Piping Up, Down Again

I don't know if it's narrowly analogous to my experience developing and teaching online courses since the fall of '01, but the technophilic pied piper of computer-mediated distance ed--who fluted for distance initiatives through glowing positivisms--in the late 90's, has yielded to a symphony of vastly more critical, responsible pedagogies, mindful of the barbs described in Hara and Kling's article.  Computer-mediated distance ed programs have grown up in the five years since the article was published; they've been (and continue to be) shaped by theoretical currents in technology and media, by laborious, ongoing revisions guided by new experiences and best practices.  They continue to take seriously the frustrations expressed by students--frustrations about tech speed, about confusing explanations of assignments, about feedback time and engagement.  And attrition rates continue to be a question--or, perhaps, only part of a broader question about what's bound up in the pursuit of excellence, the sort of excellence that lives on tireless exertion, dialectic reflection and conversation on ways to make the programs better.  A recent faculty survey where I teach asked instructors, "why do students withdraw from your online courses?"  My responses were speculative; the knowledgeable answers are harder to produce than a summary of the rants and rumblings of students who endured the term of study then posted wry comments on the instructor evaluation form.  So many of our distance learning students are full-time military who work and travel, who have families and heaps of other commitments; they tend to be realistic about their workloads and planned TDY excursions, and, when confronted with an unusually rigorous stint in composition or the introductory humanities survey, I think many students opt out because the promises made in the syllabus are clear--perhaps daunting.  By what other terms can eight-week online course work?

I brought this back to my blog rather than commenting over at Palimpsest and Dennis Jerz's Literacy Weblog because I often get the feeling that I have my head in the sand about ways that computer-mediated distance education is done at other institutions.  I honestly don't know much about how it works elsewhere.  When the subject of computer-mediated distance learning comes up, I falter, succumb to my doubts about all that I don't know about how it's handled anywhere else. (are you on Blackboad? WebCT? VCampus? hybrid or mixed-mode? meeting in person occasionally or always via computer? supplemented by video or live chat? are your face-to-face curricula migrated for online delivery for outcomes comparisons? vice versa?  are faculty who teach online also required to teach on in bricks-n-mortar spaces? must instructors encode (HTML the content) their own courses? are the courses peer reviewed? how is faculty training and mentoring handled?). 

I've given half a thought to starting a blog for distance ed instructors in comp/rhet, including the 15 or so instructors who teach the classes I'm familiar with.  And perhaps it would work better if it was wide open to instructors from various institutions, except that cross-talk can be tougher to negotiate when we set out from considerably inconstant curricular and ideological frames.  But to the extent instructors are geographically spread out; I wonder how widely they are pedagogically spread out, too--to what degree my sense of best practices jibes with my peers' understandings of best practices in computer-mediated distance ed (esp. as it ties to essayism, close reading, discourse analysis).  What better way to reconcile it than by a blog--a blog for overlaps in computer mediated distance ed and on-site ed folded together under tech/comp/rhet. Anyone know of a listserv or other forum where this is already going on?