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An experiment in distance learning

by Marilyn L. Gross
January 6, 1997; CharityVillage NewsWeek Cover Story

My entry into the field of distance learning for nonprofit organizations was abrupt --- a phone call from St. Thomas Aquinas College (NY) asking if I could teach my in-person, graduate-level Grantsmanship Institute as an online course. Not wanting to turn down a challenge, I agreed - and soon discovered that, while distance learning has been around for quite a long time, little, if anything, has been offered in the way of nonprofit management or fundraising. In the months since I developed the Grantwriters Workshop, a few colleges seem to be warming to the idea....but it is still essentially virgin territory.

With a background as nonprofit staffer, foundation program officer, consultant and trainer, I had no experience in distance learning and no role models to follow. So I gave myself a crash course in distance learning (also known as online education, asynchronous learning, and a host of other new names), then honed it to fit the needs of adult learners from not-for-profit organizations and public agencies who want to raise funds for their organizations, but are unable to attend in-person workshops or courses, for a variety of reasons.

Levelling the playing field

While I believe distance learning can never replace live, person-to-person teaching, DL can level the playing field for individuals and organizations who find it hard to compete in fundraising with the more sophisticated groups - often because they lack access to the vital information necessary to pin down grants and other sources of funding. When provided appropriately (i.e., through relatively inexpensive, widely available media - and not locked into real time), distance learning can help move non-profit people with physical, financial, or time limitations, or who live in distant cities or rural areas, up to the same starting point as students who live or work next door to the instructor.

I would like to talk to you about the evolution of the online "Grantwriters Workshop," what worked and what didn't, and to invite your suggestions for making online training even more responsive to the needs of charitable organizations and public agencies.

Getting the word out

With no advertising budget, essentially no support staff, and a sponsoring college with no experience in distance learning, I set out to develop a vast electronic and conventional mailing list of organizations having contact with large numbers of charitable and public agencies. This entailed countless hours of poring over charitable sector and grantmaker directories and publications, as well as days of surfing the Net, (which produced lots of informational material that later became substance for the course). After almost a thousand press releases were mailed and e-mailed, inquiries immediately started pouring in, from 36 U.S. states, Canada, Puerto Rico, and even Israel. 25 people eventually registered, representing universities and small colleges, city and state agencies, public school systems, independent proposal writers, rural not-for-profit organizations, and even a town police department.

Structuring the course

I had decided to structure the course on an in-person class model, which would cover everything from how to locate funder and grant information on the Internet, to interpreting grantmakers' program guidelines and requests for proposals, to the basics of writing - and properly targeting - successful proposals. I organized the course content into eight lessons, which were sent out weekly, with the exception of Lesson One --- Suspecting (correctly) that some (many!) students would not have a functioning e-mail account at the start of the course, I first-class mailed a big package to everyone.

This contained the first written lesson, a syllabus and calendar for the course, photocopies of required readings (with publisher's permission to reprint), order forms for recommended publications, a workbook, and a variety of housekeeping items (student information sheet; course evaluation form, etc.). From the student ID sheet I compiled a comprehensive class list which included e-mail and conventional addresses, organization name and purpose, etc., which was later sent to each participant.

Arranging the chat rooms

Also included in the initial package were two start-up disks (MAC and PC) which America Online supplied, for those who wished to participate in five private chat rooms. I had made the executive decision to use AOL for the chats, even though I knew that would limit participation to AOL users. Although Internet Relay Chat (IRC) can be used with any Internet provider, it can be more cumbersome and seemed less appropriate for beginners. I soon learned that AOL chats can be logged and saved, so I was able to e-mail transcripts to students who could not otherwise participate. When saved to a disk, chat logs can be manipulated through word processing into a more coherent format.

