in the environment, most newcomers had not achieved a “comfortable fit” with the institution.
Cette étude consiste à examiner les expériences vécues par les professeurs lors de la transition que représente l’adaptation de leur rêle à une université d’enseignement radiodiffusé. D’un point de vue conceptuel, on a abordé l’étude dans la perspective des transitions professionnelles et de la socialisation au sein de l’organisme. D’un point de vue méthodologique, on a adopté une approche ethnographique. Les nouveaux professeurs, confrontés à de nouvelles tâches et è des milieux différents des autres établissements d’enseignement, ont succombé à la confusion et au stress. Deux à quatre ans apres, la plupart des nouveaux venus n’avaient pas réussi à s’intégrer parfaitement dans le système.
Several excellent works have examined academic roles in “traditional” four year universities (e.g., Wilson, 1942; Caplow and McGee, 1961; Finkelstein, 1984). The role of the traditional academic is typically defined as a three-part function — the conservation, dissemination and innovation of knowledge (Wilson, 1942), with dissemination, or teaching occupying the majority of faculty time (Finkelstein, 1984). Distance education, because of its mandate, its technology, and its culture, may require a different emphasis on role behaviors. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the adaptation of academics, to an open, distance university.
With few research models in the emerging literature on distance education, other disciplines were examined. Organizational theorists appear to offer a framework suitable for examining academic adaptation to a new occupational environment. For example, Van Maanen (1975) and Mortimer and Simons (1978) found that before full acceptance and responsibility of the new status as a (traditional) faculty member is accomplished, an extensive socialization experience may be necessary to learn specific job requirements as well as to unlearn prior expectations.
Further occupational transitions may be a source of profound personal change as new environments are encountered and new territories are established (Nicholson, 1984). Concomitant witl~ adopting the new is abandoning the old which may result in stress as events require adjustments to established behaviorai repertoires (Hopson and Adams, 1976).
Socialization is broadly defined by Brim and Wheeler (1966) as “the process by which persons acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that make them more or less able members of their society.” Socialization is said to occur repeatedly in response to change in their lives and employment situations (Schein, 1968). Socialization is a process of moving through one of a series of interrelated but conceptually discrete steps which form a ‘‘socialization episode.”
The first stage, anticipatory socialization, represents the events at the pre-entry level. Foremost is the formulation of expectations about the employing organization (Graen, 1976).
The second stage, entry-encounter, involves obtaining information about the organization through interviews and other sources (Wanous, 1980). Encounter is the process of confronting expectations at the work place, managing outside life conflicts and making sense of the changed life situation (Louis, 1980). At this stage, the individual can be viewed as being half in and half out of the organization, as final decisions are still to be made and the situation remains somewhat amorphous, or “unfrozen.”
Adaptation, the third stage, focuses on the initiation to task, learning one’s role in the work group and acquiring cultural values which define the organization (Van Maanen, 1975).
As the individual “refreezes’‘ into a new role mode, he or she metamorphoses role and outside life conflicts to achieve a level of satisfaction, job involvement and internalized motivation (Porter, Lawler, & Hackman, 1975) which remains more or less constant until an occupational, organizational or life change occurs. Such change initiates a recycling through some or all of the stages (Schein, 1983; Nicholson, 1984).
This conceptual framework is particularly suited to this study because there is considerable evidence that the entry and encounter experiences of organizational newcomers are crucial to the formation of attitudes toward, and understanding of, occupational roles (Louis, 1980; Van Maanen, 1978; Feldman, 1976). The newcomer is uniquely subject to influences and is motivated to become accepted by this new social system (French, Kast and Rosenszweig, 1985). Brim and Wheeler (1966) go so far as to suggest that what a newcomer learns at the beginning will become the core of his organizational identity.
Failure to adapt to the new role or culture is thought to result in absenteeism or turnover (Dugoni & llgren, 1981), deviant behavior patterns (Raelin, 1983) or rebellion (Schein, 1968).
