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Welcome to Online Learning circa 2002

A few people sent me this link from NPR:

Online Courses Catch On in U.S. Colleges

It’s cool but at the same time there are at least 3 things about this story that make me feel like it was written in 2002. In other words, seismic shifts that are taking place elsewhere on the Web that aren’t touching the world of online education (at least as mentioned in the story).

Post what you think they are in the comments. Anyone who gets any of them will get a brand spanking new EduFire t-shirt when we get around to making them. :)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 10 Comments

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    The article says the professor has a microphone but doesn't mention a video camera. Seems like it's audio and text only. Pre-youtube. Pre-EduFire. Definitely 2002ish.

    She has to rely on a university to provide her the online teaching infrastructure and brand to reach the customers. She can't reach them directly.
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    Strange. I can't think of a single thing that's missing. I know what's happening online, but for some reason I can't connect it to education.
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    Jon
    Thanks for the glimpse at some real, live dinosaurs! It does seem like a news piece from 2002 to me too.
    NPR is making it sound like a newsworthy breakthrough:
    -- for student participation to be more immersive than doing seat time in classrooms. Just wait until online games and chat rooms get invented!
    -- for the quality of student comments to get better when they are written. Just wait for blogging to take hold and millions of bloggers finding their best voice by writing.
    -- for educators to be experiencing real time dialogue online. Just wait for text messaging, commenting on blogs, Twitter and social networking sites to come online

    I guess conventional education will go down in flames because the insiders are oblivious to the profound changes that have already occurred. Keep up the good work!
    tom
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    Does anyone have a WEBCAM and a microphone? Good. Plug them in. Text chat only for a class? That's 2002 for sure.
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    Clearly there is an engaged population of students that continue to pour into these online learning venues as Online Nation's numbers indicate. Should the online enrollments continue to double roughly every four years, universities will have a tsunami of off-site learners to accommodate. Online students are now becoming part of the offline lecture "class". Would it not be cool if embedded technologies that companies like ziizoo.com use right now to link students and tutors online, like video chat and whiteboards, to integrate the classroom experience more completely for those online? Thus the classroom becomes seamless and immediate, rather than bifurcated by location and requiring two distinct preparation phases and the extra time to deliver to students. Virtual hours could be held so students on campus can help students off campus and vice versa. Then, everyone starts learning from each other as technology allows the online student to participate more completely.
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    @Andrew: we have trouble connecting it to education because we've been "schooled," which is to say we've been had it pounded into our brains for 16 years or so that education is about the *system* rather than the topic.

    Why do these online courses have to delivered linearly? For that matter, why are the subjects arranged by *course*? If education is about letting your learning follow your passion, education should be open to that. There is no student so driven as the one who *cares* about what he's learning, and while we seem to want to teach curriculum in a line, kids (and adults) can figure out really quickly when they're over their heads, and they'll go like stink to catch up if the opportunity is there.

    We've all done this outside of a structured school environment: you don't understand a topic, so you do some research. You see where your weaknesses are, and you find the people and resources to help you fill those holes of understanding. The problem is that most of us spend 6 hours trolling the web to find the information that could have been provided in6 minutes with access to the right people, given the right environment.

    So back in a school context, a student who wants to know how to write a video game can attend one lecture (for free, auditing) in object oriented programming, then quickly realize they need lots of basics, and with some simple help from the prof, or even (and preferably) other students, they can find exactly which courses and profs they should be pursuing. The student, instead of the system, becomes the driver. This is how it should be, but it's hard to do when you need to schedule classroom space, justify teaching resources, and "cover" curriculum.

    Curriculum is not irrelevant, but bad implementation has quietly changed the purpose of education from creating citizens who are passionate about their world, to accounting for how well human widgets can mirror that curriculum back in a way that is objective, but entirely disconnected from its roots in the living world.

    The wild west of the internet can do better than reproduce a classroom in a time- or location-shifted way. It can entirely change the way we think about how knowledge is spread, and the value of someone who has the expertise, tact, and wisdom to light fires in the minds of others.
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    The one thing I can see is one I'm happy to leave as is: a central authority. Many memes and fads that are on the bleeding edge of internet communication are all about the distribution of labor and responsibility: social networking, wikis, etc. Personally, I do not think that kind of distributed knowledge is education; it is a conglomeration of personal research - often poor research.
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    Amazing responses all. I'm blown away by how passionate people are about this subject!

    Ranjit – Spot on. T-shirt coming your way one day. Video...what a novel concept? How many of the Top 100 Alexa sites are video-related (answer = lots?). How many online education-related websites have meaningfully incorporated video? Other than a handful of the YouTube clones out there (5Min, VideoJug, ExpertVillage) the answer is pretty close to zero (although I like what Sclipo is doing a lot).

