Dr. Ken Collier, Director of the Centre for Learning Accreditation at Athabasca University spoke with Dr. Sharon McGuire about how a typically face-to-face subject such as communications can successfully be taught via distance education.

Aurora:How can you teach communications skills at a distance?

McGuire: In distance education, we typically work with two kinds of student. One is a rapidly disappearing student we used to call "the little man on the mountain"-the person who was isolated and needed everything sent to him or her in order to be able to complete a course. The other is the vast majority of students who live in community of some sort.

My approach has been not to re-create the classroom, which I don't think distance education should be about, but to create a learning community where students practice communication skills with those around them in their own real-life situations and with real-life feedback. Students work on a communication skill in their communities and relate it back to me, the professor, in some way.

For example, in one of my courses I ask students to do a medium-level problem- solving session. It could be deciding where to go on vacation or some other problem to work out that is not particularly emotionally fraught. It doesn't matter if it is with a child, a boss, a mate, a friend. They tape the conversation and write out the transcript. There is a great deal of value in doing this because students can analyze what happened at each point-where they thought they did well, where they thought they could improve. Very often students write me a note afterwards and say something like, "I thought this was the most dreary business in the world, but did I ever learn a lot."

One of the most wonderful ones I ever saw was of a mother observing a sleepover that her teenage daughter had. She said, "I never believed all this was going on until I stopped and looked at it. I had no language to deal with it. I certainly could feel tensions, I could feel naughtiness, I could feel all sorts of things, but all of a sudden I started to really watch."

I always encourage students to get immediate feedback from whoever they are dealing with, to ask, "Did you feel threatened, did you feel that I wasn't with you or that I really was with you, was there anything about my nonverbal behaviour that caused you discomfort or set you at ease?"

Students use their own experiences in their own communities, relating to people they know and work with all the time. They get feedback from them, they get feedback from a tutor or a teacher, and thus they learn. There's analysis going on of whatever communication skill is being taught. It is most successful.

Aurora:In some ways, then, the distance aspect has an advantage over the traditional classroom. Rather than being extracted from their real world and put in a classroom on a campus somewhere, students practice the skills immersed in their own real world.

McGuire:Exactly. Whatever the classroom situation, it is an artificial one because as the teacher I'm going to assign you a subject or limit your subject in some way to what I think you can deal with, or I will base it around a published exercise from somewhere. But it's not real; it's an artificial exercise.

Aurora: Many of us who work in counselling have always assumed that to teach communication, you have to be in the same room with the person you are trying to teach so you can model behaviour. But you appear to have found a way to accomplish this without having students witness what you are doing and saying.

McGuire:I certainly value the notion that the richest form of communication is face-to-face, but it certainly isn't the only communication situation that we are faced with during life either. There is communication by telephone, by computer. More and more we are isolated as workers, as family members, and as citizens, and we need to have a number of ways of coping.

We make an assumption that students are mature and have had a great deal of experience already. Now if you can label that experience in some way and have students doing shorthand notes in response to a situation, or to analyze a picture, or whatever it may be that you choose to do, students then are able to relate their own experiences. "Oh, yeah, I've always seen that, always wondered," and it becomes a reality for them.

Aurora: So you're saying if learners witness their own behaviour and the reaction of their partners, they don't necessarily have to witness yours. They can think about what they have done themselves.

McGuire:Yes. Sometimes I'll also ask students to describe how a conflict arose, how it was resolved, what kind of behaviours were helpful, what kind of behaviours were not helpful? What did you see in the body language? How did music help with your understanding of what was going on? There are a thousand things to look at and analyze, but perhaps for the first time students are focused on these particular communication skills and begin to see them in new light.

Aurora: Do you use any particular theory or approach that you either got from someone else or that you have adopted yourself?

McGuire:Well, like I said, I think the first thing is to recognize that students are not learning in a classroom. They are learning in a community into which they can tap endlessly, and share. The community learns, they learn. It's a real life situation, not the artificial situation of a classroom.

In terms of writing and producing courses in communication skills, I think one of the things you have to do is clearly label or clearly give models that you stress are not applicable everywhere but are a place to start. For instance, a problem-solving model. Here is a way to start. The first thing you've got to do is to clarify the question until you are both perfectly sure that you understand the question you are trying to solve before you go on. So, break it down, label it, and observe the situation a number times, maybe check back the tutor and say, "How am I doing?" But, preferably to check back with whomever you are working with to see how you're doing.

Aurora:The courses you teach may be used by students taking different degrees and for a variety of reasons. What challenges does this pose?

