What is the Future of Online Learning Platforms for Education?

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The New York Times highlights the problems and limitations of online learning

On February 18th, The New York Times published an editorial titled "The Trouble with Online College". In it, the Times editorial board said that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which are non-credit classes with hundreds of thousands of students per class, are not very good models for online classes that are offered for standard college instruction.

The Times warns that "College administrators who dream of emulating this strategy for classes ... would be irresponsible not to consider two serious issues." The two issues they cite are: high student attrition rates among online learners, and lack of assistance for students who are not highly motivated and who lack strong learning skills.

The editorial notes that there is very little interaction between instructors and students in online courses, and that students who are already low-performers fall even further behind. This is based on a study done by Columbia University's Community College Research Center.

Additionally, a five-year study of Washington state students at community or technical colleges, the editorial said, indicated that many students who enroll in these schools lack basic academic and time-management skills. Online courses, the editorial argues, makes them sitting ducks for failure.

The Times editorial sensibly recommends that students first demonstrate competency in traditional classes before being allowed to enroll in online courses. The Times also sensibly recommended that hybrid courses, mixing online learning platforms with in-class instruction, produces outcomes that are comparable to traditional classroom instruction.

What are the problems, and the potential, of digital learning?

Letters to the editor, in response to the editorial, helped to present the other side of the picture.  

Duke University sophomore Aaron B. Krolick says that one of the benefits of online learning platforms is that they enable teachers to get immediate feedback on their teaching so that they can make adaptations as they go along.

I particularly like the way Krolick describes teaching -- including teaching that uses digital technology -- as being an "art" that is in the process of becoming. We have to give this art of teaching time to develop, and to learn from initial errors.

Steven Mintz, founding director of the University of Texas' Systems Institute for Transformational Learning notes that "A 2010 Department of Education review found that 'students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction," and asks how this could be. 

His answer is that lecture classes are less engaging for students than instructional methods that can be used with online learning platforms. Most face-to-face classes for undergraduates, he argues, are lecture-based; online courses, on the other hand, can engage more of the tactile and kinetic modes of learning.

Mintz lays out some of the strengths in digital instruction in order to engage students: "Online courses can enhance learning opportunities for nontraditional students and those not well served by lecture classes. High-quality, next-generation online courses incorporate personalized adaptive learning, problem-solving activities, interactive laboratories, animations, simulations, educational gaming, virtual reality environments, social networking and data analytics," he says.

Mitchell Stevens, associate professor of education at Stanford notes that face-to-face instruction is not always everything that it is cracked up to be in the first place. It is, he notes, "always of uneven quality". There is no guarantee that a student will receive good instruction just because that instruction is formatted face-to-face.

Similarly to Aaron Krolick, Stevens calls for giving the art of digital education more time to develop before we judge it.

As Stevens points out the fallacy of assuming that face-to-face instruction necessarily means higher quality instruction, Lawrence Lipsitz, editor of Educational Technology Magazine, notes that incidents of poorly designed digital instruction does not mean that digital instruction must, of necessity, be poorly designed. Moreover, any course that fails to engage its students may be poorly designed, whether the class is digital or it is face-to-face.

Lipsitz also notes that many faculty members are poorly trained and are not prepared for online instruction. 

From my own experiences, I found out how difficult it is for faculty members to get depth of assistance in finding creative and engaging ways to use online learning platforms. I have used these platforms at three universities and found it very difficult to get anything beyond the most superficial training to adapt the technology to the demands of the various disciplines I was teaching. This was so, despite the fact that two of these universities had fairly large and well-funded digital instruction centers. 

The digital instruction centers had been taught a narrow range of canned methods of instruction. They understood their job to be to pass on these "fool-proof" canned methods of instruction on to professors. Any attempt to think outside of the box was usually met with comments such as, "Nobody ever uses that function," or "nobody has ever asked that before." There was little experience I could draw on for guidance. I had to find my own way through many trials and many errors.