Given that the purpose of this study was to investigate adaptation to new role behaviors in a specific cultural setting, the flexible approach offered by the ethnographic mode of research seemed appropriate. This approach allows the researcher to use the culture of the setting and personal accounts of population members to account for socially acquired learning (Bogden and Biklen, 1982; Schatzman and Strauss, 1973). Since behavior is significantly influenced by the context in which it occurs, research is conducted in the “field” environment in which the behavior occurs (Minnis, 1985). Through direct personal contact and observation, informants are encouraged to identify the relevant categories and criteria which describe their world, rather than the researcher determining how the world conforms to a priori assumptions (Guba and Lincoln, 1982).
In this study, all but one of the faculty members who had received tenure at Athabasca University within the previous six-month period agreed to participate in a series of increasingly structured interviews. These faculty members were considered to meet the inclusionary category of institutional boundary crossing described by Schein (1978). It was anticipated that they would have reasonably fresh recall of entry experiences, while having gained a sense of perspective over their two-to- four year period of incumbency.
No effort was made to compare their perceptions with those of faculty before who had left the University before achieving tenure since the search for those who left presented considerable difficulties.
The tenets of the ethnographic or qualitative method guided the research activity. Included in these tenets are ethical considerations of individual rights, privacy, confidentiality and anonymity, as well as rigorous attention to credibility, applicability, auditability and confirmability as described by Guba and Lincoln (1982).
The first series of in-depth interviews were open-ended explorations guided only by a brief scenario presenting the general theme of the study. Follow-up interviews were somewhat more structured, guided by an outline of emerging categories. Finally, direct questions were designed to elicit specific information, clarify previous statements or resolve discrepancies.
Interviews were taped, transcribed, and circulated back to the interviewees for comment. After the initial assignment of subject matter into categories, follow up interviews, and further category clarification, the data was further reduced through presentation in narrative form. For the purposes of this paper, data was further reduced to those areas representing the major themes which ran through respondents’ accounts.
As the interviews proceeded, interviewees recommended other organizational members who would be able to provide additional information or clarifications. Subsequently, six other members (administrators and Instructional Designers) agreed to contribute their views and perceptions in single, topic-specific open ended interviews. Documents were also referred to as required.
Motivations to seek change in work roles will have some impact on willingness to accommodate to new work roles. These motivations are predicated, to some degree, by the accumulation of occupations which have tended to shape psychological functioning in respect to work activities (Nicholson, 1984). As well, prior socialization has been described by Mortimer and Simmons (1978) as a potentially important force in shaping an individual’s adjustment strategy. The themes of motivation, prior socialization, organizational efforts to provide appropriate expectations and candidate’s initial understandings will be briefly touched upon.
One’s expectations of a job affect one’s eventual satisfaction with it. (Wanous, 1980; Merton,1957) Pre-entry expectations tend to be overly optimistic, resulting in dissatisfaction. Schein (1968) suggests that this problem is exacerbated if organizations describe what the job will be like in the future while neglecting to monitor the steps necessary to achieve full professional status.
Faculty members interviewed for this study came from traditional teaching backgrounds and had little exposure to distance education. All but one had experience in alternate career activities (ranging from shoeing horses to heading up a research department for a high-tech industry). Primary motivations for seeking a position with Athabasca University were the necessity of getting a job in a tight employment market, and some intrigue with the distance education concept. Some faculty mentioned family considerations, location, the academic life style and contributions to students, to the university’s mandate and to their professional careers.
At an average age of 47 years, and with considerable training and experience, study participants felt that they had quite clear expectations of the role of faculty members in a distance university context. As one respondent noted:
They told me I’d have to write courses. I thought “O.K. I can write courses.” In hindsight, that was a mistake.
For many, the tasks to be done and thc skills to be learned were more extensive than they had anticipated, as suggested in the above passage. Moreover, their extensive exposure to educational environments gave them a paradigmatic view of the professorial role.
One informant noted:
. . . if you’ve been teaching at the U of A and you move to the U. of T., you just keep right on. There’s no learning process really involved in how you’re going to do research and prepare for your courses.