Getting started

I gave the first lesson two weeks to arrive and sink in, while students scrambled to get online. Subsequent lessons were e-mailed every Wednesday. Each contained a few pages of lecture by me on the week's topic. Topics included Resources for Grantwriters, Researching Potential Funders, and Concepting your Proposed Project. Workbook pages were assigned, as well as reading selections from the required articles and from directories likely to be found at area libraries. As a carrot to encourage writing, and not just Web surfing and conceptualizing, I offered to provide written reviews of all drafted or completed proposals sent me by a specific date.

The final few lessons focused on grant proposals and related writings, including the funders' own words (program guidelines, annual reports, and RFPs); abstracts or executive summaries; and letters of inquiry or preliminary proposals (a/k/a the notorious not to exceed two pages letter); students were sent examples of each. The class was instructed to request application information directly from grantmakers active in their fields.

Pointing students to the Web

Almost every lesson directed students to World Wide Web sites relevant to that week's topic, and to very specific pages within those sites. The challenge to the students, and to me as instructor - particularly a long distance instructor - was to keep them on track, not wandering through the excitement of cyberspace like Hansel and Gretel without even a bag of bread crumbs to find their way back to where they started out. I made few demands of my students, but one was to exercise discipline while completing a lesson and limit themselves to the suggested areas first. For example, one assignment read: "Visit The Foundation Center's Home Page; go to The Fundraising Process; from there, go to A Proposal Writing Short Course; read up to Financials." The second half of the article was assigned in the following week's lesson.

I also took students to generic Web sites, such as meta-indexes of philanthropic organizations, networks of grantmakers, or publications of interest to not-for-profits. From these huge (and tempting!) lists, several specific hyperlinks were singled out for visiting. Finally, knowing that different students had different priorities (e.g., some wished to learn more about private grantmakers, others about government sources; some about education, others about health), I directed students to main branches of information in various fields, make a reconnaissance visit first, bookmark points of personal interest, finish the week's lesson, then return to explore to their heart's content.

Ready for questions

In addition to staying on track, a second demand was made of the students. They were required to e-mail me with questions related both to the grantmaking process in general and to their organization or project in particular. I replied to each inquirer by personal e-mail and organized related questions into six frequently-asked-questions (FAQs) sheets, which were e-mailed, with written responses, to every student. Whenever possible, I incorporated the comments of outside professionals whom I'd consulted to amplify my response. Particularly intriguing student questions were used to kick off chat room discussion, with dynamic results. Because the group was relatively small, people learned each other's names and organizations, not just online handles, and the cross-country discussions occasionally had the flavor of being in the same room together.

The Post-Mortem

The overall response to the online "Grantwriters Workshop," from students and myself, was very positive. The elements that seemed to work best were:

1. The weekly lessons, which were pasted into e-mail messages (rather than sent as attached files), and could be saved to a file and/or printed out and kept in a loose-leaf notebook.
   
   
2. The extensive reprinted articles, which students could not have easily located on their own.
   
   
3. The focus on very specific, generic Web sites, with highlighting of other sites to be visited at one's leisure (or by those wanting a more advanced or intense course of study).
   
   
4. The personal, individualized style of delivery, which was more labor-intensive for me than merely posting the course on a Web page with hyperlinked examples of sites to visit, but which paid off in feelings of satisfaction and accomplishment for students and teacher alike.

Positive response from students

Students told me that my "conversational" writing style and occasional technical assistance provided by phone made them feel that the instructor was right there in the room with them. Many were pleased by the sheer volume of material provided and the ability to seek out specific information whenever they needed it; this structure also ensured that illness, travel, personal crises, or crushing work deadlines would not prevent them from pursuing the coursework on their own time, at their own pace. One student invoked the old adage of being taught to fish rather than simply being supplied with fish. I found this reaction among the most gratifying, since it persuaded me that I had accomplished what I'd set out to do: namely, teach a group of people from not-for-profits from around the country (and potentially from throughout the world) how to locate for themselves information that will increase their funding potential, and ultimately their organizations' sustainability.

