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.

Comments

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[Signal 11]

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. Geeks have come the farthest in this country to breaking that rule - but even we still need some real-life human interaction to do some things. Imagine trying to hold a chemistry lab... via video-conferencing. "Charlie was a chemist, but charlie is no more, what charlie thought was H2O was H2SO4". There are just some things you can't do online. I should know... I've been trying to get a job online for the last three months. I'm still unemployed. *g*

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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Planning and pedagogy in online courses

[Yosemite Sue]

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.

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 ... 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.

YS