The process this respondent refers to has been termed “mediated entry” (Corcoran and Clark, 1984), or the “easing-in” to role behaviors and attitudes through extensive modeling and practice in previous institutional experiences. Mediated entry does not appear to provide a strong basis for anticipating requirements at a distance education university. Commenting on the difficulties which lie ahead for the newcomer, an administrator stated his concern for the socialization of the newcomer:
It takes such a long time to adjust. It is different, very different. There is just no way somebody can just walk in and feel instantly comfortable. It is a major adjustment, a major reorientation. And I figure it takes a good year, even with the really bright people who get in right away.
The organization makes some effort to alert prospective candidates to the role they can anticipate. One reported:
I make sure that they realize when they come in here that they are going to have responsibilities which, while similar to the academic’s role at a traditional university, are somewhat different. And primarily, I’m talking about the coordination and the delivery. I make sure that they know that they can live without face- to-face contact with students on a daily basis. They will have as much time to do research as at any university, but what they won’t have is a block of time in which to do it...and because it’s a small institution, they’re expected to give more to the academic atmosphere, the climate of the institution than they might at a larger institution...
However, paths to professional status are not clearly enunciated, perhaps in an effort to encourage the initiative that academics are assumed to bring to their positions. The same administrator continues:
The goals we set up for academics are very vague. The actual goal is there, but how you get to it is not there.
Academics exposed to organizational literature and institutional representatives at Athabasca University tend to see them in terms of previous experience. Interviews are seen as “standard” or “straightforward.’‘ Such written information as calendars are critiqued for their “congruence” with other such documents they are familiar with. There tends to be an assumption that organizational differences—such as lack of on-campus students, open access policies, job requirements and the like—were adequately presented and understood. It was only over time that these differences became “real,” and were perceived as sources of discomfort or difficulty.
As Athabasca University academic staff moved through the process of “learning the ropes,” or socialization, a number of surprises occurred which required significant adjustment. Due to the restrictions of this paper, only some of the major themes will be reported, focusing on role acquisition and cultural adaptation.
Like traditional academics, faculty at Athabasca University devote most of their time to the role of teaching, focusing on the dual responsibilities of course development/course delivery.
The initial task for the new academic at Athabasca University is usually to write a new course, or to revise an existing one. All informants reported this to be a difficult task. The beginning expectation appeared to be that the process would be similar to preparing an outline and lecture notes for in-class presentation. As one respondent commented:
I grossly underestimated how much effort was required to just develop a distance ed course. I’d think of the time, for example, I’d spent preparing notes for use in the classroom and made the false assumption that it would be an equal amount of time to prepare a student workbook for a distance ed course. It takes ten times as long!
As this report suggests, the length of preparation time is an unanticipated restraint on overall production. Some other factors reported to contribute to the complexity of course writing were: the amount of detail involved, continual accuracy checks, the constraints of the physical production process, conflicting time and role demands of other course team members and unfamiliarity with the learning model. Perhaps the greatest shock for the first time course writer is the importance of learning theory. For example:
When you go through a program, a PhD program, you learn absolutely nothing about teaching. About how people learn. You just stand up and do it. Here, it becomes very important because the teacher and the group of students—that link is broken. Then the whole notion of how people learn becomes very central.
Course writing, as the excerpt notes, is a different process of communicating with the student from that typically experienced in the classroom. As one of the Educational Psychologists or Instructional Designers (IDs) commented:
People learn things all the time. Being in a classroom is one way of learning, but it certainly isn’t the only way.
IDs appeared to play a crucial role in the socialization of the new academic, with the majority indicating that ID help was critical for learning the skills of course writing and providing ways of thinking about distance education. A typical response:
I didn’t understand how these courses were put together. I mean, he (the ID) just challenged me and nailed me cold. In the beginning, it was the kind of things that I would do at a traditional university, you know, things like “ask them these questions and then ask them something else on the exam,” and those who fell by the wayside were the chaff... The ID would say “what do you want people to learn. What’s really important here?” And I found it an incredibly scary process. I mean, it challenged me to the core of my academic being.
“How courses are put together” goes beyond the writing activities to involvement in the production processes. For example:
You learn the ropes in terms of finding out how this outfit operates. If you’re producing a course, at certain stages you’d better know what has to happen in the media in terms of production, or you could get all screwed up. And what the flips are between them and copyright and doing all kinds of other things like that. It gets pretty complicated at some stages. The only thing that saved me was having an editor who did know the ropes. Nobody even attempted to teach me.
