As always, if any member feels stirred by the snippets on controversial issues offered here, please feel free to use Your Say to make a comment, or kickstart a discussion on WAOE-Views. Web Editor
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As always, if any member feels stirred by the snippets on controversial issues offered here, please feel free to use Your Say to make a comment, or kickstart a discussion on WAOE-Views. Web Editor |
Scepticism about the value of an online degree
The following piece comes from Headlines Extra, a free online news service
provided by the Benton
Foundation. The services is intended to keep users
you up-to-date on important industry developments, policy issues, and other
pertinent communications-related news events. This service is
available online at www.benton.org/News/Extra.
The item is worth setting alongside the piece about buying a degree
included in the previous issue of WEB (in the section, From the Web
Editor), which excited some discussion on WAOE-Views.
DISTANCE LEARNING NO BARGAIN?Headlines Extra sourced the item from the online journal, Wired. It's worth reading the whole article, and following up some of the links, at http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,21595,00.html. Take up any issue that arises for you with a message to Your Say or WAOE-Views.
Issue: Distance Learning
University professors, who acknowledge that they may one day have to teach distance learning courses, remain skeptical about the value of a virtual degree. On many college and university campuses, professors are protesting school investments in distance learning courses by signing petitions questioning how distance learning will effect undergraduate students.Universities are beginning "to move away from brick-and-mortar education and toward money-saving strategies like digital education," said James Gregory, one of the professors who signed onto the petition. The biggest criticism of online learning is that it ignores the social dimension of learning. "It eliminates human contact, including contact with professors and other students. The peer community is the most important aspect of learning," said Gregory.
Mary Burgan, general secretary of the American Association University Professors said, "We are mainly concerned about the students." The concept of virtual degrees is motivated by "certification, rather than education," she said.
While most distance learning is currently aimed at working adults, some academics worried about the inferior education they may be receiving. Carole Fungaroli, an English professor at Georgetown University, said, "What online learners will get is an asterisked degree, which is different from the on-campus degree. Universities will set up a separate but equal campus for single mothers and working adults, while they still have 'A' degrees for their stars."
Long-distance learning advocates "confuse information delivery with education. Information delivery is reading an encyclopedia, and that's not learning," Gregory says.
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Interactivity - a key difference between online and f2f learning?
I'm not 100% sure, but I think this piece also appeared in a September issue of the Benton Foundation newsletter. Its main focus is on advances in hardware and software to increase the (sense of) connectedness between deliverers and clients of distance learning programs, but it touches on a central problem for online education which is not merely technological nor even just methodological in character, but rather more fundamental. Web Editor
THE INTERACTIVE DIFFERENCE
Perhaps the single biggest differentiator in online learning programs is the level of interactivity they offer."One of the biggest issues facing companies wading into online learning is the degree of interactivity they're willing to settle on," writes Tom Barron, editor of Technical Training. "Just what constitutes 'interactivity' is by no means clear. To some people, it means enabling learners and instructors to share ideas in a virtual chat room; to others, merely posting questions on a bulletin board qualifies as interactivity."
As the cost of technology decreases, many companies are finding ways to bring the benefits of the classroom into a distance-learning setting. At Aetna U.S. Healthcare, two-way audio capability means that no more than 15 minutes ever elapses without interaction between the student and the instructor. Achieving an acceptable level of interactivity has been worth the trouble for Aetna, which estimates that the new online training system has saved the company $3 million in 18 months.
[Source:Training & Development, Sept 99 http://www.astd.org)
The issues and other matters raised in this section of WEB are intended to derive from membersā concerns and suggestions.
Input to WAOE-Views during the recent Annual General Meeting showed us that members are looking for opportunities to engage with important issues and ideas affecting the Web-based delivery of teaching and learning, but also that we need to do more to spell out to our members details of the organisational procedures through which they will get to know more frequently and reliably what goals the Association is pursuing, what action is being taken to realise these goals, and - most importantly - how members may make the most effective contributions to WAOE.
As a result, a new column, WAOE Policies and Procedures, has been split off from WEB Ideas and Issues. This will free the WEB Ideas and Issues column to be taken up more and more by topics of interest arising from the thinking of the members at large about their own professional practice in online education, and the role that WAOE as a whole and the sub-groups in which members are most actively engaged might play in lifting the standards and quality of Web-based teaching and learning.
If you have a concern to express, an idea to suggest, a question to raise, a point to make about online education in general and about WAOE's work in relation to online education in particular, write a short item for the WEB Ideas and Issues column and send it to the WEB Editor. On a smaller, less formal scale, you might prefer to air your views first of all in the Your Say section of WEB. Depending on the nature and volume of early responses to the Your Say item, matters raised may spark an article in the Web Ideas and Issues section of WEB, a free-ranging discussion on WAOE-Views, or a structured debate or online chat via the WAOE WebBoard.