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Technological Pratfalls of an Online Education
An anonymous reader writes "This article (NYT=Free Login Required) at the New York Times describes an upcoming paper on the experiences of one online class and the technological barriers that resulted in frustration for participants. " Its an interesting piece and talks about several relevant issues. I always wanted to take my classes online, and I still think that it is definitely going to be important in the future, but, well, read the article.
I really don't have any experience with the technical/pedagogical problems asociated with distance learning, but I would really like to see this trend grow. Right now, I'd dearly love to see a distance learning approach to the certified Linux engineer/technician/whatever. I just can't afford the travel/per deim/tutition - and my company ain't gonna spring for it. But, as a computer professional, I can see the value of the certification, not so much the paper, but learning the things that I don't get to do on the job.
Done right, I think it's a great way to pick up new skills in a structured environment.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
did they really say that 35 e-mails in a week for a class is too much?
any class i've ever had that had and used a mailing list had at least that much or more. its just the way these things work. you've gotta learn to pay attention to the important stuff and ignore the crap that some of your less than briliant classmates come up with, but that happens in normal classes too...
and anyway, 35 isn't that many over the course of a week...
There's a link to the actual paper at the bottom of the article.
It sounds like the attempt isn't inherently flawed, but there were two problems with the implementation.
First, the technology. It sounds like nobody gave any thought to the software you'd need to support the class. For example, email isn't a bad way to discuss things, but you need good software to keep up with any sort of volume. It has to be easy to use, it _has_ to be threaded, and it has to be able to put the class in a separate, readable folder, so it doesn't get jumbled with the masses of other mail you get.
In this case, pine (for instance) is about as bad as you can get. You need something more like a threaded newsreader (ie, Gnus or something else threaded). Pine was really meant to be easy to use for people who get a bunch of personal (non-list email).
You also need to make it easy to communicate complex ideas over the email. If all students are able to read HTML email, it'll make more complex documents easy.
You also need some real-time communication. The class tried this with some chat program. Again, the client wasn't up to the task. It needed a few things: a log posted to the web after each meeting. An easy scrollback function, to satisfy the needs of those who need to refer back to something during the meeting. And it should probably be easier to use than the client they tried.
These are just a coupple examples of how you'd need to analyze the needs of a class, and how they differ from the tasks people normally do with chat and email programs. Right now, it's a lot more work to do, because most software normally sucks for class activities, but there's no no fundamental technical barrier.
More problematic for this class, I'd bet, were students' and the instructor's expectations going in. One big expectation was probably that they wouldn't have to work on the software to make the class work, as I talk about above. Another was probably that they didn't expect to have to put much effort into the _class_ to make things work.
Fact is, if you have a group of people locked in a room together three times a week, it's not too hard to get them to interact. But distance learning is different. While you can still have great interaction, everyone has to work a bit harder, if only because you have to type! You also need to work harder to make yourself clear and understood, because email/chat rooms are a much lower bandwidth connection than the classroom. It sounds like the students and the instructor both disliked the amount of effort they had to put in (complaining about answering email, for instance). With an attitude like that, it's not going to work.
So, these are a couple of major problems, but I think they could be avoided with some effort. You just have to think about them when setting up the system.
"How old r u d00d? R u a grrrl?"
--
Now, the online "classroom" idea I dig - multimedia presentations are a great way to convey lots of information quickly. Just turn on the disovery channel, or "Bill Nye the Science Guy" and you'll see what I mean. Those are the kinds of things that I'd like to see - technology to assist the teacher.. not to replace him/her.
--
If the tests you have been taking are such that you could simply look up the answers in the book, then you have had some pretty crappy teachers or oversimplified subject matter.
I've had those sorts of classes and teachers before. But for those piddly nuisance questions where you can look up the answers in the book, that's what you're going to be doing in the real world, anyway! Books are there to remember useless trivia for you, you just have to remember where to look.
