Online Education: A Review

Online education was reviewed three years ago, preceded by Oscar Wilde’s quote: “The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at least, education has no effect whatsoever.” My intention was to amuse rather than disparage online education, although the conclusions drawn in the literature about its success at the time were mixed. This special edition contains a number of articles mainly by people working in different parts of the world; Content and technique are well balanced.

You will find that there is a noticeable trend to engage with the difficult but essential issue of valuation discussed by Merisotis and Phipps. James Merisotis and Ronald Phipps are senior fellows at the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington.

There appear to be roughly equal numbers of enthusiasts and skeptics, so Merisotis’ and Phipps’ conclusions are not surprising. In their review, they found “several hundred articles, papers, and dissertations” and list what they believe are the shortcomings of research on the subject. They believe that “more emphasis has been placed on the utopian possibilities of technology and its potential to be just as good as classroom instruction, but not enough pragmatism has been applied to allow a discussion of the practical implications of online education to complement it.” to improve teaching and learning”. They also believe that technology “can benefit faculty time, but cannot replace most human contacts without significant losses in quality”.

Gordon Joyes and Rachel Scott of the Center for Teaching Enhancement at the University of Nottingham write about the inadequacies of teachers. You comment on a European project with ten universities called SteelCAL. New learning technologies are not effectively embedded in the daily practice of learning and teaching in most higher education institutions … the main reason for this is that many academics have no training and little experience in the use of communication and information technology as a pedagogical tool”. that Joyes and Scott mention under “Full Evaluation” that they “compare the effectiveness of SteelCAL in an experimental group of students with a matched control group taught in the traditional way.” It will be interesting to hear exactly how they do it As they say, this exercise is “difficult to organize”.

dr Martin Oliver, member of the Higher Education Research and Development Unit at University College, London, describes the difficulties in evaluating online teaching and learning. Regarding the importance of evaluation, he says: “The drive for evaluation has not been complemented by support and training for the practitioners who are supposed to carry out these processes”. He concludes that the questions raised in his article “represent only the starting point for an ongoing discourse on the evaluation of online learning and teaching”.

Anthony Rosie’s article discusses his experience of “meaningful engagement and enjoyment of learning” along the lines of ideas developed by Biggs, which proposes that “relationships engage students in the development of systems of connection between concepts and approaches to learning, with instruction related to this.” connection contributes”. .

Bernard Scott from the Center of Educational Technology at De Montfort University will talk about the CASTE system for course design and the question of system-student ‘conversations’. Associated with Gordon Pask, who died in 1996, Scott was considered the founding father of cybernetics. The Web of Science shows that Pask’s 1976 book on conversation theory has been cited 66 times since its publication. CASTE is used at De Montford as part of a masters level program of learning and teaching.

Diana Thompson and Garry Homer are based at the University of Wolverhampton, which is also active at other campuses in Shropshire, notably the new town of Telford. Wolverhampton and Telford are two of the few large towns in one of England’s most rural counties, with a widely dispersed population mostly engaged in agriculture. The authors describe the way in which IT training is carried out at all levels for the people of the county.

Mr MJ Wood is the enterprising Headmaster of a Maidstone Secondary School which recently won an award for its website. He has no illusions about what needs to be done “on a scale from 1 to 20 to measure the potential use of IT in teaching and learning. I wouldn’t dare to go for point 1”. He comments on the climate of opinion at home: “When parents notice that there is a shortage of textbooks in a school, they are quick to complain, but they still see access to computers as a luxury. One of our teachers recently found out that 24 students in a class of 25 have internet access at home. I suspect that one Christmas in the near future our students’ stockings will be stuffed with cheap handheld devices that provide Internet access, among other things. .

Thanks to Mathew Simond | #Online #Education