Archive
The Future of Distance Learning
Distance learning has been a source of debate, scrutiny and skepticism as well as being referred to as an inevitable replacement of the brick and mortar face-to-face classroom. Perceptions about distance learning are continually evolving, in part because of an ongoing process of societal acceptance of new modes of distance telecommunication. Instructional designers can play a part in influencing perceptions about distance learning and can also work to improve the quality of distance learning.
George Siemens (researcher, author of “Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Age”) believes that internet based social tools are changing societal perceptions of relationships by decreasing distance as a factor in those relationships. He has discussed changes that have occurred in the last five years that have provided people with practical experience with a variety of social, audio and video tools that all increase comfort levels with web-based dialogue. He also mentions the increasing influence of games and simulations as a part of this dialogue. All of these tools provide the ability to communicate globally with relatives, friends, colleagues and a wide diversity of groups. The eventual universal acceptance of these tools ultimately will have an effect on the acceptance of distance learning by providing a high level of comfort with a wide range of distance communication modes (Siemens, 2010).
Considering perceptions of distance learning five to ten years from now, or even ten to twenty years from now, involves looking at possible future trends for commercial communication tools and applying Siemen’s ideas regarding the effect of general technology use on the perception of distance learning. The Ipad, I-pod touch, and Android devices will continue to evolve mobile computing particularly in the area of asynchronous social, sharing, and collaborative applications. These same devices will also make all types of synchronous chat and audio/visual interactions commonplace. Immersive gaming/simulation environments combined with pervasive cloud computing will facilitate “always engaged” continual unbroken communication. Just as today’s higher education students grew up with the internet, tomorrow students will have grown up in an immersive, pervasive, collaborative communication environment which will not only provide them with complete comfort with online discourse, it may simply be “the discourse” that they have experienced throughout their entire life and education.
Instructional designers can be proponents for improving current societal perceptions of distance learning by being advocates for adopting Web 2.0 and mobile tools for appropriate instructional goals and uses. For my part this will include taking advantage of Web 2.0 tools to advance positive ideas about these same tools as well as other related technologies. This involves using my position responsibly, publishing, writing and sharing ideas freely as a professional, and when appropriate in journals or conferences – in general being an advocate for positive change. In the field of distance learning, I can be a positive force for continued improvement, by working closely and collaboratively with faculty and administrators. I can help faculty by ensuring that there are always opportunities to select from a range of best practices and associated technologies that meet their instructional goals, as well as help remove any barriers.
While there may always be skeptics, George Benton eloquently stated: “by exposing more faculty members to the possibilities of online teaching, we can reduce their counterproductive skepticism. We can show the potential for those methods to enhance the things that we value most as teachers—the joy of learning, and the sharing of that experience with others.” (Benton, 2009). The influence of popular communication technology on perceptions of distance learning is only one aspect of change, without cooperation and collaboration between educators, instructional designers and technology professionals, true progress in advancing positive perceptions and change in distance learning will be slow to come.
References
Benton, T. (2009). Online Learning: Reaching Out to the Skeptics. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved February 25, 2011 from http://chronicle.com/article/Online-Learning-Reaching-Out/48375/
Siemens, G. (2010). Video Podcast: The Future of Distance Education. Laureate Education, Inc. Retrieved February 21, 2011 from http://sylvan.live.ecollege.com
Converting to a Distance Learning Format Guide
Converting courses to a distance learning format is an opportunity to revitalize the course material, the course format, and the learner interactions. A successful conversion requires extensive planning and careful selection of distance learning tools as well as adopting new instructional techniques and methods.
This best practices guide provides ideas and tips to help trainers convert existing courses into a the appropriate Distance Learning format. The guide covers planing strategies, potential enhancements to the course in the new format, how the role of a trainer changes in the distance learning environment and how trainers can encourage trainees to communicate online.
Selecting Distance Learning Technology for Interactive Tours
Imagine that you are a high school history teacher on the West Coast of the United States and you learn about exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. These exhibits are highly relevant to the classes you are teaching and you wish that you could take your students on a tour of the exhibits and of the museums. Now imagine that you have been lucky enough to make the acquaintance of a museum curator at each museum – both curators have offered your classes personal guided tours. You would also like to have some group class discussions after the tour. Travel to the museums is both time and cost prohibitive, you know the solution is possible with distance learning technologies. You have turned to your school district’s instructional designer for assistance.
Instructional designers or technologists are responsible for helping teachers select the appropriate interactive instructional tools for distance learning. For this situation, the instructional designer could start by looking at the resources that are already provided by the museum. Museums have moved beyond simple web sites with text and exhibit photographs and now supply a full range of interactive materials – these materials can be used at a distance or while in-person viewing an exhibit. Museums also provide ways for the public to interact with each other and with museum staff. Visitors to the web sites of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (http://www.metmuseum.org/), The Museum of Modern Art (http://www.moma.org/) or the Guggenheim Museum (http://www.guggenheim.org/) can find a full range of Web 2.0 applications including: blogs, podcasting, You Tube videos, Flickr photo galleries, RSS feeds, Delicious social bookmarking pages, Facebook pages and more.
It is clear that museums understand the potential of the participatory and collaborative nature of Web 2.0 applications to promote learner engagement (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2009).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Metshare web page (http://www.metmuseum.org/metshare/about.aspx) specifically indicates that sharing and connecting combined with the study of art are the purpose for using these Web 2.0 applications. MetShare also provides a multi-theory instructional design approach by integrating a variety of ways for visitors to learn, interact and collaborate. Each Web 2.0 application can utilize one or more best practices from different theories (Beldarrain, 2006).