The real problem that could come up is if the same test is distributed to everyone and the students collaborate and send each other answers. For essay questions, this will obviously not work, but for a lot of the more black-and-white disciplines that have right and wrong answers, it could make things difficult. What these systems really need is a way to record the "scratch paper". If everyone is *working* the problems absolutely identically, something fishy could be going on.
--John
I tire of all these people, primarily those least familiar with computers, telling everyone that we must: put classrooms online, build advanced media facilities, put everyone online, etc etc -- or be lost in the information age. People such as Bill Clinton and Al Gore like nothing more than to go to these poor neighborhoods, and promise 'a computer in every classroom'. I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Sure, everything being equal, they should be online. But these are kids in neighborhoods who are functionally illiterate, and have been for a long time. No amount of technology is going to fix this. These problems aren't new. Until they learn to read and write decently they'll never get anywhere.
Infact, i'd go as far to say that those with more traditional education are _better_ equipped to handle technology than those of today's hi-tech classrooms. The problem is that in all these hi-tech classrooms, basic staples of learning are lost. Students of today might grasp today's technology: Windows95, Netscape, Office97, and what not. However, its a very superficial knowledge. They don't know, nor are they expected to, how these devices operate on a more basic level. Its basically a black box to them. What happens when you change the box a little? They're absolutely lost. This type of learning simply doesn't work. Meanwhile, they're losing sight of the ball. Which is to teach students how to learn.
As a programmer involved with online and distance delivery education at a Univesity, I read the article carefully (and will be seeking the original sources). It makes some good points, but when I started to think about the problems mentioned in the article, I came to the conclusion that this particular online course was not well-planned. Like any software project, careful planning for online courses can save time and agony later on.
... I just hope people do not get caught up in the hype. It is easy to throw up a web page and call it "online course material" - teaching that material is a different story.
In many cases, online courses are viewed as making the course content available on the web, with email access to the instructor and other students. IMO, this is no different than mailing out a textbook and some SASEs. If the interactive features of online tools are not used, the student might as well choose to do the course via traditional correspondence means.
Here, when a professor or department come in to discuss putting a course online, we try to determine if that would be an appropriate thing to do. Certain courses lend themselves well to distance/online delivery, while others do not (though there may be a place for additional materials or tools online). Tools for instructor-student interaction and student-student interaction are used for most of our online courses. Animations, video and audio files and interactive web pages are used where appropriate. (Very few people are able to learn well by visual methods alone - it is good to use audio, experiential and social aspects to the learning experience in *any* course situation.) There are many proprietary courseware packages available that allow you to provide rich content and tools to students, if you use them to their full potential.
When a course is being prepared for online delivery, our instructional designers work closely with the content experts to plan how the course should be delivered so that the student can get the most out of the course. The technological requirements are discussed, and depending on what the target audience is, choices are made as to what tools will be used. Support is a big issue for online courses, so that students have somewhere to go when they run into troubles. However, pedagogy is one of the most important aspects of the planning stages - there has to be a commitment by the instructor (and department or institution) to actually facilitate the course.
In the situation described in the article, it appears that this course was not very well-designed and that there may not have been a full commitment by the instructor and institution to delivering the course. It also appears that support was not ideal for students encountering technical problems. Unfortunately, the students are the ones who suffer when this happens.
I think there is a huge potential for the use of online tools in education
YS
"Arrr! The laws of science be a harsh mistress." -- Bender
I was in an online class in college. It sucked. I was sitting at my computer when, all of a sudden, I had to take a leak. I clicked the little 'raise hand' icon to ask the teacher's permission, but my box bluescreened. When It came back up it told me that the ntdetect.com was invalid. By the time I got my box back online, class was over and I had wet myself. Twice. Good thing I was in my dorm room and nobody could see me except for my room-mate and he had a thing for urine that used to give me the creeps, but that day I was thankful for it.
--Shoeboy
I am in charge of the technical side of the distance learning program at a major college and I'd have to say that the experiences in the class mentioned in the article don't at all match our own experience. But that's because we built a reasonable technological infrastructure before we started classes. We keep e-mail to a minimum, along with browser requirements and required technological background.
