Creating a statewide classroom of social work students is no neat trick. Yet that’s exactly what CHE professor Ron Rooney has done. An 18-year faculty veteran with a knack for staying ahead of technology’s fast-changing curve, Rooney has developed a curricular model that expands access to valuable knowledge in social work practice without sacrificing the interpersonal interaction that education in the field demands.

The success of Rooney’s innovative approach to distance learning is clear in his “Social Work With Involuntary Clients,” an advanced course informed by Rooney’s international expertise on working with people mandated or pressured to accept outside help, such as batterers or others referred by the courts, parents at risk of losing their children because of allegations of abuse or neglect, and children perceived by families or teachers as having behavior problems. The course centers on the discussion and role-playing that are critical in practice-oriented classes. Yet the course’s unique design allows students to take part from remote locations at varied times (in the parlance of instructional technologists, they are engaging in “asynchronous learning”).

What enables this approach is a clever blend of digital-age tools, including live interactive television (ITV), a multimedia Web site, and videotape and CD-ROM technologies. Students in the nine-week class “meet” four times as a group, looped together by ITV from three sites (Twin Cities, Fargo-Moorhead, or Rochester) while Rooney leads the class from one of the sites.

Between meetings, students work their way through readings starting with Rooney’s own book Strategies for Work With Involuntary Clients (Columbia University Press), considered the definitive work on a topic of vital interest to social work practitioners. Students also log onto a course Web site to explore related information, complete assignments, and take quizzes; view, via CD-ROM, nearly a dozen Rooney-created videotapes of client sessions; and participate in online discussion with other students and Rooney himself. What’s more, one of the ITV sessions features a live teleconference allowing students to talk with international experts in the field.

Engaged learning
“It’s a great class in so many ways, but one is that Dr. Rooney’s passionate commitment to students really comes across,” says Tara Tieso, who took the class last summer while completing a dual master’s program in social work and public health. Positive student evaluations are just one clear sign of the course’s success, says Rooney; another sign is that the course draws working professionals from across greater Minnesota in addition to students already enrolled in campus degree programs.

The course content is a major draw, Rooney says, noting that helping professionals frequently find themselves working with involuntary clients instead of the “‘model clients’—those who seek you out—that for a long time were emphasized in social work education.”

“People leap at the chance to take a full-fledged practice course on this topic without having to relinquish their day jobs,” says Rooney, whose most recent offering of the course this past summer enrolled 32 students, including 10 in the Rochester area alone. “Many of our students have both job and family responsibilities, so it’s extremely attractive to them to do the course when and how it works well in their lives.”

With a student group more diverse in age and experience than is typical in campus-based programs, the course “allows students to see how knowledge is applied in real life,” observes Rooney. “That goes for me, too—I stay in closer touch with the field, and I also get to see how people are using ideas and techniques in ways I never thought of. This makes me a better scholar and a better teacher.”

Lest anyone think that distance learning lacks the connection and crackle of a “real” classroom, Rooney reports that “this course had some of the most motivated learners I’ve had in any of my classes, and frankly, discussion that was richer than in a traditional in-person class.” The “virtual” classroom he’s created has no back row, Rooney notes, meaning there’s no easy out for the passive or the shy. Students are required to contribute regularly to a Web-based discussion of readings and videotapes—and to share relevant insights from their own lives.

“There’s more time to exchange views, people are more reflective, and we hear more voices,” says Rooney, ticking off some of the advantages of the online discussion format. “The discussion isn’t just dominated by students who are the most fluent verbally. In-person discussions tend to leave out a lot of people, including nonnative speakers. The online format doesn’t just favor those who are quickest on the draw.”

“The online discussion was intelligent and very thoughtful—I really valued that,” says Rosalyn Washington, who took the course in summer 2002 as she wrapped up an undergraduate program in journalism, African American studies, and social work. Washington, who is starting a master’s program in social work this fall, runs a small nonprofit agency helping incarcerated men and women return to their communities. She also works for the Minnesota Medical Foundation. Relishing the flexibility of Rooney’s course in the context of her busy life, Washington also appreciated being able to view the videotaped client sessions again and again on CD-ROM as opposed to seeing them once as an in-class roleplaying exercise.

She particularly valued the diverse perspectives that flourished in online dialogue. “I learned a lot from what other people shared about situations I had never dealt with—their own life or work experiences involving learning-disabled children or people who had mental health problems, for instance,” says Washington. “I also contributed my own perspectives as an African American woman and my experiences working with people behind the [prison] walls.”

Describing his role as “prodding people to participate and nudging people to support their views and connect their thoughts to course material,” Rooney estimates that he spends as many as three hours a day reviewing students’ posts and contributing thoughts and questions to advance the discussion—in addition to the hours he spends grading assignments, managing the Web site, leading the in-person sessions, and holding office hours in Peters Hall and online.

Tieso, who helped Rooney conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the course, notes that student assessments trumpet Rooney’s accessibility as a particular strength, further vanquishing any notion that distance learning means distanced learning. Tieso herself found the course “very empowering. She notes that for their final projects, Rooney offered students the chance to work with renowned experts on a chapter for a revised edition of his book, now in preparation. Tieso, who will start a Ph.D. program in social work this fall, was among those who took him up on the offer.

History of innovation
Hearing Rooney converse fluently in the high-tech jargon of uplinks and uploads, you’d never guess that he first earned his teaching chops as an early 1960s Peace Corps volunteer in rural Central America. Paradoxically, Rooney credits that distinctly grassroots experience with making him the innovator he is today.

“I worked with an El Savadoran agronomist to bring new ideas to farmers, and I also taught English to rural El Salvadoran kids. I learned how important it was to present practical material in ways that had real immediacy for people,” Rooney says. Interactive workshops involving demonstrations and role playing succeeded where lectures did not, he found. This lesson came back to him vividly a few years later as he watched two graduate school mentors from the University of Chicago, both renowned theorists, fail (“spectacularly and painfully”) to connect on any practical level with an audience of social work practitioners.

Rooney, who himself worked with child welfare clients for several years in Illinois, joined the University of Minnesota faculty in 1985 determined “to create learning situations that truly help people in social work practice, and the people they’re trying to help.” Grasping the pedagogical potential of emerging technologies well ahead of the pack, he made enthusiastic and creative use of the video camera and satellite television starting in the early 1990s, spending hours on end in a production studio in the University’s Rarig Center. In 1992, he landed a grant for a statewide satellite-TV version of a training program he’d developed for county social workers on working with involuntary clients

When ITV emerged as a successor to the one-sided satellite format, Rooney created one of the first ITV courses offered at the University. Showing a knack for linking early innovations to later ones, he remade his ITV course into a Web-based course, and then reinvented it again, as the ITV/Web/video/CD-ROM hybrid he now offers. Importantly, his work also became a springboard for the social work department’s distance-learning option for its master of social work degree.

Rooney’s early techno-savvy continues to reap dividends. The model social work practice sessions he directed and videotaped are today sold all over the world (through insightmedia.com), earning royalties for research and for development of further outreach tools. Those videos, along with tapes culled from the satellite course and an accompanying workbook, today form the basis of an award-winning correspondence course for aspiring helping professionals in the University’s General College.

Rooney has grown keenly aware that many of his students lack his technological derring-do. After losing some intimidated students after the first class session last semester, Rooney now mails students user-friendly instructions when they enroll—and stations an on-site tech expert at the first class sessions in the Twin Cities, Moorhead, and Rochester. “Don’t be afraid of technology,” he tells students. “It’s just a medium for learning. But it does spark learning in new ways and bring a lot more people into the conversation. What could be more exciting?”