Lipsitz says that MOOCs are certainly not his idea of of well-designed courses, but my experiences have led me to the opposite conclusion -- it is through MOOCs that I am picking up the most useful and meaningful ways to engage students through digital instruction. In MOOCS, I am seeing the potential of digital instruction being modeled every day. 

I am learning a lot, not only by taking MOOCs, as a student, but also by reverse-engineering them, in order to find out how they work so that I can use this information effectively in my role as a faculty member.

But Harry Wyatt, emeritus teaching professor at SUNY, has another opinion on all of this. Wyatt calls distance learning and online education a "pipe dream" and says they are "O.K. for learning more about something we already know, but they are not much use in the beginning stages [of learning]." He goes on to say that "humans are not designed to get their basics from computers..."

Really? I would think that human beings can get their basics from a rock, if they curious and attentive enough -- that is, if they are patient, motivated and open to learning.

So, what are sensible uses for digital technology in the classroom?

Kathy Cassidy, writing in Primary Preoccupation, outlines the uses the abuses of technology in the classroom, has shared her principles for the sensible use of technology in the classroom. Although she writes from the standpoint of elementary education, the principles she outlines are just as relevant for higher education.

Cassidy makes the point that the idea of using online learning platforms in (and outside of) the classroom should not simply be to use technology for technology's sake (it should not be the sense that "now that we have all this neat stuff we have to use it"), rather it should be to bring content to the classroom that was previously inaccessible; to provide students with choices in their style of learning and their method of sharing what they have learned; it should be a means of connecting classrooms, and disciplines, so that we don't treat them as separate silos of learning; and it should enable students to showcase what they have learned with an audience that extends well beyond the classroom, through blogs, digital portfolios, videos, and other digital artifacts.

The New York Times editorial was focused on standard academic courses and traditional methods of instruction; for me, the point of using digital technology and online learning platforms is to push beyond traditional methods of instruction; it is to find new ways of teaching, and maybe even new ways of thinking about education.

Kathy Cassidy's main point comes down to this, "Technology should not just allow us to do traditional [instruction and learning] in a different way; it should allow us to do things that we thought were not possible [in the classroom]." In other words, technology should not just create digitized versions of older styles of instruction;  it should open up opportunities for whole new styles of instruction and learning.

#EDCMOOC

What is Creativity and Self-Expression in the Digital Age? #EDCMOOC

Image credit: Brain Pickings

Maria Popova reviews Kenneth Goldsmith's "Uncreative Writing" in her literary website Brain Pickings. I know, from my own teaching experiences, that the digital revolution has made plagiarism easier for students, and -- having grown up in the age of cutting and pasting, sampling and re-purposing -- many of my students don't seem to have ethical qualms about doing this.

The surprising thing is that there is even a debate about whether or not the standards and the ethics around plagiarism should change. At first glance, the idea of the legitimacy of plagiarism seems to be a huge concession to dishonesty and intellectual laziness. The argument that students don't know the difference between plagiarism and their own creative work seems almost condescending. The notion that the technology has changed our ethical and intellectual standards seems to yield too much to technological determinism.

But Goldsmith seems to be making the argument that one cannot avoid self-expression, even when appropriating someone else's words -- or images or sounds. He argues that one expresses oneself, even in how one selects and reassembles content that others have created. One cannot avoid self-expression when one is working with, and processing, text.

Digital postings are rife with mash-ups and sampling in newer and more creative ways, unintended and unanticipated by the original creators of content. Goldsmith argues that this has always been the case, even with the analogue technology the predated the digital age. But digitized content pushes this trend into hyper-drive.

Goldsmith's book suggests that the change we are seeing, facilitated by digital technology, is not a change in ethical standards so much as it is a change in how we understand the notion of "creativity" and whether or not "originality" is as rare, and as difficult to achieve, as we once thought it was. It raises the question as to whether or not, in the past, we have over-emphasized the notion of creating text from scratch as the only form of creativity and originality in the process of self-expression. It suggests that appropriation of content, re-purposed, is a legitimate form of self-expression, and that the very act of selecting content and re-working it, is unavoidably self-expressive.