Although the interviewers indicated that writing a course was eventually a challenging and satisfying activity, there was also stress and tension resulting from the prevalent “sink or swim” approach to learning the many necessary skills. One academic commented:
Why couldn’t that have happened the first year I was here? Or the second year? I hear the stories of other guys slugging it out. Learning the hard way. Of course, there is a certain amount of pride. People—especially academics—don’t want to say they’re failing or making mistakes.
Academics perceive the development of courses to be a larger task than anticipated, with less organizational support than they would have desired. In addition, the task requires skills that academics may not have acquired. These factors, combined with organizational expectath3ns that a course will be written by a deadline, can seriously affect a new faculty member’s image of him or herself as teacher, writer, and academician. Thus, new faculty members encounter a “debasement” phase (Van Maanen, 1977) or “upending’‘ experience (Schein, 1978) through involvement with organizational activities, which seriously affects their expectations about themselves or about the organization. Schein (1978:106) notes that an upending experience, for those whose self-esteem remains intact, can be an effective way of introducing new employees to the organization quickly, but “for many it could lead to discouragement and demotivation.”
Once a course has gone through the production process, it is considered “on the shelf,’‘ or ready for student use. Subsequently, another series of institutional mechanisms swings into place, guided by the academic responsible for coordinating the delivery of the courses.
Most academics tutor a block of students in order to achieve contact with students and to evaluate the material. Tutoring is usually conducted one-to-one over the telephone. This aspect of role performance appears to require significant adaptation. Threecomments:
Right now I’ve got a group of students, about 10, and I call them or they call me. That way we get a little of that one-to-one. But the telephone changes the interaction. Very much so. I’d be hard put to say exactly how, but you certainly miss the interaction. I enjoy a classroom interaction.
I find the lack of student contact here a tremendous deficit. I argue with the people here who say that tutoring is equivalent. I don’t think it’s even close.
For a long time I thought that just tutoring home study students was just not enough intellectual stimulation. As a matter of fact that has turned out to be true. That’s still a problem.
Perhaps part of the reason tutoring is seen as a less than fulfilling task can be seen in the perception of distance education students as different from classroom students. An academic discussed this issue:
I noticed the level of involvement with their studies. Typically, distance education students, I have found, have many more commitments and sort of tuck their studies in with everything else.
Another part of the reason may be found in the academics’ perception of themselves as instructors. For example:
I am enough of a ham that I really like getting up in front of a classroom. You have to see me to believe me. I leap around and do things, and I like seeing the faces with the voices.
Lack of students on campus, particularly graduate students, tends to reduce the range of scholarly activities that academics feel are important to their professional growth. As one administrator indicated:
Anybody who needs students to regenerate isn’t going to get that here!
Without students on campus, academics, presumably, must seek other means of creating professional links. Respondents indicated that participation in professional organizations, personal networking (particularly with discipline related departmental members at the nearest sister university) and the seminar program sponsored by the Vice President’s office were some means of compensating.
Course delivery also requires extensive administrative work which does not seem part of the expectations of incoming academics. One informant states his view:
I’m grading for seven courses and the hours that I spend sitting there—they could hire a marker. I’m paid here as high priced help and I use at least 75% of my time on something that somebody with an awful lot less training and experience could do.
In addition to the marking load and general paper shuffle, are the many other activities of course delivery. One academic sums up:
Maybe I’m not very efficient, I don’t know. But I find myself extremely busy, day to day—details concerning how seminars are running, just keeping the courses going, working with tutors, marking and whatnot. These things just keep me going all of the day.
Course delivery systems and the administrative processes were activities that academics learned mostly through “trial and error’‘ or asking for help from others. While one informant reported that he had taken the initiative in finding out “how things work around here,” approaches of the others were typified by this response:
It’s really difficult trying to get help from already over-worked colleagues who are having their own problems.
