Is online education the solution to widening inequality, rapidly rising costs, and lack of access to high quality courses? Will it lead to the demise of traditional “brick and mortar” institutions? I was initially very skeptical about the claims being made about online education, but after teaching several of these course during the past academic year my own assessment has become much more positive....Digital is the future. It's just beginning and it is going to get amazingly better over time with experience and innovation.
I've been involved in distance education for some time and my conclusion is that the learning curve in the discipline is a lot like the transition from theater to cinema. First, in the days of silent. Stage actors were used large to reproduce what was already the standard in acting. That soon fell flat on its face as innovators realized that theater and cinema are different media that afford creative artists both different tools and different opportunities based on them.
The same thing happened predictably in the transition from silent to sound. The first films were theatrical productions and stage performances, which again soon fell flat in comparison with the innovations of cinematic artists who integrated speech, sound effects and music as tools to enhance creative opportunity and control.
Distance learning is still largely stuck in the classroom model and the initial attempts at using digital media rather than analog have not yet really broke out of this mold. The reason that cinema was able to make the leaps it did was because the people involved were creative artists who realized that the medium is not only the the message but also the massage. Interestingly this expertise was also transferred to television advertising when digital production matured.
Education has not caught up yet, but it is going to and it is not going to take that long once it takes off and a feedback loop is created that unleashes both creative imagination and pragmatic innovation.
Notice that all the "bad parts" that Thoma notes are based on the classroom model. He doesn't yet realize that digital distance learning is a fundamentally different experience from traditional classroom education. He is focusing on a process rather than an experience. This is in-the-box thinking when what is needed now is out-of-the box thinking.
The fit between process and experience is reciprocal and interactive. It's called learning. It's about exploring alternatives and options taking tradeoffs into account in achieving payoffs. Education is a complex adaptive system involving discovery, and innovation and therefore emergence. It is network and feedback dependent. It's about information, but not only about information. It's about life. (Yes, I realize that John Dewey said most of this beginning a century ago. It was called progressive education.)
Parents that have home schooled and those that have been successfully home schooled realize this. Several of my friends home schooled their exceptionally bright children and they eventually graduated from top undergrad and grad school. Students can set their own pace, for example, and make decisions about what, when, how and above all why they study. As in all creative endeavors, freedom is the foundation, and freedom to explore is essential.
12 Good and Bad Parts of Online Education
Mark Thoma, Professor of Economics, University of Oregon
3 comments:
That's a very interesting perspective tom. Like how you demonstrated with cinema, all new technology first tries to mimic the old method of doing things until it gradually changes the entire landscape that is more suited to its native form. In what ways do you see the new online method changing education that are not being recognized because we are still trying to fit it in the class room model?
Education will shift focus from teaching to learning, which is the purpose of education. The two Latin roots. One is is educere meaning to lead from. In the Platonic sense this is to bring forth rather than to put in. The conventional model of education is stuffing information in. The other Latin root is educare meaning to train or to mold. This was the method of the apprenticeship and tutorial methods that gave way to the classroom model.
Education understood as learning is oriented toward bringing out and shaping rather than stuffing and testing. Media learning is well suited to this whereas the classroom is not.
Learning can be facilitated. Learning is natural and doesn't have to be highly structured. As Sir Ken Roberts has observed, every child is a genius until beginning school and it gets worse grade by grade until one has become merely a cog in the machine. Only a few are able to surmount the obstacles and tap their natural creativity and learning ability. It's not so much of doing things right as stopping doing things wrong. Don't break the natural flow of curiosity, exploration, adventure and experimentation. Channel it constructively as unobtrusively and and invisibly as possible. Treat learning as play, a set of all sorts of games.
Learning is enhanced by environments conducive to learning. Create information and emotion-rich environments and put learning teams in them. Young people are already doing this with their gadgets and they are developing apps to enhance it.
There are plenty of example already in existence that can be adapted to digital learning if they haven't been already.
This doesn't mean that learning can be all digital. Obviously some interpersonal interaction is needed face to face, as well as hands on training. That can be structured locally without the need for traditional schools and classrooms that can be replace by digital communications.
This was realized even with classroom education, especially as class size increased. Grad students were employed to run small discussion groups and labs, for example. Learning needs to be interactive, both with others students, facilitators, and outside factors. Above all, learning has to set learners in life from the outset rather than taking them out of it for years in preparation to enter it.
I would suggest that traditional teaching be divided into facilitating learning and research. The PhD is a research credential, for instance, rather than a teaching credential. That's what a dissertation is supposed to establish. The traditional master's was the teaching credential. I would go back to that and have the learning facilitation in higher Ed be conducted by learning professionals and set the research people free to do R&D. Actually, many if not most profs prefer one to the other anyway.
As I said in a prior comment, John Dewey wrote extensively on this in the first half of the 20th century. Since then it has been widely investigated and experimented with in philosophy and psychology as well as education. There's a large literature on alternative education and there are also a number of working models available.
The first thing I would advise in closing down the conventional schools as quickly as replacements can be implemented and let a hundred flowers bloom. Most importantly, this has to begin in pre-school and there should also be education for first-time parents since learning begins in infancy. This was widely known and culturally acknowledged in so-called primitive societies. That needs to be recaptured.
Needless to say this would result in an entirely different type of society. Which why there has been a lot of opposition to a learning approach to education rather than preparing people to become cogs in the machine.
See Sandwichman, Trigger Warning! The Wage Prisoner's Dilemma
Oops. That should be Sir Ken Robinson .
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