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.

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