Noriko Hara

School of Education, Indiana University

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Mid-Western Educational Research Association in Chicago, IL., October 14-17, 1998.

Many authors in the distance education literature claim only the positive aspects of web-based distance education. However, at the same time, most of the literature consists of descriptive case studies, not research articles. This proposal presents a qualitative case study of a web-based distance education course at a major university in the United States. The study investigated whether students feel frustration in this course and if so, whether students' frustrations in this course inhibit their educational opportunity. In this study, frustrations of the students were found in three related sources: lack of prompt feedback, ambiguous instructions on the web, and technical problems. I conclude that frustrations of the students in th is course inhibited their educational opportunity. This case study attempts to illustrate students' perspectives and to call attention to some fundamental issues in distance education.

John was in a computer lab around 11:30 pm on Saturday. Many papers were scattered around the computer he was facing. John was a student in B555, a web-based distance education course, and participated in my research. Since we were introduced to each other a week before, when I conducted an observation and interview, I said hello to him and realized that he was working on the B555 class assignment. He told me briefly, "See we have to ma ke sense out of this," by pointing out this week’s assignment page, printed out from the B555 web site. I remembered that he was waiting for the assignment specification via e-mail from the instructor since early in the week, and asked, "So, the instructor hasn't sent out the specification message for the assignment?" John said no.

Later, around 1 am, I returned to the computer lab. (In fact, I wanted to ask John if he had sent e-mail to ask the instructor about this week’s assignment, but I doubted he would be there.) The lab was quiet and he was there alone. I was working on a different project, so I picked up my printing job and said to John, "Don't work too late." Then, John looked at me with vacant eyes and said that if I had been doing my interview now, I would get a totally different perspective about this course, because he knew that I was studying B555. He seemed so exhausted and frustrated. He looked like really wanted to talk to somebody to share his frustration.

This is a case study of students' perspectives on web-based distance education in B555, Computer Assisted Language Learning, offered by a major university in the United States. Every Monday, the instructor of this course usually sent an e-mail message explaining the requirement for particular modules, reflecting on the previous week’s on-line discussion, encouraging students, suggesting questions for the upcoming on-line discussion, adding resources for assignments, and revising activities. However, when I saw John, the instructor had not sent any e-mail to specify the assignment for this week. John did not seem to know what to do in the computer lab by himself.

Recent cutting-edge technology enables us to implement distance education. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that during 1994-95 academic year 25,730 distance education courses were offered by higher education institutions. A third of higher education institutions in U.S. offered these courses in the fall 1995 (National Center for Education Statistics, 1997). The number of distance education courses appears to be growing (Hanna, 1998; Roberts, 1996). Research studies indica te that the achievement and satisfaction of students in distance education are equivalent to those of the students in traditional classrooms (Johnstone & Krauth, 1996). Distance education provides opportunities for students who cannot be physically on ca mpus to study with other students. Harasim (1993) asserts that computer-networks make the world connected, and that this concept is applicable to distance education. However, past studies fail to illustrate the details of students’ perspectives on distance education.

As Windschitl (1998) notes in a current issue of Educational Researcher, research on the use of the World Wide Web (WWW) lacks disciplined scholarly articles. "The vast majority of published work is description of technology implementation in classrooms" (p. 28) or reflection of what has been done in distance education. One reason for this is because WWW is relatively young and is still in a testing stage, not an evaluation stage. Indeed, the lack of disciplined sc holarly articles characterizes the field of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) as a whole. According to Romizowski and Mason (1996), among published articles in CMC by 1991, "only some 10 % to 15 % were research studies." (p. 442). Moreover, Romizowski and Mason claim that little qualitative research based on observation and interviewing in CMC has been conducted. Windschitl also suggests that qualitative studies capture unique phenomena on the use of WWW. Using technology in education settings is one agenda of significant researc h. The field of education research seeks research on the use of WWW.

Johnstone and Krauth (1996) prove the efficacy of technology, but fail to address surrounding issues, such as students’ isolation, and effective advising from instructors. The literature review shows that the research on the use of WWW is short of analytical studies as well as qualitative studies (Burge, 1994; McIsaac & Gunawardena, 1996). Moreover, research on the effect of distance education has been focused on student outcomes (Ahern & Repman, 1994), but not on the affective side of distance education.

