I wrote an article that posits the opinion that online education is at a very important point in its developmental history. To make a long article short, online education is at the confluence of what it can do and what it needs to do.
What online education can do is it can successfully reach students at a distance in very powerful ways. This confirmation that significant learning does take place has perhaps finally gotten past the debate of no significant difference, that online learning is at least as effective as, if not better, than the face-to-face alternative.
However, what online learning needs to do is to be practical and effective given today's world, given today's marketplace and economy to be more precise. There is a press for increasing enrollments in higher education. This is an economic reality that all programs are facing. It would be wonderful if all online courses enrollments were capped at 16, or even 25 or 30, but I assert that reality will suggest that this might not be feasible - at least for all courses in an online program.
As instructional designers, what can we do? We can start by talking about instructional strategies in terms of thresholds. There are lots of different tools, approaches, applications and strategies that one can apply in online learning contexts and they all work well within certain parameters. It is my opinion that many of these will break down and become untenable as enrollment numbers increase. This breakdown will occur, not because the strategy or application is not a good idea or doesn't work, the breakdown will most likely occur administratively in that it will simply be too much work for the instructor. Hence, we need be begin speaking in terms of thresholds, i.e., with how many students will this work before it burns out the instructor.
We could solve this by simply 'canning' courses using lecture capture, provide automatically generated feedback to questions and fancy buttons for turning to the next page. However, if quality is what we are after then reducing interaction and time on task is not the way to maintain quality. We need new tools - tools that provide administrative efficiencies for online educators that do not exist yet. This means that instructional designers, developers and teachers need to talk - and most importantly they need to speak in terms of thresholds.
The term 'flipping the classroom' is something that I have heard a bit lately and have attended a couple of conference presentations where this was the focus. Now perhaps I am getting cynical in my old age but this term has troubled me right from the beginning.
It is my understanding that is at the heart of 'flipping the classroom' is to get teachers to think about how they are making use of a student's time, both in and out of the classroom. 'Flipping the classroom' often targets those teachers who spend a great deal of time in class lecturing. Instead of lecturing, teachers are encouraged to record this material so that students can review this material before they come to class. In this way, the teacher can use the time spent in class in new and perhaps more interactive ways.
What's wrong with this? Nothing. What's new here? In my mind, nothing. Thinking about how you use your and your students' time both inside and outside of class is something that all teachers should do. It is the heart of what teaching and learning is all about.
Over the years Penn State's involvement in the coalition has provided us with opportunities for moving thinking into action. Do we use our discussion and notes about integrative learning? Here is an example of where we are now:
"Integrative learners do not separate learning from life..."
The integrated learning experience presupposes purpose, involves reflection and personal connection, while at the same time implies an understanding of what the important attributes, values, understandings that are to be learned. From the beginning of our involvement NCEPR our goal at Penn State has been has been to find out whether a structured e-portfolio system, designed to communicate high expectations and intended learning outcomes could have an impact on student engagement and learning.
In other words, how do we share a 'big picture' of learning and then place our students within this picture such that this position serves as a scaffold for finding new understandings, promoting meaning making that leads to self-authorship, concepts that Kegan and Baxter-Magolda advocate. We know we need to invite prior experience to play an important part in shaping this experience but also realize that students bring messy pictures into this arena. The challenge lies in the gap between where students are and where our big picture implies they should be.
What is the developmental pattern for how students can be brought through this integrative process? A simple advanced organizer is not enough. How do we infuse structure while at the same time allow for a flexibility that cultivates students' becoming 'architects of their own education'?
We've moved through a variety of unsatisfactory solutions and frustration surrounding technology as 'a moving target' is getting old, but we are learning. Nonetheless, we are excited about our most recent deployment, MovableType4, to support Blogging as e-Portfolios. We don't think of this as a new service because of how nicely it integrates into the technology infrastructure already in place. Further, it has dramatically reduced any learning curve associated with online publishing, students are comfortable with its capabilities and convenience. But more importantly it allows us to 1) include templates that state program learning outcomes, 2) use tags to associate artifacts with these outcomes, 3) use tags to provide intellectual access to content previously not possible, and 4) aggregate and 'pack up' specific program outcome related evidence for assessment or evaluation purposes.
We are hopeful that this most recent exploration into the use of the MovableType blogging platform will help us in delivering the three curricula we have been talking about: the delivered (teachers' goals for students), the experienced (students' perceptions of the learning experience) and the lived (personalization of how this is experienced in life). The unobtrusiveness of this solution is perhaps it greatest feature because looking back at earlier solutions we've thought that perhaps the more we get out of the way, the better we'll serve our students.
As Kathleen Yancey noted at the Waterloo meetings, "Biggest take-way: be very intentional with communication."
