For faculty members at NYU's online subsidiary, selling goes hand in hand with teaching
By SARAH CARR
"Either move with the times or die by the sword," Sally Silberman quips as she drives into SoHo. She's spent the last few hours talking with a passenger and making
cell-phone calls -- to a colleague, to her boss, to her hairdresser -- while traveling her weekly route from her home outside Washington to her teaching job at New York University's for-profit online-education subsidiary.
Ms. Silberman, who in previous jobs has sold pianos and furniture, represents a rapidly emerging type of distance-education faculty member. Her background is in the corporate world, and she brings that experience and that set of expectations with her. A focus on the bottom line is normal; tenure isn't. Teachers like Ms. Silberman are hired more for their business savvy than their degrees -- her highest is a bachelor's -- and their numbers are growing.
Ms. Silberman is worlds away from more-traditional professors in her views on teaching and academe. She doesn't hesitate to offer advice to scholars wary of distance-learning ventures: "I would tell faculty members that virtual organizations are going to go where they can get the content. So get with the program."
Although most of her work can be done from her home on her computer -- she likes to say that she sometimes teaches in her pajamas, with her cat scrambling across the keyboard -- Ms. Silberman commutes to Manhattan once every week or so to touch base with her colleagues in the company's SoHo offices, just south of the university's main campus. NYUonline was started in 1998 to develop and market online courses.
With Ms. Silberman's help, NYUonline has been pitching its online courses to corporate customers for the past several months. The company already has contracts to offer courses on management, human resources, and banking to employees at corporations like American Express and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. This fall, NYUonline is also offering an online-teacher-training course for professors who want to learn how to instruct in the medium.
Ms. Silberman's job may seem amorphous. She is alternately called a teacher, a consultant, an instructor, and a course facilitator. She has written the syllabuses and lesson plans for some of NYUonline's courses -- which, except for the teacher-training course, are mostly in business subjects. For other courses, she moderates live sessions during which students sitting in front of their computers and scattered across the country can speak to each other through special headsets.
Soon, she may also begin working directly with corporate customers of NYUonline who have questions about the company's courses, although she does not want to become a member of the sales staff. "What's normal for me is doing something different every day," she says.
Ms. Silberman holds the title of adjunct associate professor at New York University, but her world at NYUonline is defined more by the jargon of online learning than by classrooms and textbooks. She uses terms like "asynchronous," and "content expertise" the way other professors speak of midterms and term papers. And she readily admits that working as an online instructor is as much about marketing as it is about teaching. "I love what I am doing," she says. "I feel as though I have found a home. I love not only the teaching, but the selling of it."
At companies like NYUonline, teaching is broken down into components. A professor may generate the syllabus and the content for a course, an instructional designer works to put the content online, and another instructor might interact with students in real-time chat sessions.
"We are evolving out of the era of the Lone Rangers, the highly independent faculty member who controls the whole process," says Richard T. Hezel, the president of Hezel Associates, a research company that specializes in distance education. "Faculty members can choose to be involved in the design, development, content expertise, delivery, or distribution of courses, and they may end up working more closely than they are used to with others who have expertise in other aspects."
While leaders of NYUonline and other companies selling online courses say employees like Ms. Silberman will help them bridge the gap between the academic and corporate realms, other academics worry that the craft of teaching will be destroyed as institutions begin to rely on a broader assortment of people to create and deliver online curricula.
"Distance education is capable of literally breaking down the teaching function to a series of discrete tasks performed by different people," says William E. Scheuerman, the president of United University Professions, a union for faculty members at public institutions in New York. "We are concerned about a disassembling and de-skilling of the profession."
But Gordon Macomber, the chief executive officer of NYUonline, says he believes that both adjunct and full-time faculty members can play a role in offering corporate education through companies. "I think the whole concept of adjunct professorship is going to be very important," he says. "They will be a large percentage of the talent needed to deliver applicable education. However, you need the university system to evaluate whether the talent is worthy and full-time faculty have an edge, I think, on certain knowledge."
Ms. Silberman is not without experience in education. She is an adjunct professor at N.Y.U.'s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, where she has taught courses in business and management since 1992. Most of her professional experience, though, is in sales and business. As recently as last year, she was the vice president of sales and marketing at U.S. Office Products. In person, her sales background is apparent -- she excels at selling herself, listing her strengths as networking and seeing the whole picture.
She has an economist's distaste for inefficiency. Just as she has little patience for faculty members who won't move with the times, she has little tolerance for any kind of slip-up that she deems egregious: She calls the "How's my driving?" numbers painted on the backs of trucks when she sees truck drivers driving poorly.
David Hawthorne, the senior vice president of e-learning for NYUonline, says he hired Ms. Silberman because of her speaking skills and her business acumen. "She gets a real sense of joy out of getting students to interact in an online environment," he says. "Her additional talent is that she understands the business needs that NYUonline exists to fulfill."
Mr. Hawthorne says instructors at NYUonline typically make slightly more than instructors teaching the same courses in a traditional classroom, but he declined to provide specific salary figures.