This case study investigated students’ frustrations in a distance education course, B555. The entire course was offered through a web site. After reviewing the literature, I found that only a small portion of it indicates students' isolation in distance education, although many authors (e.g., Besser & Donahue, 1996; Twigg, 1997) emphasize the importance of this issue. Thus, my primary research question was: How do the students in B555, in a major university, overcome the feeling of isolation in a virtual classroom to create the sense of a community of learning? However, while I was observing and interviewing my informants, I learned that students’ isolation was not a problem in this course. Possibly because of the small class size, students supported each other and had a sense of a community of learning. The real issue in this course was the students’ frustration, which, I also noticed, was another gap in the literature. Therefore, the final research question in this study was: Does student frustration in the B555 web-based distance education course inhibit their educational opportunity?

Nipper (1989) introduces three generations of distance education. The first generation was provided mostly through paper-based instruction; the second through integrated multimedia; the third was provided through two-way communications media. In this study, the third generation of distance education, especially using networked computers, was explored.

In addition to the research question, key questions examined in this study were:
What causes frustrations among the students? How do students deal with their frustration? Are there individual differences between students who are comfortable with technology and those who are not?

B555 had six master’s students from language education and special education, two of whom were international students. Two other students were instructors in the English as a Second Language (ESL) Program in this university. Four students had only minimal experience with computers, but one of them was enthusiastic about technology and spending thirty to forty hours a week for this course at the beginning of the semester. One student was very familiar with computers, and her friends had taken the same course last summer, so she not only did not have any problem with technology, but also knew the content of this course. The sixth student trained teachers in integrating computers into a curriculum. She was taking this course far from the university, so that she did not have direct access to university facilities. She was the only student who had taken a distance education course prior to B555.

The instructor was a Ph.D. candidate in the language education program, and an international student. Although she had experience as an English teacher, this was her first time teaching in the U.S. and by distance education. She had audited B555 over the previous summer. When she participated in the design team for the B555 web site, however, the course itself was designed by a faculty member in the language education program. The faculty member designed most of the web site, such as course activities, and reading assignments, but because of health problems, the current instructor took over B555. Since she had not designed the web site, she tailored the instructions on the web by sending weekly e-mail messages.

The human subjects committee approved this study and informed consent was obtained before each observation and interview. Pseudonyms were used in order to protect informants’ identities. However, I realized that if I cited quotes from e-mail messages with their pseudonyms, it would reveal the subjects' identities because the instructor knew who said what in e-mail messages. In addition, since the class size was so small, as long as I described students' profiles in this document, the instructor would certainly know who was who. There was a substantial debate about research in cyberspace in 1995, after a research team at Carnegie Mellon University published a study of pornographic picture exchange on the Internet (See Kling, 1996). Therefore, in order to protect the informants, I decided not to include individual students’ profiles, though they would have helped readers understand this case more deeply. For the same reason, I did not identify authors of the e-mail messages.

B555 was one of the graduate courses offered through distance education in the language education department. It was taught through a web site developed by graduate students during the previous summer. This site contained reading materials, activities, discussion questions and additional readings organized along eight themes, such as authentic task, control, and time and feedback. The course syllabus and assignment instructions were available on the web, since B555 was offered as a web-based distance education course. The grade was decided based on five assignments: Reading responses (10 %); On-line discussion participation (15 %); Internet address book (10%); Portfolio (50 %); Final project (15 %). According to the syllabus, the purpose of the course was "to give participants a broad general view of computer-enhanced language learning and the place of the World Wide Web in the language learning classroom." After students enter their usernames and passwords, they would see the menu screen. This page used the metaphor of a traditional classroom, so that the student could be situated in their familiar environments. It appeared to welcome students. However, students’ experiences in this course were somewhat different.

I selected a case study methodology because I found it necessary to develop a "thick description" (Geertz, 1973) of a virtual classroom. The inquiry was an instrumental case study (Stake, 1995) based on a need for a general understanding of students in distance education. The language education department where this study was conducted offered several courses on-line. I chose one of the courses, B555, because the instructor permitted me to observe the on-line class and to interview her and her students. She also mentioned that she would like to learn from this study. Six students, five students at the university campus and one student from out of state, were enrolled, and all agreed to participate in this study.

Secondly, I observed how each student interacted with the web site and conducted an interview immediately after the students had finished their tasks. Observation sessions lasted one to two hours. I observed four of the six students in the course. The interview following the observation lasted about an hour for each student. One student did not allow me to observe his interaction with a computer because he said that he would not feel comfortable if I observed him while he was working on this course, and another student was far from the university location. However, these two students and the instructor agreed to be interviewed for about an hour. Moreover, I collected data from informal conversations with two students as well as the instructor.