We have over 1100 students enrolled in Web-based classes right now. A large number of them have already taken Internet courses, so apparently they liked the experience. Yes, there have been technological hurdles, but the students don't get too frustrated as long as we take care of the issues right away.
Our program is quite different from other schools in at least one regard: we give the instructors complete freedom over the pages that make up their course. They can put their big odd-looking photograph right on the home page if they want to. We want both the instructor and the students to feel like they're in a friendly classroom, not in a perfected, white-walled corporate training session.
On the technological side we took care to make it so that tests and assignments behaved just like paper assignments, where teachers can write their own comments on the form and students can look at their past assignments. It is a world away from e-mail assignments.
Something else that makes a difference is that we have a Distance Learning department which runs the Distance Learning Service Center. Students and faculty can call the center at any time for assistance.
I think people are simply not aware of how much it costs to put a course online (and you wondered why your ol' prof recycled the same material decade after decade :-) ). I recall the Open University (UK) estimate that it costs ~$1 million to create a single 3 year subject, plus the cost of revising it in another 3 years. Putting notes on the web and adding email support are a natural complement to normal lectures but nothing can replace face-face interaction with an expert, nor collaborative work with peers. Despite the desires of corporate educational providers, teaching will continue to be labor intensive until someone invents 3D AI avatars that can read minds.
:-( ).
Perhaps there are some roles where computer intensive training would be more effective (e.g pilot training) or can compenstate for disadvantages (braille translation) but for technical stuff, there's no alternative to getting your hands dirty (so why am I procrastinating reading this instead of trying to find that obscure timing bug?
Give me a decent book by an engaging author anyday.
LL
Signal 11 wrote
You know, in all seriousness, remote learning won't achieve widespread acceptance within the next 30 years for one simple reason: you can't flirt with somebody who's in another state. Seriously.. human interaction is a key component to learning.
Once you've got your hormones under control, I'd like to respectfully point out that the college crowd is making an increasingly smaller portion of the higher education market. For people serious about getting access to further education and not interested in chasing skirts (due to existing family life), web-based material (if correctly designed and supported) may offer time savings not possible otherwise. I am amazed at the dedication (not to mention stamina) shown by some colleagues who juggle a full-time job, raise a kid, build up a technical web site, and still have time for part-time postgraduate study. Also your comments about the requirement for human interaction may be correct for kids with short attention spans but IMHO the biggest bottleneck is trying to work out the conceptual gaps in a student, then suggesting a course of study that fits their inclinations. Given the incredible discrepency in talents and backgrounds, even within a small class, it becomes a Herculean task to create a learning structure that satisfies everyone.
Now, the online "classroom" idea I dig - multimedia presentations are a great way to convey lots of information quickly. Just turn on the disovery channel, or "Bill Nye the Science Guy"
General science/tech/business edutainment aimed at mainstream would have little intrinsic value except in building a broad general knowledge. Solving problems, mapping theoretical techniques to applications, and simply knowing where to go for help can't be taught easily through a passive medium. I suspect that whole-scale uptake of remote instructional technology will be primarily by the corporate universities (perhaps outsourced to specialist firms). Let's face it, mental geniuses they may be, universities do not always have a lot of relevant real-world experience. The real competition for Stanford, Harvard, or ColumbiaU is not going to be other universities, but professional courses offered by the big 5 accounting firms or IBM/Microsoft/McDonald/etc.
LL
You know, in all seriousness, remote learning won't achieve widespread acceptance within the next 30 years for one simple reason: you can't flirt with somebody who's in another state.
Ain't true. What do you think all these people in AOL chat rooms are doing? Yeah, I know, it's a big stretch to call that flirting, but it is generally the same idea.
Seriously.. human interaction is a key component to learning.
Not for all people. Most of what I know I taught myself either by reading books or by tinkering around. There wasn't much human interaction in that. OTOH, my wife, for example, cannot just learn stuff by herself. She needs it to be *taught* to her. That doesn't mean that I am smarter than her or vice versa -- we just learn in different ways.