Although Wilson (1942) indicates that academics tend to underestimate the amount of administrative activity required in an institution of higher learning, at least two factors appear to intensify the adjustment to distance education. One is the “tyranny of the mail,” the influx of exams, assignments, other course administrative concerns and institutional business on a twice daily basis. The other is the “tragedy of the treadmill,” a phrase which reflects the year-round~ aspect of course delivery activities accompanying the “open” system oi enrolment. Respondents report that these activities not only require significan adjustments, but also tend to sap energies which might otherwise be used for scholarly pursuits.
Membership in a new organization involves adapting to a new culture. In the organizational context, culture can be thought of as a system of values and informal rules which is developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems and which is taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Schein, 1983).
Two major themes emerged as informants discussed the cultural environment they encountered when becoming faculty members at Athabasca University: time and space.
Van Maanen (1977) describes the organization’s definitions of time and spac as problematical until the newcomer constructs maps of time and space specifi to the new setting. Academics, through earlier socialization, have a sequence c . activities in their lives which reflects the traditional academic year. With students enrolling in courses all twelve months at Athabasca University,that sequence is no longer in force. One respondent comments:
Before I had a lot more flux in how I geared my time. I knew, that if I had a busy year, I could blitz it through, and in April it was all over. Then I could personally recoup. If I’d missed out on some other research things I wanted to do because of the administrative work, I could catch up in the summer and rebuild by personal resources. I could concentrate fully on my research. Here, what the problem really is, if I’m away for a month or two months doing some research, it just keeps on cranking. There’s a negative thing there. The exams are all there that I have to grade. The other crap’s all there. It just piles up. You don’t want to go away. At other universities, when it quits, it quits.
Faculty work is continual rather than divided into “chunks’‘ of activity at Athabasca University. A related adaptation difficulty was expressed by another key informant:
You don’t have the rhythm of a conventional university which means you don’t have the breaks—the emotional and physical breaks—from the job that you have in traditional places. The breaks you have are those you provide in terms of using your Professional Development time and vacation time. You don’t have spring breaks, you don’t have summer break, you don’t have any time away from work. You’re always doing course delivery, course development. No break from that. There’s a different rhythm.
Altered perceptions of time take a considerable period of adaptation. Academics may be aware of the year-round functioning of Athabasca University prior to employment, but they recognize the physical and emotional strains imposed by the system only after some period of residency. Time management and self-discipline skills are components of coping strategies developed by academics. One commented:
If you’re well organized, you can really maximize your time here. If you’re not well organized, you kind of drown.
As this quotation suggests, academics learn self-organization on their own, adapting skills previously developed or learning by “trial and error.”
When increased flexibility is built in to encourage working to objectives, whether at home or in the office, the sense of time is further disrupted by a blurring of structured work hours. Most of the respondents had not yet reached an accommodation of self and outside-interests in the temporal sphere.
The location of the work place will influence the way of life in an organization (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Handy, 1985). Athabasca University is located on a large parcel of land overlooking the small town of Athabasca. It consists of one buildin~. surrounded by minimalist landscapin~, bevond which is over 350 acres of land, part bush, part cultivated.
The second floor consists of of fices for faculty, but no staff lounge or informal gathering place other than the coffee areas. The physical layout appears to mitigate against high levels of interaction, particularly on an informal basis. There is a lack of intense conversation, argument or general comaraderie. As custom and tradition provide few opportunities for informal learning, values and beliefs must be largely derived in more formal settings such as Academic Council or Faculty Council meetings.
The new academic is usually the only person hired in a particular discipline, or subset of a discipline. Being the department or the academic authority can be a heady experience for the beginner, as one academic mentioned:
It was so exciting to have an opportunity to form a whole department on my own!
However, the lack of others engaged in one’s discipline becomes burdensome over time. Two comments:
The combination of only dealing with home-study students and the lack of colleagues is really pretty hard. I find I don’t have any colleagues at all here. That means that it’s really important to me to talk to other people in my discipline to find out what I’m missing.
It’s isolating by the fact that I’m the only one working in this discipline. There’s maybe a few people who might know what I’m talking about. But, by and large, people don’t know what it is that I’m doing.