Has our understanding of plagiarism changed in the digital culture? If it has, did digital technology make this change inevitable, or would this change have occurred even without digital technology? Here are several different views on audio sampling, which is a forerunner of current arguments about "plagiarism."

Digital Technology and Our Utopian / Dystopian Future: Democracy or Mob Mentality?

Image Credit:  STCroiss. Creative Commons 

I am currently taking a Coursera course on "E-learning and Digital Cultures". This course is taught by a team of teachers from the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland. One of the initial questions in the course is whether or not our outlook on information and communication technology is essentially Utopian or Dystopian.

The Utopian claims, according to M. Hand and B. Sandywell, in their book "E-topia as Cosmopolis or Citedal" (2002), are that digital and internet information technology inherently have a democratizing effect. The technology itself is neutral but its application is such that it democratizes the power of speech and access to information. Cyber-politics, under the Utopian vision, focuses on maximizing public access to digital technology hardware and software so that more people will be empowered.

Dystopian claims, according to Hand and Sandywell, are that the technology is inherently de-democratizing. Again, dystopians acknowledge that the technology, itself, is neutral but ownership of digital hardware and software, which determines access to dissemination of content, allows the technology to be controlled by anti-democratic forces. Cyber-politics, under this dystopian vision, focuses on resisting anti-democratic attempts to control and limit who gets heard and who has access to information.

Both Utopian and Dystopian views tend to be technologically deterministic to the extent that they argue that technology is destiny -- for better or for worse. The deterministic perspective minimizes the significance of human agency. They minimize the degree to which the online experience is created through the interaction between human beings and technology use. They under-emphasize the degree to which human beings create meaning and shape their own experiences through the use of this technology.

I don't subscribe to technological determinism, in any form, because I have seen people use technology in ways that were not anticipated by its creators, just as they have with other artifacts in the social environment. The entire premise of Hip Hop culture, for example, arose from sampling from all forms of popular culture and transforming the meaning of these signs in ways the signifiers had not originally intended. This is something that human beings tend to do with all forms of popular culture; they take what is given and they adapt it in ways that transform the original context and make it their own.

Anti-democratic forces are, no doubt, trying to use digital technology in ways that are dis-empowering, but the nature of the technology is such that it gives more people opportunities to document and share their thoughts, creations, and experiences, and to network with others they would never have had the opportunity to interact with in "real" space.

That is my Utopian side talking.

My Dystopian side is impressed (and not in a positive way) with how people are using this technology to lower the bar of social and political discourse. My Dystopian side points to the way people create their own "facts" to re-enforce what they already want to believe, and it points to how people post content on the internet that is incendiary, just because they can get away with posting it, without being held accountable for what they post.

Quotes, of questionable authenticity, are widely circulated on the internet and people use social networks to re-enforce each other's biases and to insult those who do not agree with them, rather than taking advantage of the opportunity to consider new perspectives on things. The illusion of anonymity on the internet often brings out the worst in people, "freeing" them to engage in hate speech on a level they would never even consider in a face-to-face encounter.

My Utopian side is glad that unpopular ideas have the chance to be expressed, weighed, and considered by a larger audience. This side of me is excited by the possibilities of having speech without self-censorship, or censorship that is externally imposed. My Utopian side is also thrilled with the idea that corporate media are less able to shape the consciousness of individuals who can now more easily curate the content they consume and decide for themselves what is important and what is not. Information is no longer so easily prioritized by a few publishers and media networks.

My Dystopian side is concerned about the potential for this technology to strengthen ignorance and the mob mentality of mindless movements, which are antithetical to the deliberative process. My Dystopian side is concerned that the internet is being used to feed the passions of people who are not interested in hearing all sides of an issue, but are only interested in looking for someone to fear or something to torch.

Digital technology can create the conditions for greater and more meaningful social interaction and engagement, but it can also encourage the tendency of people to isolate themselves and wallow unchallenged narratives that circulate among those who share their narrow exposure and biases.

I see both tendencies occurring. Part of this excites me, while the other part frightens me. It is not technology that will determine our destiny -- our destiny will be determined through our interaction with technology as it shapes us, even as we are finding new ways to apply it and give it meaning.