Teaching cyber savvy became first step

What were the difficulties, or the aspects that might have been done better? First, being a long-term cyberphobe, I had assumed that all of my students would be way beyond me in technological skills. To my surprise, most students turned out to be virtual beginners (pun not intended!), as did many of the inquirers who decided not to take the course at this time because they didn't feel ready.

The major challenge, then, became not just imparting factual information, but getting across via computer the basic "how to" skills (e.g., how to load AOL, send an e-mail, point the mouse at the right button, bookmark a Web page) which can be demonstrated so easily in a hands-on lab course. Providing written instructions succinctly, in a way that would neither frighten off the first-timers nor bore the few veterans, was made more difficult by not being able to read my students' faces or interpret hands in the air to mean, "I don't get it", or "What you just taught us doesn't work."

A few bumps on the information highway

There were several additional, unanticipated hitches related to having students living in remote areas or lacking experience with computers --- some were restricted to a single local provider, whose system was often overloaded and had no one available to provide advice; for some, the telephone connection was a toll call, which discouraged them from joining chats or doing lengthy "surfing;" and some had such slow modems that downloading Web sites became a real drag.

Lack of visual contact stressful

For me, keeping track of students who were not active, vocal participants was difficult, time-consuming, and stressful. Was their silence online a sign that they were having technical trouble? Where the feeling anxious about using electronic media without a nearby guru to hold their hand? Or was it a problem with the course content or presentation? Though I actively solicited negative, as well as positive feedback in an effort to improve this and future courses, it was difficult to gauge student ability and satisfaction levels without live bodies.

Among the mixed blessings was the lesson delivery. Being a bit of a perfectionist, I was dissatisfied that lessons pasted to e-mails lost the spacing, underlining, bolding, and italics which would have improved their appearance and made them easier to read. Yet, the alternatives seemed worse. When I experimented with sending material as attached files in text, the more elementary level students had trouble translating them with their word processing software and saving them as files. At other times, the files were lost in transmission.

Chat rooms vs. IRC, listservs, newsgroups

Chat rooms also posed a dilemma. I chose to go with America Online because it seemed especially friendly, many students already had access to it, and (last but not least) I was most comfortable with it. However, I knew I was excluding those using other providers.

In the final analysis, I felt that mastering the use of Internet Relay Chats would have been difficult for all of us novices, particularly with no assistance available from the college. Those who have visited chat rooms know that the dialogue can become confusing, with onscreen interruptions or moments of dead silence, when everyone waits for someone else to talk first. Applying my old social worker skills to a new medium, I learned how to facilitate the give-and-take, while students contributed suggestions for easing the flow of words.

Despite the shortcomings, chat rooms (and the logged transcripts) were a high point for many people because the immediacy of the interaction seemed preferable to the delays inherent in listservs and newsgroups. Alternatives, such as conference calls and satellite videoconferencing all have their downsides --- the first, because taking turns speaking would be even more difficult without onscreen words and names as prompts. The second because the need to travel to downlink centers to join in the teleconferences would cause the very mobility problems I was trying to avoid in the first place by using distance, rather than on-site, training.

Restructuring the content

The body of information for grantseekers and proposal writers is vast, and is expanding quickly. For future programs, I have decided to split the material into two sections, each of which will be the equivalent of a 40-hour, in-person course. Using the Internet to Research Grant Opportunities and Online Course for Grantwriters will be offered through St. Thomas Aquinas College beginning January 22, 1997 and running through March 31 (with a January 15 registration deadline).

Other courses and workshops on the drawing board include specialized versions for the education and health fields, grantsmanship overviews for board members and directors, and training in power writing for fundraisers and nonprofit managers.

I invite, and greatly appreciate, suggestions for these or any other online training programs.

Marilyn Gross is CEO of Educational Funding Strategies. Contact her at mlgross@aol.com, or visit EFS's Web site.

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