Online Education
Michael O'Hare's thoughts:
Online education: For my sins, I guess, I’m a member of the Berkeley faculty Committee on Courses of Instruction. Things are looking up for this gig, though, because there’s growing interest on campus and at the university level in online instruction, and the committee is starting to seriously deliberate... a lot of the action is going on in the wrong arena, looking for ways to cut costs “without reducing educational outcomes”, and this approach will assuredly wind up cutting costs and only reduce quality somewhat. But it’s almost certain that we could actually teach more, better, and cheaper with technology if we go at it wisely. How would we think about online education if we were focused on quality and value instead of penny-pinching? First, we would be looking at students... where value actually gets created... let’s talk more about learning and less about teaching.... In my vineyard, higher education, it has a few characteristic productive routines: A. reading textbooks, journal articles, and the like to accumulate declarative knowledge and maybe skills. B. practicing acquired skills.... C. being talked to, sometimes with exhibits on slides or a blackboard, in one-way, one-to-many lectures [did I mention professorial ego? If you haven't tried it, you have no idea what a rush it is.... D. conversing with peers about the course material. E. conversing with peers, in a facilitated discussion section.... F. creating original work like a term paper, a sculpture, or answers on an essay exam.... G. engaging with comments and critique of original work by the prof and/or GSI [see F]. H. being asked questions to which the prof knows a single right answer.... I. engaging with evaluation of exam and assignment work, in the form of a letter or number scalar summary..... J. providing feedback to management, in time to be useful for mid-course correction, about how the class is changing the student intellectually (and affecting her in all the other ways that matter).... K... formal presentations to peers, individually or as groups. This list is important because faculty attention to each of these has very different time fractions, salience, and intensity from students’ allocations, so thinking about how we teach is very different from thinking about how students experience what we put before them.
For most people, it appears that “putting a course online” is mainly providing C as online video, and eliminating E or turning it into a chat or email exchanges. But lots of the other elements are already “online”, even in conventional courses.... What technology allows, that seems to me incredibly valuable, is to allow A and C to run together into a medium like the one students are already adept at using, and you are using now because it pays off for you at this moment better than a book or the TV: a multimedia thing like a web site with videos, perhaps including some talking-head shots of the prof, text with copious links, interactive experiments like those at PhET, chat rooms, and the like. This thing allows student self-pacing, “rewinding” and repeating.... What’s at risk? Well, paper books have pace control and rewind, portability, and they are just really nice to use. I read them and I love them, but I’m not sure their deficiencies won’t doom them in competition with an iPad.... Most troubling to me is the fate of D (for distance-learning students not in the same zip code) and E [update: and K] (for all students). Learning is not just content, but also affect. We are hard-wired to talk face-to-face, and not only with words or even words in voices, but eyebrows and all the rest of it. And conversation in a group of four or fifteen is not the same as three or fourteen separate dyadic schmooses, not at all. I’ve been in a lot more than my share of on-line international meetings recently, on the phone and web-enabled with exhibits and chat, and have a little experience with videoconference teaching. On the one hand, those meetings would not have happened if they required physical travel; on the other, they are really lame....
The “question of online education” has been settled: learning in for-credit degree programs is mostly online now. Instead of asking whether we should do it, we should be asking how the on-lineness can pay off even better for students, and we need to think outside the absurdly cramped box of videotaping a bunch of standup lectures to sell to more customers than fit in a room.
