The 24-Hour Professor

It is just before sunrise, and Lee M. Grenci is ready to start teaching.
His early-morning session is just the beginning of a long day of virtual teaching. He will check in again every few hours, from home or from his university office. Long after he goes to sleep, students will continue to post messages to the course's discussion board and send him e-mail -- turning in their assignments, asking about their grades, or just saying hello.

Mr. Grenci has taught here for nearly 20 years, but this is his first semester teaching online. He quickly discovered what has become conventional wisdom at many campuses: It takes more time to teach in a virtual classroom than in a regular one.
Is technology turning college teaching into a 24-hour job? The growth of e-mail, course Web sites, instant-messaging software, and online courses has forced many professors to rearrange their daily routines and has made them more accessible to students than ever before.

Before the Internet, the only opportunity most students had to speak with their professors was during scheduled class sessions or office hours. Now, more professors can be in touch with students at any time -- morning, noon, and night, seven days a week. That is especially true for online courses, which are advertised as allowing students to study at their convenience.

"I have been online every day of the semester," says Mr. Grenci, though he says he tries to limit the amount of time he spends on the course on weekends. "Saturdays I just check in once, sort of like a doctor, to make sure none of my patients are ill. Otherwise my wife would kill me."

Although critics of distance education have worried that virtual classrooms mean less contact between professors and students, many professors say the opposite is true. To compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction, institutions or professors often promise students a quick response to personal correspondence by e-mail -- with some pledging to answer all student e-mail messages within 24 hours.

Technology experts are divided on how available professors should make themselves to students over the Internet. Just because a students sends a message at 2 a.m. doesn't mean that the professor needs to respond that night. Or does it?

"We've had a millennium to figure out how to control workload in a classroom," says Gary E. Miller, who is associate vice president of distance education at Penn State and executive director of its World Campus. "We're in a phase right now with the development of online learning where we're trying to figure out what the rules should be."

Response Time

Mr. Grenci says he is a morning person, and he is animated even before his coffee kicks in. One thing Mr. Grenci likes about online teaching is that he can work in the early hours, when he says he is at his best. Today he says he slept in: He sometimes starts as early as 4:30 a.m.

His home office is a kind of shrine to Penn State, which is also his alma mater. The walls and trim are painted blue and white, the university's colors, and several wall decorations feature the Nittany Lion. Mr. Grenci puts an Eddie From Ohio CD on his portable stereo -- which gets his two mini dachshunds barking downstairs -- and he points excitedly to the e-mail messages he has received from students. About 40 or 50 new messages have come in since he last checked, about 9 p.m. the night before.

"Wow. Let's see. We've got lots of business, lots of business," he says. The course, an introduction to weather forecasting, started out with 270 students, though about 25 percent have dropped out as the semester progressed. The bulk of the students, nearly 200 of them, are from the university's main campus here, and the rest are enrolled in branch campuses across the state.

Some of the e-mail messages are addressed directly to Mr. Grenci, while others are responses to a discussion question on the course's bulletin board, which the students are required to respond to each week. This week they were asked to use weather readings and find a city where they thought it would rain at a specific time.

"I always enjoy the e-mail," Mr. Grenci says as he opens a message.

But the message, like many he receives, is hardly inspiring. The student asks when the grades for the last assignment will be posted. Mr. Grenci taps out a reply using one index finger (he says he never learned to touch-type). Other students have asked the same question, and he answers them one by one -- though he cuts and pastes the same response to several students.

"I would prefer somebody ask a really hard question," he says. "Then I'd really get my juices flowing."

Mr. Grenci also replies to every contribution made to the discussion board, though some of his responses are as brief as "Quality post" or "I can't argue with that forecast."

"I made a promise to them that I would answer every post within 24 hours, and I haven't broken that promise," Mr. Grenci says proudly, as the sun rises to light the white picket fence in his backyard.

Promises and Relationships

Such pledges are perhaps the clearest symbol of the way technology has changed the relationship between professor and student.

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