Good examples of interactive tours can be found at the Museum of Modern Art. These tours are available in a variety of formats including mobile app formats (http://www.moma.org/explore/mobile/index). The multimedia tours lead the viewer through a selection of important pieces in an exhibit – the current exhibit on Abstract Expressionism is a good example (http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/abexny/). The mobile tours are appropriate for both on-site and distance use – providing useful information while viewing an exhibit, pre-training before attending an exhibit, review after exhibit attendance or as a standalone tutorial for instruction and discussion.
Museums web resources are a starting point for building an instructional experience. The next step is to select technology that will facilitate the class virtual tour of the museum by a curator. The technology should provide an equivalent learning experience which is important to ensuring equivalent outcomes -as opposed to attempting to provide an identical learning experience (Simonson, Smaldino, Albright, & Zvacek, 2009). One choice is to use Elluminate’s learncentral (http://www.learncentral.org/) which offers educators a free synchronous (3 station) collaborative web based meeting room that supports video, audio and web tours.
Using Elluminate, the history teacher could invite the curator to lead the class on a web tour using the museum resources and if the curator is using a laptop with a Wi-Fi connection, the tour could be conducted from the exhibition space. The classroom configuration could use a presentation system for Elluminate viewing by the entire class and a separate station could be set-up for individual students to ask questions. If the school is able to purchase an upgraded license to allow more stations, the entire class could participate in the tour with the ability to ask questions and even join in the tour from locations outside of the classroom. The Gwinnett County Online Campus (GCOC) has used a similar version of Elluminate for district-wide distance learning high school classes that serve a diversity of learner types. GCOC has seen increased student engagement and better outcomes as a result of this technology. (Green, 2009)
Facilitating an online group class discussion after the tour does not require the use of a course management system. While blogs and wikis might provide an acceptable discussion space, another alternative is to use the educational group capabilities of the Diigo (http://www.diigo.com/) social bookmarking site. Diigo offers teachers special educational accounts (http://help.diigo.com/teacher-account/faq). The account provides the teacher with the ability to create a private group area for a class. The teacher, invited guests and the students can share web resources, make snapshots of web pages, discuss and comment on resources, and place annotations directly on web pages to share with other group members.
The group discussion can move beyond the museum resources to include any web resource related to the topic – with the teacher, curators and each student adding new comments and supporting those comments with links to web resources. This is a collaborative dynamic group process that incorporates social constructivist principles where all learners think about the relationships of tags to each other as well as the comments and learn from each other (Estelles, Moral, & Gonzalez, 2010). The Diigo in education group demonstrates a public example of this tagging and commenting process: http://groups.diigo.com/group/diigoineducation. Diigo members belonging to this group can also see the other group member’s annotations on web pages.
While it might at first seem intimidating to a teacher, providing a synchronous distance learning tour followed up with a distance learning group discussion can be done at no cost or a relatively low cost. Teachers can take advantage of free web resources and combine them with best practices for distance learning instructional design to offer highly interactive and engaging experiences for their students.
References:
Beldarrain, Y. (2006). Distance Education Trends: Integrating new technologies to foster student interaction and collaboration. Distance Education, 27(2), 139-153. doi:10.1080/01587910600789498
Estelles, E., Moral, E., & Gonzalez, F. (2010). Social Bookmarking Tools as Facilitators of Learning and Research Collaborative Processes: The Diigo Case. Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Learning and Learning Objects, 6, 175-191. Retrieved January 22, 2011 from http://www.ijello.org/Volume6/IJELLOv6p175-191Estelles683.pdf.
Green, G. Y. (2009). Engaging Online High School Students with the use of ClassLive Pro Powered by Elluminate. Distance Learning, 6(1), 31-39. Retrieved January 22, 2011 from EBSCOhost.
Simonson, M., Smaldino, S., Albright, M., & Zvacek, S. (2009). Teaching and learning at a distance: Foundations of distance education (4th ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson.
Developing a Smart Social Media Strategy Webinar
A free webinar for faculty and administrators on effective use of Social Media. For more details visit:
The registration page also has a link to archived webinar’s as well.
Making Change: Ideas for Lively E-Learning
Making Change: Ideas for Lively E-Learning has a fresh clean and inviting design. Cathy Moore’s style is direct, simple, succinct with liberal use of graphics, and multimedia. Cathy covers topics of interest to the working professional instructional designer. The articles deal with improving the learning process as well as instructional design technology and software. Her 4000+ readers provide additional useful information and advice to each article.
Cathy is especially good at using very clear graphic examples to teach complex topics in a deceptively simple and often fun manner. In her article Why you want to focus on actions, not learning objectives, she skillfully uses three photos each with two alternatives and a good amount of humor to make her point that “To identify what learners need to know, we first have to identify what they need to do.” Her readers offer both interesting criticism and support in response to the article.
Cathy has worked in the instructional design field for over 25 years, her insight and her experience is valuable to both the professional and the student in Instructional Design.
IT Bill’s Weblog
IT Bill’s Weblog tagline is Technology Should Make Life Easier. IT Bill offers a down in the trenches look at technology and learning including Instructional Design.
His writing of direct experience with colleagues, faculty and students mixes with scholarly references as well as excellent references to books, articles and a variety of web resources.
In one article entitled Blended by Design, he writes about the pros and cons of gradually adding e-learning technology to a face-to-face class. His advice is pragmatic and he provides several links to resource sites for more information.
Bill’s viewpoint of “theory put into practice” is useful to instructional designers because it grounds the instructional design process, placing it in the occasionally messy real world.
I especially liked Bill’s advice in his article Good Technology meets Good Practice – “…if we aren’t improving instruction by encouraging student collaboration, faculty/student communication, fostering active learning, or otherwise applying sound principles of good practice, we’re just playing with toys in class.”
IT Bill works as the Coordinator of Instructional Technology with the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at Ferris State University, Big Rapids, Michigan.
6 Bells Interactive 