Without students to interact with or colleagues to stimulate thinking, academics are compelled to rely on their own resources to seek academic stimulation. Another resource which faculty members must find within themselves is the ability to work alone. An observation:
The work itself is obviously in many ways more isolating because what we do is write. So we’re working much more on our own than we would be at another place.
The accumulated comments suggest considerable feelings of isolation — isolation from the students, from the town, from the academic community and from each other.
With the primary goal of entering a tenure track position, potential newcomers tend to build expectations relating to their idealized role as faculty members.
Course development, usually the initial task, often proves more arduous than expected, requiring new skills and values. Course delivery, the second component of the dissemination process, is also alien territory to the newcomer. Academics tend to view the deliverv nrocess as “not really teaching” and express perceptions of inadequacy in the distance delivery role. Administrative weactivities require more effort, energy, and time than was anticipated.
A major theme which ran through the data suggested that academics were still experiencing some difficulty in adapting to the rhythm and isolation in a distance education facility. Some confusion was also expressed about the difficulties of performing more traditional academic activities in a less conventional setting.
Organizational intervention in the learning processes of academics was provided through the assignment of Instructional Designers to course teams and assistance obtained from other employees. However, “trial and error” or personal initiative characterized much of the role acquisition activities.
Where initial expectations are inaccurate, a first “debasement” phase of socialization may alter these expectations (Van Maanen, 1977; Becker, Geer, Hughes, & Strauss, 1961). For the academic this phase first occurs when confronted with the task of “teaching’‘ as described by the distance education institution. At this time, academics may discover that their instructive skills, writing skills, organizational skills and perhaps even their conceptual skills are not congruent with institutional expectations, nor is there a great deal of institutional support for acquiring the requisite skills.
While debasement activities may facilitate disengagement from old roles, concomitant features are anxiety and some loss of self-confidence. There was little evidence in the data that faculty members, after a period of 2 to 4 years, had reached the metamorphosis stage of accommodation to role management, resulting in general levels of satisfaction. Confidence levels appear to remain low as individuals struggle to adapt to organizational realities and redefinitions of family and self.
The implications of this study are viewed from three perspectives: future research, managerial applications and professional applications.
The findings of this study are based primarily on interview data from a defined group. In order to develop a model of the transitional experiences of academics as they discover a new role in a new culture, (i.e., open, distance education), a longitudinal study would be beneficial. Participant observation techniques could be included which would allow a more explicit definition of learning activities and their impact on newcomers.
It would also be helpful to extend the study to other distance education institutions in order to test the generalizability of this study’s concepts and conclusions. Discussion might also be generated on such issues as the impact of overarching ethnic cultures on professional behavior and attitudes. Additional research might also center on the relationship of the academic to the student, the academic to the institution and the academic to the profession in a variety of settings.
Management, in employing professionals, acquire a valuable resource which must be handled with great care. (Raelin, 1983). At Athabasca University, managers are very conscientious about correct hiring practices and providing reasonable access for the academic to the town and to the organization as a prelude to accepting employment. Equal attention might be given to monitoring the progress of new professionals as they adapt to their new roles.
Consideration might also be given to introducing both formal and informal socialization activities. Adams, Hayes, and Hopson (1976) suggest that training programs can be generated to develop coping styles in virtually all actual and anticipated transitional experiences. Other strategies might include appointment of a social mentor as well as a task mentor. These individuals would be responsible for assisting the newcomer to find his or her way through the complexities of organizational life and help the employee discover a new personal and family life in the community. Computer Assisted Learning programs could be provided for the incoming academic to provide skill-building activities along with an expert ‘‘tutor’‘ for further explanation and assistance.
In closing, it would only be fair to say that, as managers should increase their sensitivity to the career concerns of academics, so academics should seek a proactive role in shaping their involvement with the organization. Academics must take some personal responsibility for learning the new culture, both before entry and after accepting the position. During this time of self-examination and self-discovery, academics might seek open dialogue with the “elders” of the organization while exploring avenues they can pursue on their own.
1 In a distance education university ‘‘coordination and delivery” refers to the process of expediting the delivery of course materials through interactions with internal departments such as Registry, Course Materials, Teleconferencing, and Student Services, as well as liaison with external members such as tutors and cooperating institutions.
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