Different kinds of observations were conducted. One of the observations was a special event during the semester that provided opportunities for students to interact simultaneously. They had a field trip to SchMOOze University—a virtual university campus accessed by telnet from all over the world. SchMOOze University is a MOO specifically designed for an English as a Second Language learner. MOO is an acronym for "MUD Object Oriented" (Bruckman & Resnick, 1998) referring to "a multi-user, text-based virtual reality." (Blankenship, 1993). Simply stated, MOO is programmed to provide an electronic space where people can meet on-line, have synchronous chat and discussion, and play games. The rest of the observations were conducted in university computer labs. However, because the nature of the observation was human-computer interaction, I asked subjects to "think aloud" (Ericson & Simon, 1984) while they used a computer. Although this methodology has a disadvantage that researc hers cannot take account of every comment from informants during think aloud sessions, the methodology is widely used for usability tests; Dillon (1994) rationalizes the use of verbal protocol during the tasks to gain more accurate information than during retrospective verbal reporting.

Third, I examined various types of documents related to B555, such as the course syllabus, reading assignments, and the course description in the catalog. The syllabus explained materials that students would use, the purpose of this course, format and philosophy, class schedule, and requirements/evaluation including readings/responses, electronic discussion forum/participation, Internet address book, portfolios, and final project. In addition, with her permission, I reviewed the instructor’s personal log.

Three different kinds of data were analyzed (observation, interview, and document review data) simultaneously while data were collected. The analysis was triangulated in terms of methodologies, people, and time (Silverman, 1993; Stake, 1995). Furthermore, each interview transcript and interpretation were validated by informants.

During the data analysis, I realized my subjectivity, although I had not been aware of my bias when I conducted observations and interviews. Because of my background in Instructional Technology, I tended to favor the use of technology. However, no social scientists deny pre-notion of phenomena (Becker, 1998; Pershkin, 1988), so that we have to accept our subjectivities and deal with them. Therefore, in this study, I paid considerable attention to my bias toward technology while analyzing the data.

The students took a field trip to SchMOOze University to experience virtual space. When people join SchMOOze University electronically, they see text-based screens although this virtual university uses metaphors of location. People can explore different virtual buildings (e.g., library, Mall, and meeting rooms) to meet people from all over the world by using simple commands, such as "go to east." The following observation was a special event in the middle of the semester that provided opportunities for students to have synchronous interaction.

The class meeting time was set at 8:30 pm. All students and the instructor were supposed to meet at a virtual meeting room, so that the instructor could see who was on-line. Kathy immediately started the field trip to SchMOOze University when I arrived at her apartment.
Kathy typed: @knock MMM (instructor’s name)
but the computer replied

She murmured " I don’t know what I am supposed to do. Maybe I am already in." She realized that several messages showed up on her computer screen. When she saw the following messages:

on the screen, she typed, "moan." Conversation on the screen went very quickly. It was very hard to catch up with what was happening. A student complained.

However, the conversation never slowed down. When Kathy saw the following message:

Kathy typed: I practiced this afternoon.
When she typed, Kathy seemed very careful about spelling and capitalization; she is an English teacher.
Sheryl: I like the action of calling rows.

Kathy explained to me and said, "I think what she means is ‘calling role.’ Sometimes it’s confusing, the teacher and half of the students are non-native speakers."

Further, she said "I tried this afternoon, but at that time nobody responded to me. So, this is the first time that I see the conversation going like this" by pointing out many messages on the screen.
Then, she saw the message:

The first 30 minutes went very quickly, just trying to figure out who was there and what to do. Kathy explained to me, "This is the first time we talked together . . ." and complained "What are we supposed to do," glanced at her watch. It was almost 9 pm and according to the instructor’s guideline, students were supposed to leave from the original meeting room, go to different buildings at SchMOOze University, and look for possible student activities. Therefore, Kathy typed: Are we supposed to move around now?

When she saw the instructor’s message, she murmured "I’m going to be out, go to lobby, and go to Mall." However, she couldn’t find anybody to talk to at the virtual Mall, so she typed commands to go back to the original meeting room. She saw on the screen that there were still students from the B555 class and their discussions were continuing.

She said, "Now, I’m back to the discussion." and typed: Guess I need to stay put.

Kathy said, " I feel like nobody is answering my question," and complained "I’ve already been around the campus and . . ."
While she was deciding what to do next, the on-line discussion at the meeting room was still going on. When she saw a message referring to Ann, she typed: Who’s Ann?
The situation was chaotic in that room because different conversations were happening simultaneously. Before finding out who Ann was, Kathy said, "Maybe I’ll explore the campus now." She suggested going to a virtual bar to her classmates by typing: How about the bar?
Kathy saw everyone’s agreement with her opinion on the screen.
When Kathy saw a message saying "Knock, knock," she figured that somebody knocked at her door and she typed: Enter
but she received no answer. Kathy muttered, " What am I supposed to do? I’m confused," and looked at the instructor’s guide. Prior to this event, the instructor sent out the instruction for the SchMOOze University field trip and a map of the SchMOOze University through e-mail. Then, she assumed Julie was sending a message that knocks at her door because she saw Julie’s message asking her a question, and tried to find where Julie was. Kathy typed a command to move where Julie was and Julie started sending a message to her.

