warrington’s blog

I found a most academic article about online learning. The focus was on higher education, but the issues it raised are relevant to elementary and high schools. The article is:

The Role of Technology in Quality Education

http://hcl.chass.ncsu.edu/sscore/garson2.htm

It was written by a guy, G. David Garson, from North Carolina State U. He doesn’t’ mention if he’s a prof, so I assume he’s a grad student. It’s not an opinion piece, more of a review of the relevant research out there on tech’s impact on the quality of education. It seems to have been written about ten years ago, since all of the (full page !) of academic references/sources are from the late 90’s. So it’s dated a bit, but is very well researched and presented.

He’s concerned about the “the recent, rapid, unregulated growth of distance education”,

and about the possibility that,

“diploma mills” are a danger. Even accredited programs from recognized institutions of higher learning may have been thrown together as experiments or simply in quick response to administrative fiat.”

and that,

“The American Federation of Teachers and other faculty organizations have also raised serious cautions about web-based education (Mingle and Gold, 1996) and have even gone on strike over it.”

He writes that in response to criticism, some higher ed institutions have come up with quite long lists of criteria for success, including,

“ *Accepted students have the background, knowledge, and technical skills needed to undertake the program.”

“* The institution evaluates the program’s educational effectiveness, including assessments of student learning outcomes, student retention, and student and faculty satisfaction. Students have access to such program evaluation data.”

It seems to me that high schools in the lower mainland could do well to heed some of these concerns.

BC secondary students can now:

-register for online courses at will (previously, permission was needed)

-re-take them as many times as necessary

-be taking online courses and regular courses concurrently

-be taking courses online without the school’s knowledge

-be taking online courses and will still want to access materials and help from teachers at their regular school, while that online course may well be hurting that school’s enrollment and staffing. In other words, teachers may be encouraging the very process that may be hurting their school.

My fear is that:

-students will sign up for distance ed, some will procrastinate and fail, school classrooms will face declining enrollment, junior teachers will lose their positions because of that decline, the students will not experience the success they hope for, and that the whole thing will not succeed as expected.

In fact, it seems that we’re going ahead somewhat willy-nilly with online learning, without having foreseen potential pitfalls. The woman who presented the new policies regarding distance ed for the VSB, when asked about the possibility of cheating on assignments (ie, How do you know who’s really turning in an essay or project when it’s done online?), her response was, “Well, cheating has always been with us”.

That was no answer at all.

I would like to see that the success rate of an open-door policy on online learning for high school students had been researched adequately (or how about ‘exhaustively’?), that we’d all have excellent reason to expect that it would succeed well,… before committing ourselves to it the way we have.

For example, in the UK, the Open Learning Institute did, in fact, study the effectiveness of online learning and they,

“concluded that three factors combine to maintain quality and integrity of Open Learning courses: (1) common, structured course materials; (2) open assessment using a competency-based methodology; and (3) an extensive support and monitoring network.”.

It doesn’t seem that we in BC are being as diligent and they were in the UK.

The article goes on to review the “Borkian Vision of the Future of Education”, where he speculates, among other things,

-Education will become highly interactive, engaging the student every 20 seconds or so for a response, much in contrast to present-day passive lecture methods.

-Education will become highly computer-mediated, replacing (not supplementing, which would be an added cost) the lecture method in courses for 15 or more students.

-Distance education will begin to displace campus-based education because the high costs of an interactive computer-mediated course can be justified only through their use by a large number of students than only distance education can provide.

Hmmmm, if he’s right, schools will be VERY different places in the near future, at least, as an experiement.

The article goes on to remind us that, “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it”, and he discusses the limited success of PLATO, an expensive experiment in ‘programmed learning of the 60’s and 70’s which had many of the same characteristics of Bork’s vision of future learning (ie, interactivity, individualization, and computer mediation)