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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.
There's a link to the actual paper at the bottom of the article.
"How old r u d00d? R u a grrrl?"
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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.
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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 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.
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.
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.