However, I still don't think online learning will take off in a big way. People who need interaction will hate it and people who don't need interaction (like me) will not need it. I'd rather teach myself than be taught online. For me its faster, cheaper, more convenient, and I actually learn more by having to fix my own mistakes.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I took an 'Advanced Topics in Data Networking' course in the spring at Harvard and thought they handled the 'distance learning' piece well. The classes met as usual and were also videotaped, the video of the class was available within hours on the web along with all the slides Scott (Bradner, instructor) used. Most people went to most of the classes, but if you couldn't make one you could watch it at any point on the web. All the reading assignments (mostly RFCs) and exams were on the web. The instructor was available and responsive via email.
A class with no chance of face-to-face interaction with the instructor and no shared space with other students will work for some people, but interaction and groupwork are more instructive for others. Making classes available in a variety of media and allowing the students to choose what works best for them seems like the best idear to me.
Exactly what made them think using web pages and mailing lists would be better than a correspondence course?
Plain mailing lists are practically useless for anything but announcements. Some sort of threaded system is needed if you are to sort through all the garbage to what you are actually interested in.
In my experience, a good set of course notes (or FAQs or HOW-TOs) is worth infinitely more than the lectures (which the mass chats are analogous to). Regular private chat program use or, preferably, face-to-face contact is needed by all but the most self-reliant students. One of the biggest advantages of a university setting is that the students all study together and teach each other, filling in the little gaps in each others' understanding.
Of course, this could just be a case of a teacher's lousy skill shining through.
It seems like the problems the students had were that they were not prepared for an on-line learnign experience. As another comment stated, 35 emails in one week is hardly an overwhelming amount of email. I get more spam than that each week.
The one comment that I thought really explemplified the lack of preparation by the students was the comment about the chat room going too fast. I've been mudding for a long time now - going on five years. At first, being in that environment was confusing and frustrating. After awhile however, it became almost second nature. Messages were seen and remembered, and responses were made quickly and accurately - AFTER having been acclimated to the environment.
I'm not really sure how you (as a university) would provide a means for students to get acclimated... but perhaps the professor could log all conversations from the chatroom and post them on the web page.
I just seems to me like the students in the class expected a cake walk and got a class that had some real content that they weren't expecting.
It doesn't save time, it takes it. In large amounts. Your average college prof or high school teacher is basically clueless about what you need to do- they can put up a simple web page, but interactive programming is difficult and beyond most of them.
There are a ton of products out there to "make it easy" for the professor to setup an online class. Every one I've seen isn't worth the effort: they are complex, fragile and very limited in capabilites. Sure, you can click a few boxes and put a quiz online. Too bad it will be only multiple choice and have virtually no useful feedback to the student unless the professor spends the time writing detailed answers. The web-based discussion boards have a fraction the capabilites of USENET. The integrated grade books don't hold a candle to a spreadsheet like Excel.
The CD-ROMs in most books are worse. They always want a version of Quicktime you don't have. They are poorly designed, filled with examples that are simply copied from the paper book and still have limited feedback on the quizzes.
Thus, you get people like me helping out. I do web page/CGI/Java/multimedia stuff for the department. But now you have to find someone who knows both chemistry and the Net. You have to pay my salary and all the other overhead. And I still have to train professors in how to use this material.
We won't even get into the problems of distance ed. Is the person taking the test online the same person that signed up for the class? How do I get people even to show up to class- one of the best determiners of who will do well in the course?
There are a ton of great things you can do with the web. (See the Chime plug-in for example, an amazing tool for chemistry.) But how to rework an entire course to be web-based is not at all clear.
Eric
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
On the other hand, I took part in an online course way back in 1987. It was hosted by NJITs EIES system (half mainframe, half BBS) and offered for credit by Upsala College (which sadly, is no more). (I wish I knew where the study docs for this was - it was part of a three course experiment and I know research was done).
It was Introduction to Sociology and lasted the full semester. We met in person exactly three times - for orientation (and to buy the book), for the mid-term exam, and for the final exam. The class had about 16 students, IIRC.