Although Kathy seemed very well prepared for this special event, the virtual field trip, she was frustrated because she could not figure out what was wrong with her when she could not operate her intended commands, e.g., simply responding to a knock. She could not ask for help with her problem from a real person, so she had to solve the problem by herself. I suspect that the incomplete text-based guidelines from the instructor might have caused this frustration.

Amy commented to me about this virtual field trip at a computer lab a few days after this event:

Like Kathy, Amy was frustrated because of the problem that she had with operational commands at SchMOOze University. She expressed her frustration and even anger at herself. I assume that she felt as if she had been left out of the class because she could not use the commands properly.

Julie also had a negative experience with this virtual trip. Because of the slow connection from her computer, her responses delayed significantly. When I observed Kathy trying to talk to Julie on-line, Kathy had no response from Julie for more than 2 minutes. Finally, Kathy gave up the conversation with Julie. Another student also reflected back the feeling in a personal e-mail to the instructor next day after the field trip to SchMOOze University:

There were, however, positive comments about the virtual field trip. John was enthusiastic about the SchMOOze University activity:

John seemed very excited about the technology. In contrast with Kathy, Julie, and Amy, he had a positive experience with the field trip to SchMOOze University. In the interview, he mentioned his favorable view of technology, although he did not have much experience with computers before taking this course. Because Kathy and Amy expressed their uneasiness with the computer, I speculate that computer competency may affect their level of frustration .

As described at the beginning, John expressed his feelings when he was alone in a computer lab without any instructional help. The topic for this week was "feedback and time" and he was working on the assignment for the week, evaluating lesson plans using technologies for language education. He started talking to me.

When I met John, he was extremely frustrated and he had more than one source for his frustrations. He mentioned that he still had not received specifications for the assignments from the instructor. So, he still had no idea what was expected on this assignment. He also had doubts about the professional development of the B555 web site.

When I left the computer lab, John returned to work on his assignment and declared: "I will finish this work anyway. It’ll probably take an hour and it may not be a good work. (.) But just do it." It was almost 1:20 am. He said to me in a tired voice, "You have a good night, and I’ll have a good night."

Students and the instructor in B555 generated quite intensive on-line discussions through e-mail. The number of e-mail messages in the week of October 19th was 35, and this volume was not uncommon throughout the semester. Later in the semester, students confessed that they did not read other people’s comments before writing their e-mail messages. One student expressed her problem of being behind via e-mail. In the middle of the semester, when the other students intensively discussed a particular topic within two days, she did not have any comment during the period. After a student summarized the overall discussion in his e-mail, she sent an e-mail that had a subject line saying, "Ah . . . I cannot catch up with all of you : (" She was one of the students who wrote the least e-mail messages to the on-line class discussion. During interviews, some other students also commented that these e-mail messages were overwhelming, and consequently they fell behind.

Amy logged into her computer system and started to copy all e-mail messages on to a word-processing file. When I asked her a reason, she said that she didn’t want to waste paper and if she printed out from the e-mail system, it would look like a lot to read, although it took time to copy the messages. "After that, I delete the messages because it’s too much e-mail." She told me that her routine work for B555 was to: print out all the e-mail messages for B555 in a word-processing document; print out all the readings for this course; read the e-mail messages and reading assignments at home.

Eric commented about the overwhelming e-mail messages as well:

The literature indicates this drawback of asynchronous CMC. While the advantage of CMC is that it is free from time and location constraints (Ahern & Repman, 1994; Burge, 1994; Harasim, 1990; McIssac & Gunawardena, 1996) as well as high interactivity (e.g. Ahern, Peck, & Laycock, 1992; Harasim, 1993; Henri, 1992), it is also very demanding for students and instructors to read all the messages (Hara, Bonk & Angeli, 1998; Kang, 1998; Wiesenberg & Hutton, 1995).< /P>

The instructor also commented that at the beginning of the semester she was spending all day doing nothing but reading and responding to e-mail messages. Later in the semester, she was able to reduce the workload, but still spent large chunk of time on this course.

In a web-based distance education situation, students do not see each other or their instructors. This absence of physical cues led to some frustration among students.

Eric also indicated his frustration with not getting enough feedback:

Sheryl expressed the lack of immediate assistance from the instructor as well as the difficulty of finding information on the Internet.