McGuire:We have students of different ethnic origins, and many do not have the same kind of relationships within their ethnic groups that we are accustomed to. For instance, the teacher-student relationship is often very different – where the teacher says and the student does, and there is very little discussion between the two. In those cases, what we've generally done is try to come up with a designated group that is a little more ethnically homogeneous that they can relate to a little better. But that's not always possible.

In business communications, students have to recognize that if they are going to work and live in this community, certain behaviours are expected. For example, you work in teams and play team roles. This may be foreign to some students, but they will meet it again and again, and it is best to be prepared. I don't know how else to get around that one.

Aurora:A lot of people assume that communication skills as taught in university are usually about some specific thing, such as social work, and you expect communication skills for that. In business there are communications that are specific to that, but they both really do rely on a lot of the same abilities and being able to understand yourself.

McGuire:There is a very heavy crossover in the way communication skills are taught in different disciplines. For example, if you are trying to help people become productive employees, you are often using exactly the same techniques you would use in a therapeutic encounter. These aren't particularly different, but they are differently slanted and have different end points.

Aurora:In the end, once you have a learner who has completed the course do you look for any specific things? Do you have a list of skills or list of things they should have or do?

McGuire:Oh, yes. I often ask students for three of their tapes and transcripts and ask them to analyze the difference between the first, second, and third. I don't expect mastery, so it shouldn't be a threatening exercise. But students should be able to see a steady growth over the three times, given the feedback and the practice they've had. I am looking for improvement and the students' own ability to see where they have improved and where they still have problems.

Aurora:For me the key point is for learners to become conscious of how they do communications. It is not to start from no communications and achieve mastery. It is more a matter of knowing what the learner has got and what to look for if they are going to go farther. And by distance, there are many ways that you can find that out. You don't actually have to be standing in the room with them to be able to get some signals on that.

McGuire:Unless you have an extraordinarily small group of three or four students, in a classroom setting,you can't observe enough anyway to be able to really assess them. And students tend to be much tougher on themselves when they are assessing themselves - "Oh shoot, I did that again. I really must watch that." and it's right there in black and white where they can see it as opposed to you as teacher in the classroom that one really doesn't work very well, let's try it a little differently. They see it because they have to look for it. They are not relying on somebody else to look for it.

As far as modeling behaviour is concerned, again, distance education students have the opportunity to see all sorts of wonderful modeling behaviours around them. If you want to teach students nonverbal communication, have them go to a gathering in their community- to the grocery store, on a bus ride, to church, whatever it might be -watch behaviour, and analyze it. What did you see? Now, go back. What did you see this time?

Aurora:What prompted you to put these communication courses together in the first place?

McGuire: The first course came from Ray Rasmussen, a professor in organizational behaviour in the business faculty at the University of Alberta. I very much liked what he was doing. He put the responsibility for learning on the student's shoulders and off the instructor's shoulders. As a teacher, I have long been an advocate of that. How do you get students to take responsibility for their own learning, and enjoy taking responsibility for their own learning? I saw this wonderful example of it and became an instant fan. I developed the course to reflect those kinds of principles as much as I could.

Aurora: Just before we started taping this, you said something like, "I'm a lot less sure about some of these things than I would have been five years ago." Does that mean you've got some doubts?

McGuire:No, it doesn't. What I was referring to is the increased movement in distance education to re-create the classroom, to re-create groups, to give group projects, to try and pace students so they are all at the same place at the same time.

One of the things I did earlier was give students the opportunity to do a project in communication or to come to a central learning centre for a day to take a seminar and meet other students. That worked really well. The seminars were almost always full and served a very good purpose. The students didn't have to be all in the same place, because all I asked was that they get through the first unit, get the language a little bit, and then decide if they want the seminar or to do the project at home. Well, then came this notion that if you are going to have a seminar, everybody has to be in exactly the same spot at the same time; you can't go around running seminars every month. There seems to be an increased emphasis towards re-creating the classroom.

I just don't know if some of the things we did in the early days are possible any more. In the beginning of distance education in this country, there was an attitude of "Why not? Let's try it." Now, because of the enormous number of initiatives going on and as we've become more systematized, we have had to draw tighter guidelines. But you always lose something as you gain something, don't you? That freedom to go ahead and try it is not really available anymore.

Aurora: You have taken the time to think through what you do to make teaching communication possible at a distance. It isn't just a duplication of what you do in the classroom. You have also seen evidence that you have succeeded. That is a step that a lot of us in traditional universities have never taken.

McGuire: That's the fun. I must say that over the years I have had so many appreciative students. They get in the middle of those interviews and say, "What is this busy work you've got me doing?" At the end they're saying, "Wow, that was really valuable."

© Copyright 1999 AURORA

Citation Format

Gismondi, Mike. (1999). Aurora interview with Sharon McGuire. Aurora