    Tom – Hilarious. :) Yeah, I've heard of this thing called online gaming as well. It's pretty interesting. T-shirt your way as well. However, they do mention text chat so we can't give you two t-shirts. ;) In fact I think my favorite quote of the article is this one:

    “...an advantage with online stuff is that because people have to type, you have to think more about what you say before you say it. So you usually end up with a lot more intelligent conversation.”

    It says a lot about the state of traditional ed that people think one of the advantages of online learning is that it dumbs down the communication mechanisms. LOL.

    Alex – Yup. Webcam is definitely an answer. I think Ranjit kinda beat you to it but we'll hook you up with a t-shirt anyway.

    Mike – Exactly. Wouldn't it be great if someone decided to do that? ;)

    Josh – Awesome follow-up. My favorite in fact. :) However, I do disagree with one of your statements:

    “Curriculum is not irrelevant, but bad implementation has quietly changed the purpose of education from creating citizens who are passionate about their world, to accounting for how well human widgets can mirror that curriculum back in a way that is objective, but entirely disconnected from its roots in the living world.”

    I'm not sure that the way the education was developed that it was ever to create citizens who are “passionate.” From my studying it seems that education as we know it developed primarily to at least partially discourage people from being inquisitive and viewing the world as an inter-connected system. After all if the line workers start doing that it could definitely cause some disruption on the factory floor right? I think that's one of the biggest problems with edu as we currently know it. It developed during a time that is much different than what we currently live in. Totally agree with you on the need to re-imagine. :)

    Jason – Would love to hear more. While I agree central authority is good in some circumstances I feel that in most cases it actually doesn't produce an optimal result. Or even the most accurate. Wikipedia is a great case. Despite some inaccuracies, a number of studies have concluded that Wikipedia is at least as accurate or perhaps more accurate than Brittanica and other “authoritative” sources. And it's only going to get better as more people participate. So I'm not entirely convinced that central authority is best...

    OK, my offline time for the day is about to end so I gotta bounce. Looking forward to seeing more comments!
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    I whole-heartedly agree that a student should be free to decide what they study and when. "How" becomes a little hazier - interest in a subject will not necessarily indicate to the student the best way to learn it. That is where an authority figure or system comes in. We don't need taskmasters so much as we do guides. I can imagine teaching being divided into two parts. One would be the specialists, who could instruct students in a specific subject. The other would be the generalists - those with a broad range of limited knowledge, but with the expertise to direct the student to the best sources. The generalist role is something for which I have a talent - which is why I am studying to become a librarian. The specialists would have a slightly more rigid structure of instruction, at least in a formal educational environment. I am a strong proponent of freedom to learn, but I at least need a semi-rigid structure to my learning. I like to choose my destination, but after that I need a fairly detailed map. Not everyone is like that, though, and the system as it stands gives you not a map, but a set of rails and a bucket of coal.

    There is another important division, between those who wish to increase their knowledge in general, or for their own pleasure, and those who need formal recognition of expertise in a given subject. In many regards, I find myself in the first category. I love to learn new things for their own sake. But as a future employer, I need to have some objective guide as to the knowledge and expertise of the people I intend to hire. There must be some system of grading, recognition, and certification. It could certainly be improved, but there must be something. Anarchy is no kind of solution in education. But on the other hand, there need to be more resources available to those of us who want to learn more without necessarily pursuing a degree or career.
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    Jon: I don't think we disagree at all about modern education-- it is at least partially intended to create a submissive, passionless populace. To clarify, if we go back way before Andrew Carnegie et. al. got ahold of public learning policy, I think we'd agree that people took pure delight in sharing the wonders of the world with their families and communities. This informal, on-demand (I won't say "home schooled" just yet) education was called "raising a family," and I think history would show that people were much more engaged and passionate about their lives.

    So curriculum is just the "accounting" of the bits and pieces that make up the "what" of the education, which is in an of itself not an evil thing, and I have seen some excellent curriculum documents. The problem is that teachers (especially brand new teachers) misinterpret these documents to mean that they should be teaching the bits and pieces AS bits and pieces. It's bad implementation that kills curiosity. Instead, they should teach the wonder of the topic, how it's alive in the world, why it's being passed down; then the bits and pieces take care of themselves. This seems intuitive, but unfortunately, this "method" of teaching often looks pretty haphazard and unstructured, which is not how frosh teachers want to be seen by administrators when they are being evaluated on their probationary contracts!

    It's just another example of how a system built by accountants rejects anything that cannot be counted.
 

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