Hearkening back to my post on "Sexy Research," I attended a presentation today, not because I was particularly interested in the topic, but because it was such a cleverly-written abstract. Now, for the life of me, I can’t find the session’s abstract in either the online or the printed schedule. I must be blind. If you know what session I am talking about, please tell me in the comments. It was a catchy abstract about how the great debate is on over F2F and online learning and that the audience would determine the winners.
I say I wasn’t interested in this topic, even though I study online learning and have published on this topic a couple of times. I am interested in online learning, but I am NOT interested in simple debates on the benefits of the two mediums. These kinds of talks seem to lose the importance of other contextual variables related to the quality of the teacher and the students. Medium is not the only factor. But attend I did because the abstract was snappy.
I was disappointed, as I felt I would be. The first presenter argued for F2F learning, reporting on examples when teachers tried to do a class online and it "failed miserably." The obvious question is, "why did they fail–can you prove it was because it was online?" Knowing nothing of the context here–which is the problem–I would guess that the teachers had never taught online, and rather than teach in a way that is different and reflects the positive aspects of distance education (DE), they probably just threw their same powerpoints and materials online and tried to use their same teaching methods in this entirely different context. THAT will never work. But the failure is not in the medium, it is in the pedagogy, as well as the probable problem of the teacher being someone struggling with a new technology. You can’t evaluate the success of someone’s first venture into online learning after the first year of any significant pedagogical change..
Whe second presenter argued for DE, and discussed, rightfully so, that whether we like it or not, we NEED DE or we’ll be ignoring many large groups of potential learners. That is true. We normally think of nontraditional students, but he also discussed the rapidly-growing prison population. This is a good point I had not considered, as probably one of the biggest keys to helping prisoners reform and change is through education–and they don’t have the luxury of attending the university course in person.
My biggest complaint with the second presenter was his criticism of blended learning, using an awful metaphor of pieces of old ships (I think that’s what they are) being dropped onto new ships, causing massive malfuncture. Well, that’s simply not true about the blending of online and F2F, which DOES work and work very well. I have found in my teaching that by blending the mediums, you can help students make social connections F2F, which then aids them as they work together in the more productive atmosphere of DE.
This was the position of the third presenter, who argued for blended learning. Obviously, that’s my point of view too! This was also the overwhelming opinion of the audience, who responded through an informal raise of hands at the end of the presentation.
Tags: AECT2007, online learning, distance education, blended learning
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