It wasn't done with a mailing list, but with a sort of threaded discussion group (not unlike a usenet newsgroup). The professor would post reading assignments or "lectures" and participants were expected to reply. Quizzes were done by timed email (reciept was timestamped and then you had X minuites to send the completed reply).
I had a good experience with it. I learned a lot, and if I'd had to commute to campus, I'd never have been able to take the course.
If 1987 technology could be made to work, I have to think that today's tech should be able to handle it even better.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
I've been a programmer at the Technical University of British Columbia for over two years now. I was reading with amusment Schank's article, thinking about our university and all that we've done and learned developing classes for our first year of students this September.
TechBC may be closer to Schank's vision for a univsersity than a few others I know. We've tried to develop our course delivery models to embrace an online environment from the beginning. Too many online offerings are either just supplementary information for a lecture, or some glorified correspondance course. We've tried to change that by throwing out the old learning models (including a lecturer standing in front of a class droning on for 3 hours a week) and starting with something new.
A few features that set out TechBC from the rest (If I may get a plug in for my employer):
Greater sense of online community. Well, at least we're working on it. Building a course management system to handle all these new concepts takes time. Nonetheless, the students seem to be posting as much in online conferences as hanging out after class.
Strong business relationship (with tech partners, not banks or cola manufacturers), with plans for a strong co-op program.
Some amusing points. I notices Schank was complaining about the use of Latin as an "ancient educational language". Latin is also often used as text filler, sort of an "insert your text here" when developing course material. We bucked ther trend and used Esparanto. (A quote translated from Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series, I believe).
I liked the bit about using "games" such as flight simulators to teach students. I think most of our professors who would like this idea and think it was cool.
Reading about people "drifting off" and losing interest in lectures. I've been asked to generate reports from the web logs to determine which students may be losing interest so we can give them some more attention, and make sure they're not dissatisfied with their learning experience.
Well, I've plugged enough. It's not all been roses... It's been hell to put off from the university's point of view, and we won't really know how well it works until the students have completed their first semester of courses.
Perhaps our university can shock the others into changing their ways...
There'll be a lot of people in this thread who sympathize with the goals of the study and state that online learning can't compete with the simple human experience of collaring a classmate after the lecture and asking "WTF was that about?" Particularly a pretty, blonde classmate.
Hey, I confess that socializing was the primary reason I attended classes in college. Learning certainly wasn't a large attribute of CS 333.
But look, that's precisely the problem with college today. It's become an incubator for all the yuppie larva, a passport to the middle class. It has next to nothing to do with actually learning any longer. There was very little I learned at UIUC that I hadn't known previously or learned in my own time. I was so disgusted with the process (which put my family $50 in the hole) that I quit after three years. But that degree still played a crucial role in obtaining my job. Even though I've barely used it.
That's what we need to abolish. College needs to be about learning again, not certifying yourself as part of the High Income Club. If there are no people to hang out with, no babes to flirt with, no professors to fight with, then there's only one ting remaining: the knowledge.
I'm sure people said the same thing once about learning literature or engineering from books. Yet those are things I do all the time.
Let's put higher education back in the hands of people who deserve it: the people who love the knowledge and have a use for it. Not ungrateful shits like myself who only want a cushy job. Not to whale on myself or anything...
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
I know that on-line courses aren't the total solution to the education process but I've taken quite a few correspondence courses in my high school days just plainly because there are some things high school doesn't teach. Linear Differential Equations isn't necessarily one of them. :)
I for one am a person that enjoys setting the pace of my learning and it is also a lot easier for me to focus on the education without distractions, be it the female in front of you or other things.
I also know that some college professors could simply put their notes and itinerary for the class on-line and you could get more out of the class than attending, watching the prof copy his/her notes verbatim to the chalkboard.
But there are some courses where human interaction is an important part of the class. Theatre is the first of my classes that somes to mind.
On-line education isn't a solution but when applied correctly, its a damn good idea opportunity.