Sheryl was working on her assignment for the B555 course. She started the Netscape browser, went to the Yahoo Education site, and typed keyword, i.e., "instruction to evaluating electronic learning." The computer responded:

There is no web site to match your inquiry.

She looked unhappy. There was nothing she could find from this web site regarding her key words. (I thought she used too many keywords. It would be nice if one of the class sessions was teaching tips and techniques on how to search into the web.) So, she went to the Altavista search engine web site where she could inquire web sites by entering keywords. She explained, "one of my friends told me that Altavista is much better." By using Altavista, she found one web site, but that page wasn’t what she was looking for. She did another inquiry by using the keywords, "educational assessment." Now, she found too much information, so she went to the refine page to narrow down her inquiry by adding "assessments," "education," etc. She seemed to be finding a reasonable list of the sites for her topic. She went through the list and decided which pages she should print out. She found two. While she was assessing the web sites, she also read the e-mail instruction from the teacher again to make sure she was on the right track. She carried a 3-inch-thick folder that contained all the e-mail messages for this course. She printed out the third reading article from the web. Sheryl went to the web site that was referred to in the e-mail instruction, but she did not have any luck finding the relevant readings on this site either.

In contrast to his positive comments on the virtual fieldtrip, John seemed to be unsure about the appropriate attitude in an electronic environment. I assume that one of his frustrations was caused by a lack of feedback from the instructor. Because he could not see his instructor physically, and could not determine the instructor’s expectations, his anxiety level might have increased. Eric had the same problem. This issue of lack of physical appearances is identified in the literature. Kuehn (1994), Harasim (1987), and McIsaac and Gunawardena (1996) caution that the lack of communication cues is a disadvantage of CMC because people cannot use any nonverbal cues, such as gestures and facial expressions.

I saw the same frustration with Sheryl. Her frustration came from a lack of immediate help. I also assume that one of the reasons she could not find the appropriate information is her lack of the proper skills to search for information on the Internet. This may be a hole in the instruction of this course.

The lack of prompt feedback from the instructor was certainly a major frustration for students because they were concerned about their performance. "The concept of interaction [including feedback] is fundamental to the effectiveness of distance educati on program as well as traditional ones." (McIsaac & Gunawardena, 1996, p. 407). Later in the semester, the instructor realized that she needed to give more feedback to her students. In her weekly announcement on November 10, she apologized not providing "enough and prompt feedback."

The following interview concerned the frustration with technological problems and the absence of personnel to provide technical support. Unlike the other students, the interviewee was taking the course from a distant site. She indicated three areas of frustration, the biggest of which were technology and the inflexibility of the course schedule.

In addition to observations and interviews, students’ on-line discussion through e-mail gave me insights into what was happening during the class. Because this course was offered completely through distance education, I had no opportunity to have classroom observation, although I observed students individually while they were working on their computers. Reading students’ e-mail served as another substitute for physical classroom observation. Some students expressed honestly their anxieties and frustrations with the course in their messages. For example, on Friday, 17 October at 19:47:56, a student wrote the following message to the instructor regarding a technical problem;

On Saturday, 18 October at 3:06:15, she wrote another e-mail message regarding the same technology issue;

About 30 minutes after this message, on Saturday, 18 October at 3:27:05, this student sent out an e-mail message saying that she had solved this problem.

The student without direct access to technological hardware and support had to deal with technological problems that the other students did not experience. She was the only student who did not live near the university. Therefore, her frustrations were different from other students. I suspect that her technical support was inadequate, so that she had to be more concerned about technology than about the content of the course. However, some of the students also expressed their difficulties with technology during observations and interviews. Several studies (e.g., Burge, 1994; Gregor & Cuskelly, 1994; Kang, 1998; Wiesenberg & Hutton, 1995; Yakimovicz, A. D., & Murphy, K. L., 1995) report students’ frustration with technology during the evaluation of their distance education courses, but do not thoroughly investigate it.

In this interview, Amy expressed her frustration in two ways. The first regarded the e-mail instructions that the instructor sent each week. The second frustration was caused by the ambiguous instructions on the WWW site. In my document analysis, I concurred that these instructions were too simple, and could be interpreted in many different ways. For instance, one of the activity instructions on the web was:

The instructor’s intention was to give students flexibility. However, some students did not consider this flexibility as an advantage. Sheryl, for example, did not think that she was getting effective instruction because of the ambiguous instructions on the WWW site and in e-mail messages from the instructor.

Like Amy, Sheryl also gave up trying to clarify the instructor’s expectation after asking her a few questions. Further, when I asked her what was the most frustrating thing, Sheryl answered: