The first panel was a presentation of the work of the CUNY Online Baccalaureate Program. This was likely the most highly attended session at the conference, and also the most densely populated panel (I believe there were thirty-seven presenters limited to forty-five seconds each… or at least it seemed that way). The speed of the presentation and the minimum time allowed for questions made it difficult to come to any conclusions about the program. The presenters also, more than once, positioned their experiences as “one-hundred eighty degrees” different from one another concerning this pedagogical conundrum or that, so it seems that the faculty teaching in the program also haven’t yet reached any synthesized conclusions. That, I suppose, is to be expected from something so young and experimental. Each course in the program, which offers a degree in Communication and Culture, is taught entirely online through Blackboard and Learning Objects, Inc. extensions to it. While some of the faculty felt that Blackboard did a fine job of facilitating their classes, others felt stifled by the software and its proprietary logic, and have looked for outside solutions.
The short presentations combined with the Blackboard wall between the public and the program make it difficult for me to assess exactly how effective the online instruction is. The faculty do seem to feel as though they are teaching and reaching many of their students… this, it seems to me, is the most you can really hope for from a program that’s taught entirely online. Clearly, there are a lot of talented faculty involved in the program and a lot of resources invested, so it seems likely to me that a lot of good work is happening. Hopefully, we’ll hear more about the CUNY Online BA in the future.
No faculty member really wants to teach a course entirely online, but I do feel that this program allows students to complete a degree who, due to work and family commitments, might otherwise find it impossible. The program fits well within the CUNY mission of providing affordable, quality higher education for the diverse population of the city and, judging from what I saw, the instruction is rigorous and demanding. In this case, technology is entirely responsible for making it possible.
The most astounding factoid to come out of this session was the claim made, privately to me, that there hasn’t been a single instance where a student has needed technical aid, because the program orientation covered every possible potential problem. I have a hard time believing this, but if it’s true, that must have been the Best Orientation Ever.
Luke, really, you can’t possibly mean this
Plenty of faculty members, throughout CUNY, and across the country (including me!), certainly do really want to teach a course entirely online. Many of us have been doing so for years–and we don’t do it because we’re forced to, or just don’t know any better.
We do it because we see the pedagogical advantages (not just convenience) of this medium.
My mistake. I should have substituted “would prefer to” for “really wants to,” and added “that I’ve met or heard of” after “faculty.” That’s a fair point, and had I made those substitutions my point would have been slightly different. I didn’t mean to imply that faculty are dragged kicking and screaming to teach these courses; I actually think it would be a good experience for all faculty to try something like this, and I have loads of respect for the faculty who have gotten the online BA off the ground (even if it was hard to really see what they were doing at the presentation, and if their work is locked up by Blackboard). That should have been clearer in my post.
Still, I would appreciate if you could lay out for us the pedagogical advantages of teaching entirely online, of never sharing a physical space with your students. The advantages are not self-evident, and I’m hardly an old-school essentialist when it comes to pedagogy. Your claim would seem to assume that a course taught entirely online can achieve something a blended course cannot. I’m willing to be convinced, but such a claim should be explained rather than asserted.
The current program is in keeping with the mission of CUNY and is predicated on exactly the basis for my own continued involvement in CUNY (34 years and continuing) and in online instruction (6 years and hopefully more): Opportunity and Access. The current proposal targets a group not otherwise being actively and effectively reached by CUNY. It also is specific in its reaching out to those who for a variety of reasons believe that they can not attend classes in the traditional modality of instruction. It is a rather large group of people who are mature, responsible adults and now self disciplined as would be confirmed by their decision to return to college using this modality of instruction after having been advised and counseled by a well trained staff. This latter point is my expectation given the expressed commitment to a quality program.
Personal testimony is often more important than lots of research data and reports. So here are a few anecdotes. In CUNY I have taught people in the following circumstances who otherwise would not have taken classes and would not have continued their education.
1)A young woman confined to her home and assisted by a respirator who took classes in CUNY from her bed.
2)A salesman whose work schedule did not permit a commitment to any class with a fixed time
3)Two students in CUNY who were posted to Iraq and took classes from their barracks.
4)Several young mothers with newborns who took classes from their apartments when the children finally gave them some opportunity to read and think and converse with their classmates and instructor.
5)A young man receiving cancer treatments at Sloan Kettering who refused to give up on life, stopped out of Cornell, entered the hospital an took a class in CUNY from his bedroom as part of his way of affirming life in the face of death and reaffirming his desire to be a doctor.
6)students who have taken classes in CUNY while in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, Poland and Iraq and perhaps elsewhere ( as I have no way of knowing exactly where they are when they access our class and interact with me and their classmates).
As I have stated above, for me CUNY is about access and opportunity and I have met in the real world with face to face contact and in the virtual world with keyboarded conversations and emotional displays people who were most appreciative that CUNY was making online education available to them. I teach online principally for them.
I note that what I have learned about teaching from my online experiences has changed how I teach when I am face to face with my students. I have moved completely over from instructor centered to learner centered instructional design. (I have learned to talk that way about what I do!) I believe that I have become a better teacher for it. The revision in pedagogic style has afforded me more time to deal with the most pressing issues for my students as I spend less time in the simple transmission of information and more time focusing on how well my students are learning and how well they are thinking ( I teach Philosophy).
Because of what I have stated I want to do all I can and am permitted to do to assist the development of a most effective and quality program of distance education in CUNY. I believe that such a program is only possible with a faculty at its center.
I will be happy to respond to requests as to the pedagogy of online education and comparisons with other modes of instruction but this post is long enough already.
Prof. Pecorino: Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts about your experience teaching in the program.
Is there a public, virtual place where participants are discussing issues that come up, a blog perhaps? I think it would be great if more people could be privvy to how the program is developing.
At this time I know of no public, virtual place where participants are discussing issues that come upwith regard to the CUNY Online BA program or any other CUNY online program. I will suggest the creation of such to others involved in the program. There are other places on the www where there is much information -too many to list.
I was hoping that you would pose some specific question related to pedagogy so I might offer a specific response.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Sorry, Luke, for not getting back to this sooner–I was struck down by a vicious virus and my computer time has been a bit limited.
But let me see what I can add now. Phil has done an admirable job (as he usually does) of laying out some of the access advantages of a fully online course (or degree). And I know that you acknowledged those advantages in terms of access from the start. They’re very important, and it’s good to have them explained so clearly and powerfully.
But I would like to say a bit more about the pedagogical advantages of this kind of teaching and learning, because I think they’re too often neglected–or it’s just automatically assumed that there’s some sacrifice when a course is taught 100% asynchronously.
I think it’s good to start by questioning that assumption. Why should we assume, without questioning, that there is an advantage to meeting physically, in-person, in a brick and mortar classroom (or forest glen, rented-out office building, or whatever).
In other words, why don’t we turn the question around ever? Why should the “burden of proof” rest on the asynchronous virtual space? You ask “what are the pedagogical advantages of never sharing a physical space with students?” and I recognize that as a good question (and will propose some answers below), but I think there’s an equally good question, which almost never gets asked: “what are the pedagogical advantages of ever sharing a physical space with students”?
I think that the advantages of sharing physical space are almost always assumed based solely on familiarity (it’s the model most of us know best–the model most used over the past few centuries), rather than on any kind of comparative data or studies of effectiveness–or even on any basis of personal experience. Further, and more unfortunately, I think that there’s a very common privileging and romanticizing of sharing physical space with students.
Why is such sharing of physical space better? How do we know (not just assume) that it’s more effective, or effective at all?
Those are questions that need to be asked–and framing the argument in terms of those reversed questions—leveling the grounds of debate and imposing an equal burden or proof–is an essential and almost universally neglected path.
But I’ll leave that re-framing aside for now–in order to answer the question from the other side: What are the pedagogical advantages of online fully asynchronous (vs. fully synchronous, in-person, or blended) teaching?
Like Phil, I’m going to address this mainly from my own experience–rather than with quantitative data or rigorously-conducted studies (although there are literally hundreds of those, ranging back over the past decade or more. The Sloan Consortium’s publications, as well as the resources on the no significant difference website http://www.nosignificantdifference.org/ provide a good, if incomplete, starting place).
The fully-asynchronous course (I’m going to abbreviate that as fa, to save typing time), can, I asserted, actually be pedagogically superior to either a fully-synchronous or a blended course. For example.
In the fa course, the interaction among students (not student-professor or professor-student, but student-student) is frequently much greater than it can ever be in a synchronous classroom. Students report this almost universally, and I see it again and again. Students learn from each other, and learn from teaching each other, in the fa environment far more easily and frequently.
There are various reasons for this, and they are all connected to the other advantages of fa learning. First of all, fa classes change the perception and experience of time–because the course is asynchronous, students don’t have to feel rushed to give the “right” answer–and needn’t compete to give that answer. There is time to think and consider, and to compose an answer–and to do research and reading and bring in multimedia resources in support of an answer. None of that is possible in a 50-minute, or even a 500-minute, face-to-face session in the same way.
Also (and this may be the most important advantage), the fa environment gives students a chance to construct an identity based on their knowledge and thinking–and their communication of ideas–without any barriers or prejudices which might arise (and often do) in the face-to-face classroom. The disabled student, the shy student, the student with a thick accent, the physically attractive student, the heavily tattooed, the pierced, the modestly-dressed, the hijab-clad, the stutterer–all of these students in every physical class, are judged and defined (sometimes positively, sometimes negatively) by elements of their identity which may have nothing to do with their intellect or mastery of the course skills or content. In the fa class, that’s not nearly as much of a problem.
The playing field can be leveled in an fa course–and that level playing field allows students to explore the material and their own ideas more broadly and deeply.
Also (and Phil mentioned this briefly), the fa environment promotes a student-centered pedagogy to a degree which is very difficult to achieve in a face-to-face class. The well-known dichotomy between the “sage on the stage” and the “guide by the side” is something that all teachers need to keep in mind. In my own experience, both as a student and a teacher, the sage on the stage is the least effective method of producing real learning–because it casts students as passive receivers, rather than as active learners. In the fa course, it’s still possible to be a sage on the stage–but it’s much more difficult. Where the f2f classroom often promotes the scenario of a performing professor, exercising his own ego (and I realize this is an extreme description), the fa classroom makes that kind of scenario much less common–because a well-constructed fa course is built almost entirely on interaction (with the emphasis on action) with and among the students.
I should add a few caveats or qualifications, though, I realize (even though this comment is getting plenty long already!). First of all, there’s a danger of comparing apples to oranges. It’s very common to compare the best f2f course to the worst fa courses. That’s not accurate or fair–and the same goes when it’s vice versa. There are plenty of terrible fa classes out there (none in the CUNY Online Bac, of course!), and we all know (to our chagrin) how many terrible f2f classes there are in any school.
Also, I want to make clear that I don’t see fa courses as any kind of panacea or perfect medium–they’re not right for every professor, or for every course, just as they’re not right for every student.
And I do realize that some of the pedagogical benefits which accrue to fa courses are also present for blended courses…but I don’t agree that it’s automatically true that a blended course is the best of both worlds. It can also be true that blending the two media can produce the worst of both worlds–a scenario in which the f2f meetings erase or diminish the advantages of the asynchronous element, and the asynchronous element serves to detract from the f2f meetings. I’ve seen that happen far too often, unfortunately.
Finally, I want to return for a minute to Phil’s point about access–and about students’ time and convenience, and to suggest that this feature of fa instruction is really not unrelated to pedagogical goals. It’s really not a separate (or separable thing). After all, having time to think, having time to consider and discuss and learn, really is a pedagogical goal. For those mothers of newborns, or disabled people, or people with no time to come to class, or people traveling for jobs or military obligations, the access itself is part of the learning process–and allowing them that access is part of the job of the teacher–and the institution.
This is great stuff, and a welcome addition to what we’re trying to do here at Cac.ophony.org. Clearly, the online BA is a hothouse for work on these questions at CUNY, and I think we can all benefit if those actively engaged in the project can lead an open discussion of what they’ve learned and what they’ve learned they need to learn.
There’s a lot to respond to in Joe’s post. First, I’d like to say I welcome Joe’s reversal of the question—what, in fact, is “better” about f2f learning does need to be examined. However, the burden of proof lay on new teaching methods precisely for the reasons that you note: tradition and history. F2f is the standard upon which our educational system is based; it’s ingrained and what we’ve inherited. Why do we need to define what’s good about distance learning (or, more speaking to my experience, the integration of technology into the classroom)? Because we want more people to invest intellectual energy in it, and a lot of talented teachers need convincing. That’s why we’ve been in frustrating meetings with faculty and administrators making the case, and why we keep coming back to those meetings… it’s an argument worth making.
At the same time, the question, either way we pitch it—what are the pedagogical advantages of one medium or the other–is a bit of a red herring. The real question here is: what is good teaching? Well, the answer is a lot like Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” For each of the reasons Joe argues the fa course can be pedagogically superior to the “live” course, there are contrary arguments to be made.
Some courses won’t benefit from students learning mostly from each other, and while a faculty member can get carried away as the “sage on the stage,” why can’t he or she be the “sage by the side”? All of this is to say that some courses, or, more accurately, some moments in some courses, require a more intense focus on the teacher. Other moments benefit from the student-centered Socratic process. In my opinion and experience, the best courses contain both moments.
These moments are, of course, attainable in a fa course, but spontaneity can propel learning in a class, and some of that can be lost when students have too much time to reflect. We’ve all been in classes that have gone in exciting directions that we didn’t anticipate when laying out our syllabus, and those moments are terrific. This, of course, also can happen in a fa class, but (since I’ve never taught one) I have to guess that it’s less-likely. Of course, the flip-side benefit is that students have time to think more deeply before they communicate… but, good f2f courses allow for that in one way or another, too.
The notion that fa flattens the playing field is very interesting, and I embrace particularly the notion that they allow or even force reticent students to express themselves. There are courses, however, where such a flat playing field works against the notion of the classroom as an experiment. As one example, students in an intro Sociology class can look around the room and see, real time, the processes under consideration. There are also those who would argue that the virtual anonymity created by a fa degree under-serves students by not forcing them to interact more immediately with students from a wide array of backgrounds and with a wide array of attributes. Whether it should be or not, socialization is a significant element of higher education, even at commuter schools likes CUNY, and one would think that some of this is lost in the fa experience. A lot of folks learn from the clash of personalities and types that happens in the college classroom, from having first-impressions challenged and identities de-centered. While fa courses still require the investment of personality, they are computer-mediated personalities. Students can hide their “defects”—this can be good and bad.
Joe and Phil make fantastic points about access and teaching goals, which leads me to suggest what might be another pedagogical benefit of the fa degree: it would seem to attract more serious students, and potentially minimizes the disruption caused by those students who don’t know why they’re in college at all. One faculty member in the online BA told me that he feels no need to seek engagement from students who aren’t invested, and that he welcomes this. As Phil noted, most of the online BA students are finishers; most are likely older than the traditional college student; and most likely haven’t enough time to screw around. There are certain pedagogical benefits that accrue from this scenario, and I wonder if that fact has influenced some of the positive experiences those teaching fa courses have.
Joe, I think, acknowledges most of what I’ve written when he notes that fa education is not a panacea, and is not right for all courses, all faculty, or all students. How, then, do we assess what kinds of classes this is right for, and what kind of teaching works best in fa courses? Or in blended courses? The Online BA makes “Communication and Culture” its course of study, brilliantly employing the medium as material for consideration. If I have more specific questions for Phil and Joe—and since they seem to be watching and have a lot to add, I’m willing to ask as long as they’re willing to answer—they are related to questions of assessment.
How do you both assess pedagogical tools, and pedagogical results? The first question is related to the Online BA’s use of Blackboard, which we’ve discussed often here and here (although never as a tool in an fa course). What are the benefits of this system for your teaching in fa courses? What are the limitations? What BB tools to do you use? Have you considered alternatives?
The second question is about results. How do you measure them? How does the BA assess learning, and how does it assess teaching? What challenges have faculty new to this faced in overcoming their own inexperience with the medium, and how as it changed the ways that they teach?
Lastly… where can we see some of this stuff? Is it all on Blackboard, or are some faculty using a more open CMS?
There’s a lot to respond to here from you, too, Luke–and I’m glad to have the conversation (maybe we’ll meet and continue at the Schwartz symposium this year!).
Let me just reply to a few of the points, one by one…with the assumption that this discussion really does need to continue. (And what would be the place for that, I wonder? The CUNY IT Conference is much more about presentations than conversations. Should we put up a dedicated CUNY-wide discussion board of some kind? have another conference?)
I see your point here–there is an obligation on the “new” to convince the “older,” because the new will automatically be viewed with some suspicion, at least, even by the most open-minded. But I think there’s another side to this, too. The fact is that the “new” is really the “now.” What I mean is that this is the world in which our students (and we) live, and it’s the kind of educational revolution that (I think) is going to be irresistibile. So it could well be that that resistance from tradition and what’s ingrained is really not going to be an issue. This may well be a case where higher education is going to have to get on board or get out of the way or get left behind. We’re looking, very soon, at a world where our traditions are going to be irrelevant, even useless. As that change happens, reluctant (or recalcitrant) faculty and administrators are going to be left without a choice–and possibly without a job, without a role, as students can pick and choose where and how they want to get their educations.
So I sometimes feel like it’s not worth expending very much energy on convincing the people who need a whole lot of convincing. That might sound harsh or elitist, but the fact is that there is enough exciting, innovative work to be done, enough ground-breaking to be done for the students and with the faculty who need it the most.
Actually, it turns out that it can be more likely–in a well-designed fa course, much more likely. I published some SoTL work on this subject a couple of years ago http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=30 (You have to register to read the articles at Innovate, I think, but it’s free–and there are plenty of articles worth reading), and there’s plenty more to be said on that subject. Digression, surprise and serendipity are actually enabled by fa discussion, not discouraged.
I hate to say it, but it seems again like there are too many unquestioned assumptions here–why assume that the socialization in a fa class is inferior to in a f2f class? It’s different, yes, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Again–computer-mediated personalities are different (in eliminating the physical, and changing the nature of time, as I described in my earlier comment), but they’re not necessarily inferior, less-nuanced, less-complex, or less important to master.
Actually, all of the Online Bac students are finishers–that’s a requirement for admission to the program. But my own experience with fa classes–like most of our faculty–predates the Online Bac by years (since the Online Bac is not even finished with its very first semester, this would have to be the case!). The positive experiences I’ve had, and that I’ve seen, have overwhelmingly been with faculty at BMCC–dealing with (some subset of) the regular range of community college students…with their varying levels of motivation, educational experience, and academic skills–as well as time commitments and extra-curricular obligations. I also have close contact with people working in the SUNY Online system–where thousands and thousands of students have been taking hundreds and hundreds of fa courses for years.
Yes–and I don’t want to ignore that qualification here, either. I’ve not responded to all of your objections (questions, really, I know–not necessarily objections), and that’s partly because I think they’re worth leaving open–since they’re so important as questions, and since in many cases they can’t be answered simply or easily.
Blackboard was chosen by the university (by the IT Steering Committee) for the university as a whole, and thus for this program. It’s not the ideal choice, but it’s not the worst, either. My friend Michael Feldstein http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/category_posts/C20/ has much better visions of the ideal LMS (he argues for a Learning Management Operating System–an LMOS), but to a certain extent Blackboard is what we’re stuck with. However, I think it’s possible to see Bboard as an enabling constraint. There are some distinct advantages to having a unified system–it makes much of the navigation and organization transparent to faculty and students, it eases the learning curve, and so on. But the choice of LMS is really a different (and worthy) subject.
Assessment questions are always thorny–for f2f or fa. The CUNY Online Bac is working hard on assessment issues–protocols for “classroom” observations, student evaluations of faculty, assessment of student learning. In fact, we’re probably working on these issues just as much, and with just as much success (or lack thereof) as any other CUNY program. We’re quite literally just starting–but these questions are right at the center of what we’re starting with. Again, remember that we haven’t even finished one semester yet. The program is being studied, researched, and assessed more than any new program I’ve ever seen–especially because we’re all aware that there are challenges, and challengers, that are brand new.
Myself, I always lean more toward assessments that are experiential and qualitative–towards Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. And one of the lesser-recognized features of fa classes is how well they facilitate this kind of research. Because all the class interactions are captured and saved in writing, it’s possible to examine, analyze, code and classify–to see the process of teaching and learning as a process, without some of the retrospective blunt instruments we sometimes have to use.
Ah. This is a problem. Bboard is the CMS. It’s not our choice, as I said. And I think that even in a more open CMS, it would still be somewhat closed–just like a regular classroom is somewhat closed, except by invitation–under strictly defined circumstances. You can’t see what’s happening in my f2f class, generally speaking. The same goes for these courses, for now, at least. There is student privacy to be protected, and academic freedom, etc., etc.
But I don’t think that that paradigm is likely to last very long. With Stanford and UC Berkeley posting almost all their lectures on iTunes, and MIT posting all their course materials for all to see, the “closed classroom door” may not be a permanent feature of higher ed.
Very interesting questions all together–and there’s plenty more to be said on all of them.
The space of the blog comment thread is not really the best, though, for asynchronous discussion (it’s probably worse than Blackboard!).
Hope I’ve formatted this mostly correctly.
This is a great discussion.
I just have two points to add.
There are in fact spaces online to discuss uses of BB and online teaching, but they often have restricted access. I was part of a such a project last year. Sloan Fundation and CUNY set up a bunch of Blackboard sites, where (invited)members of similar disciplines shared best practices, discussed problems of both pedagogy and technology.
Secondly, BlackBoard is set up in such a way as to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act and allow for equal ( or equalish…) access for students with various disabilities.
http://library.blackboard.com/docs/LearningServices/Other/BbAccessibleContent_Tipsheet.pdf
Here is an exampke of some BB problems and solutions:
http://hightech.redwoods.edu/accessibility/blackboard.htm
Face to face classroom instruction can also be shaped to facilitate full access, through the use of notetakers, sign language translators, etc. But I am just not sure how friendly blogs are to students with diabilities, even as the idea of “universal design” for online projects is becoming more popular.
Joe:
In the spirit of how this exchange started, and since I don’t think you’d let me get away with it… you can’t possibly mean this:
Certainly, there is much to hold on to from traditional pedagogies, and much in them to use in our teaching, no matter the medium. While I agree that we’re in the midst of a sea change in regards to how we communicate, teach, and learn, let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. I doubt you meant to imply that, anyway. I hope to kick-start a conversation about this around this post, which was also in response to the conference.
In a related clarification to a point I made re: the impact of distance learning on processes of socialization… I was referring more to fa degrees than to fa courses. This was clearer, I suppose, in the first block you pulled, but not the second. Jimmy did a much better job of laying out what can be lost than I did, and pushed it a step by wondering which online tools could help fulfill the “traditional” communal function of higher education that’s lost in fa degrees (and also often at commuter schools like ours).
Me? Well, I’d still enjoy a sociable hack in the quad, or even on BB Way, more than anything I could possibly do in front of the computer (including the other “hack”).
OK, I might have indulged in a little bit of hyperbole there. But maybe not so much. I’m not saying that we should throw the baby out with the bathwater….but I think it’s possible that the water is draining out of the tub on its own, and we’re going to have to dry the baby off and get him dressed up. (Pushing this metaphor way too far!).
There are certainly parts of our tradition (the 200-student lecture, for example), which we’ve already been questioning for a long time, and which may not be worth saving at all. Another part of the tradition–the four years of residential study, immediately after high school, on a campus with buildings and parties and beer, and so forth, is probably already pretty much irrelevant–in the sense that it only represents a tiny minority of the higher education experience. That model was always nice, for those who could experience it, but it’s never been a large-scale model, and it’s shrinking rapidly.
Students increasingly are choosing, or needing to choose, a very different kind of education in a flat world. We need to get on board with that, rather than futilely claiming that it can’t be as good. And, too, we should not assume that the kinds of positive experiences gained through the traditional model can only be gained in that one particular way (and that’s an interesting direction that Jim–and you–are pointing to).
I think you’re right, though, that socialization and socializing need to be incorporated into the model of any successful fa degree. Where the mistake lies, I guess, is in assuming that they aren’t, or even worse, that they can’t be.
DE or online instruction is in its infancy relative to the other modes of instruction. Even with the other modes there is far too little understood about teaching and learning and even less effective action based on what little is known. So for now we know that anecdotally DE works well for some people. In large numbers it appears that it as good as other modes of instruction or no significant difference. So what!! What every professional educator should care about is what works best and not in general but for each particular human being who asks another for instruction particularly form those who claim to be “educators”. I know several modes of instruction that work for some people at some times and do not work for some people at some times. Every mode of instruction I know of and have ever used fits that description: sometimes it works and sometimes it does not work. DE is no exception to this. What I care about is getting what I know about to work for the people who ask me for instruction. The systems in which I offer instruction, DE, ftf or hybrid or blended, do not permit me to offer the most effective mode of instruction for each learner. In most educational institutions (K-20) it is “one size fits all” with regard to instructional modalities and that is ridiculous for most services to be offered to human beings- education is no exception to that. Most of my students who fail or withdraw from instruction are due to a misfit of modalities of instruction to learning styles and needs. The institutions in which I teach are driven by support structures for funding that make it extremely difficult to cater to individual needs and screen out those not fit for the forms of instruction being offered. In most cases they do not provide an appropriate variety of instructional modalities that can be matched to the learning styles and needs of those who seek instruction. I have students in ftf classes that should not be there and students in online classes that should not be there. In most instances there are no alternatives being made available or being matched to the learners.
Science fiction is, in the view of many, a tale of extrapolated possibilities. Here is my science fiction. Science: Educational Psychology Applied Science: Pedagogy
At some point soon, I hope, those engaged in education will realize that it is a profession and that those in it have a fiduciary responsibility to those they serve to cause benefit and avoid harm. Following from this will come a deep professional concern for understanding those who are to be served. That understanding will reveal that there are a variety of learning styles and that each learner has strengths and weaknesses or special needs. Each learner!
From the earliest point of formal education, by parents as well as by professionals, there will be devised an individualized educational plan for each learner. These will be revisited at regular intervals and revised as evidence presents itself for the need to make adjustments. Along the path of lifelong learning there will come times due to circumstances of family, work, illness, special needs, subject matter specific circumstances, etc.. where for some learners a form of education at a distance will be in order. It may come as part of a formal program with face to face classroom contacts or it may come as part of a program that is entirely online, no matter.
The DE mode of instruction is an instructional modality will be utilized along with others by learners as they have need of it and as it is indicated as suitable for them at the time and place where they are and given their needs and degree of preparation for it.
DE will be seen as just one of several modes that are effective according to the alignment of learner to modality. These alignments will vary throughout the life of the learner. Not every mode of learning is effective for every learner and not every form of learning is effective throughout the lifetime of the learner. Professional educators sensitive to these empirical findings and responsible to their learners will offer whatever works best for the learner at that point in the learner’s life. Such professionals will restructure educational institutions to operate in this manner.
DE will be judged to be not only the equal of other modes of instruction for some learners at some times given circumstances and subject matter but at times will be judged to be the more effective mode of instruction for some learners at some times.
“socialization and socializing need to be incorporated into the model of any successful fa degree.”-Joe
Well I agree and I do not think that those delivering online instruction realize this, not even those in the CUNY BA Program. “ So much to do and so little time to do it.” Soon such features should be constructed for the community being served by the program. I think of it as a pedagogic imperative.
Chat rooms, club rooms, student government, hallway meetings, hallway bulletin boards, late night “bull sessions” in the dorms, and all in the VIRTUAL SPACE.
DE may be accepted as an effective mode of education but it will not and should not be be accepted as the equivalent of a face to face brick and mortar institution unless and until it provides for those forms of education that occur outside of the classroom- most learning occurs outside of the classroom. There is a great deal that people learn (K-20) outside of the classroom from their peers- extra curricular studies and learning. There are times and cases when such learning is fully the equal in importance to classroom based learning.
I build student cafes and bulletin boards into all of my class sites and attempt to facilitate the auxiliary forms of learning that are an important and even essential component in the educational process