Ms. Silberman says she has been particularly happy working at NYUonline because she believes in the company's core product: education. "For me to be successful in the sales process, I have to really believe in what I'm selling," she says, "so that when I take someone's money, for God's sake, I can live with my conscience. I used to sell furniture, but I didn't make furniture. In this case, I'm actually making some of what I'm selling."
She adds that developing online courses for a commercial organization combines her former corporate and teaching lives. "I don't like to be isolated," she says. "I like to see how the parts fit together."
After arriving at the cramped NYUonline offices late in the morning, Ms. Silberman quickly finds herself playing with a number of those parts, overseeing and assisting a range of projects. She checks in with her boss, and then works for a few hours on the online-teacher-training course.
Ms. Silberman has produced the content for this course, creating lesson plans with titles such as "An Overview of Distance Learning." She also leads those weekly real-time sessions, in which students can log on and talk to her or a guest lecturer via an audio program the company is testing. The NYUonline offices -- which resemble those of a typical dot-com -- are so overrun with people this afternoon that Ms. Silberman and a colleague temporarily borrow the chief executive officer's private office to record one of the lessons. Many of the employees at NYUonline are 20-somethings, and the dress is definitely casual.
She eats a lunch of plain turkey slices and water -- she avoids bread because she says she believes wheat products sap her energy. Even while she's eating, Ms. Silberman doesn't stop moving. She grabs bites of turkey and then runs off to speak with someone.
Later, she talks with Mr. Hawthorne about meeting with the NYUonline sales staff to help them pitch their product. The two of them crowd in to Mr. Hawthorne's cubicle. "We are not only changing horses midstream here," he says to a visitor, "but changing streams midhorse."
When the conversation is over, Ms. Silberman sends e-mail messages to American Express employees enrolled in an NYUonline course on conflict management and negotiation. She uses her own laptop because all of the computers in the office are in use. In the e-mail, she encourages the students to send her examples of real problems they have encountered in the workplace, so that she can start an electronic discussion based on their responses.
Ms. Silberman's many roles here indicate a fundamental change in the teaching process at online institutions, according to Mr. Hezel, the consultant. "I think we are looking at the breakdown of the products that faculty create into what essentially are commodities," he says.
However, Mr. Macomber says he doesn't believe that the faculty role has been deconstructed by online education. Even in the traditional classroom, he says, the responsibility for teaching might be shared by a professor, a teaching assistant, and supplementary materials -- such as textbooks -- created by publishers. "If you look at the traditional model, there are a number of different ways in which content is created and delivered."
Mr. Scheuerman, of United University Professions, offers a more critical view, saying that companies selling online education "break a craft down into a bunch of pieces on an assembly line." He says it may be more appropriate for a commercial company to offer online courses to corporations than to undergraduates or other degree-seeking students, but he is wary of all such endeavors. "Perhaps it might make more sense when offering certificates for corporate retraining, but, still, if you are trying to compete with traditional universities, it is a sham."
Mr. Macomber, though, says corporations are demanding the style of consumer-driven education that NYUonline offers. "The academy isn't as well-equipped to meet this kind of demand," he says. "Traditional educators come up with a curriculum and say, 'Here is what you have to learn,' while the corporate side now says, 'This is what we need to know. Can you supply it?'"
Ms. Silberman, for her part, sees these changes as facts of life.
In the evening, still in SoHo, she leads an online lesson in instructional design for the teacher-training course. A guest lecturer speaks to the six students, who are located in Dallas, New York City, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and in Connecticut.
The lesson goes fairly smoothly. Lisa Shapiro, a project manager at NYUonline who is the guest lecturer, speaks to the students through the headsets as PowerPoint images appear on their computer screens. Ms. Silberman introduces Ms. Shapiro, who participates from her home, and calls on students to answer questions using a device that allows them to speak into their mouthpiece and be heard by the rest of the students -- a live-audio feature the course is testing.
While NYUonline officials say they hired Ms. Silberman for her intelligence and charisma, they might also have been drawn in by her voice. The students definitely are: They respond well to her clear, even-toned sentences, which at moments have an almost musical quality.
As is usually the case online, there are glitches. One student's mouthpiece is not working, and when Ms. Silberman calls on her, no one can hear her speak. At first, Ms. Silberman thinks the student is forgetting to hold down the "shift" key when she wants her voice to be transmitted.
But as the class continues, Ms. Silberman realizes that something else is wrong, and asks a technical-support person to help the student. Later, a tornado alert briefly draws the student in New Orleans toward his television and away from his computer.
But when the class ends, at 9:30 p.m., Ms. Silberman is pleased with how it went. The NYUonline offices are by now almost empty, and she heads for the Howard Johnson Inn in New Jersey where she stays when she comes to New York City.
Ms. Silberman says she hopes one day to "license out" her services to other companies selling online education, acting as both a consultant and an instructor.
She plans to work toward an M.B.A. using distance education. In the meantime, however, she is happy to have found a niche in academe where she can be successful without an advanced degree. "I'm accepted for my practical knowledge and not discarded because I don't have a Ph.D.," she says.
She adds that she is proud to be called a professor by her students at NYUonline and at the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, but she doesn't think the word "teaching" always explains what she does at NYUonline.
"You don't teach an asynchronous course," she says. "You develop it, you put it online, and then you sell it."
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