The Online Teacher: When the Wee Hours Are Prime Time

Story and photo by Bracken Reed

Portland, Oregon—Teaching in your pajamas at 2 a.m. might sound like a bad dream to most educators, but for Denny Nkemontoh, it's just part of the job. By day, Nkemontoh (pronounced kim-OWN-toe) teaches technology skills and sixth-grade math at Saint John Fisher School, a K-8 parochial school in Portland, Oregon. By night, she teaches two online courses through Oregon State University's K-12 Online program, and six courses through Oregon Online, a K-12 public school run by the Southern Oregon Education Service District (ESD), headquartered in Medford.

For the record, that's three institutions, an average of eight online courses and five classroom periods, serving 300 students (including an average of 45 online students per quarter), across 12 different grade levels. It makes for a lot of long nights.

"I had thought about getting my Ph.D. in online learning," says Nkemontoh dryly, "but I'd have to give up sleeping."

Love of Teaching

Ph.D. or not, Nkemontoh is obviously a high-energy overachiever. She has two master's degrees, has traveled throughout the world, has a busy home life with a husband and three children, and somehow finds the time to read more than 200 books a year. But none of this explains her willingness to endure such a busy schedule. Why take on such a heavy teaching load? Why teach online classes?

"Money" might seem like the obvious answer, but, as with any teaching job, it's hardly the whole story. Yes, the extra income Nkemontoh earns teaching online classes does help pay the bills, but it's a combination of flexibility, variety, and an old-fashioned love of teaching, that keeps her up into the wee hours, answering e-mails and guiding her online students through the intricacies of an Edgar Allan Poe story or the fine points of a well-structured research paper.

"Online teaching works for me, because I have a full-time day job and three kids at home," says Nkemontoh. "I can be home with my kids in the evening. I can help them with their homework, then get online, then stop and make dinner, then get back online. For me, it's very flexible, and I have to believe it is for my students, too, because they're logging in at all different times."

Equally appealing to Nkemontoh is the one-on-one nature of online teaching. "I feel like I really get to know the students on a more personal level," she says. "They feel free to express themselves because they're not standing up in front of a class—they don't have to worry about what other people say or think. It's a very special time because they are open and honest."

Nkemontoh also loves the diversity of students who take online classes. While her classroom students are a homogeneous group, drawing from the predominantly white, middle class suburbs south of Portland, her online students come from a variety of backgrounds. Rural to urban, coast to desert, homeschooled to world traveling, they provide a variety that keeps Nkemontoh excited about teaching.

"I love my [Saint John Fisher Elementary] students," she says, "but I do miss the diversity. I started out as a teacher in a girl's school in Cameroon, in West Africa. And I also taught in an elementary school in south central Los Angeles. The online teaching really opens up more of the world to me again, and I do enjoy that."

Nkemontoh goes to unusual lengths to open up the larger world for her students as well. In many of her online classes she uses Weblogs ("blogs") to facilitate discussion. Sometimes she gives students the option of creating their own blogs, in the same way she encourages her classroom students to keep journals, and other times she has students log on to her blog as a kind of centralized discussion board. Either way, she frequently uses her international connections to involve students from other countries.

"I invite them to join in our blog," she says, "and that's really been a neat exchange. We've had language arts students from Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Cameroon, and a few other places. It gives students a completely different point of view."

Personalized Pedagogy

In her willingness to embrace technology, to take a global view, to create personal bonds with a diverse group of students, to individualize her courses, and to adapt to a wide variety of teaching situations, Nkemontoh represents a new breed of teacher.

According to Tina Mondale, the director of school improvement for the Eagle Point School District in southern Oregon, and formerly a lead administrator for Oregon Online, this kind of adaptability will be a necessity, not a choice, as schools strive to better meet the needs of their students.

"Schools are being asked to become more and more individualized for their clients, who are their students," says Mondale. "I think in the very near future kids will take part of their classes online and part of their classes at a school; part of their instruction will be given individually and part of it will be in groups."

The reason for this, Mondale says, is that the factory model of public education simply has not worked. "That kind of mass education—throw a whole bunch of kids in one room and teach them all the same thing at the same pace—doesn't work very well," she says. "We see that by kids not succeeding. For that reason alone, individualizing education is the way of the future."

All forms of distance learning are on the rise, Mondale points out, but online learning is especially popular. "It's growing at just a phenomenal pace around the world," she says, "because it has some very definite advantages. Part of what education does, or is supposed to do, is to prepare kids to succeed in the world we're living in now. Online learning certainly does that, because we're living in a technological world. The way we communicate is with the same tools that students use in an online class. So, besides the content, you're teaching them how to communicate using technology. That's really critical—it connects them to the larger world."

Institutional Support

Mondale began her professional life as a first-grade teacher and quickly became a proponent of technology. "I saw how it motivated the kids in my classroom," she says. "I saw its potential for getting kids excited about learning." Her enthusiasm eventually led to her position as the technology coordinator at the school, and she has not looked back since.

For six years Mondale has been promoting both online education and the use of technology in the regular classroom. Through courses offered by the Southern Oregon ESD and Southern Oregon University, she has taught others, via the Internet, effective online teaching practices and instructional design. One of her students was Denny Nkemontoh.

While Nkemontoh was already technology-savvy and an accomplished classroom teacher, she found the online training to be invaluable. "The teachers I had modeled good online teaching," says Nkemontoh. "That was really important. They got back to me in a timely fashion; they treated me like an individual person rather than just a student with a number; they remembered things about me. There was also a sense of organization, professionalism, and consistency in the courses and in how they presented them."

A focus on personalized communication and a clear, consistent instructional design, complete with assessments, are the absolute bedrock of successful online teaching, says Mondale, but equally important is an often-overlooked need for institutional support, for both teachers and students. "Right now, most traditional school systems are really not set up to support students in online learning," she says.

Those supports can be as basic as making sure students have a place to do their work, to more complicated investments, such as providing a mentor at the school who can offer face-to-face help, having well-trained counselors who can do a good job of placing students in online classes and preparing them for the self-discipline that is required, or providing teachers with building-level technical support.

But, according to Mondale, the most important and most complicated support that is necessary for the success of online learning is less tangible. "A lot of the policies we have now don't lend themselves to online learning," she says. "And it's a battle, because it's trying to change a very strong traditional school culture, which is that you come in and you sit down every day and you're marked absent or present, and that's how you take classes. We need to have a broader definition of education in order for the online model to succeed."

The cultural change needs to happen at every level, says Mondale, including higher education. "Online education is going to be a part of how all kids learn, and I think it's going to be a part of how all teachers teach."