News: Are Online and Traditional Learning Substitutes or Complements?
Discussions of “online” vs. traditional learning often go in either/or terms. Which is better? Will online learning wipe out the traditional classroom, or will it fail? This way of thinking risks missing the point in two ways.
First, the terms in question are far from clear. Online learning can mean everything from showing a movie of someone giving a lecture (whether the movie is shown on a big screen in a lecture hall or a little screen on an iPod) to an expensively crafted, learning-science-driven, highly interactive, asynchronous production. Similarly, the traditional classroom can mean anything from 10 students around a table to 800 students in a lecture hall.
Second, the better/worse question implies that both modes of instruction are trying to do the same thing, like a track meet where everyone is running the 100 yard dash and the index of success is completely clear. When the question is: Is she better at pole vaulting than he is at the 5,000-meter run, the question itself risks incoherence.
We would offer the common-sense propositions that some educational outcomes schools and colleges aim for would be extremely difficult to achieve well via online learning alone, and there are others where it is very likely that good technology can deliver better results than human beings can achieve at the same cost.
These propositions are so obviously true it’s hard to know how even to argue for them. One of the things we want for students in high school or college is intense interaction among a group of peers expressing and wrestling with one another’s views on complex and contentious matters. This involves listening respectfully to others, staying on point in one’s own statements, disagreeing respectfully, searching for common bases of agreement, and so on. Such face-to-face discussions might be technologically enhanced (not all the faces have to be in the same room) but fundamentally it is human interaction that is essential, and making it successful requires a skilled discussion leader. More generally, we want to help people learn to interact with one another effectively—including with people very different from themselves—and they need to practice with others to make it work. It’s noteworthy that home schooling for elementary and high school-age students is often practiced in groups, partly to foster interaction, and many school districts invite home-schooled children to participate in regular extracurricular activities, again partly to foster a capacity for successful interaction with others.
On the other hand, we also want students to learn to master a variety of problem-solving and analytic techniques which require practice. The best way to practice efficiently is to do lots of problems that are not impossibly hard but are just beyond your current reach (what the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky called “the zone of proximal development”). And nobody can match the computer at picking the next stretch problem for a particular student—neither wasting her time with problems she can readily solve, nor driving her to distraction with impossible challenges. Computers can get really good at this in contexts where there are unambiguously right and wrong answers to problems.
There are no doubt too many colleges that do a lousy job of the first or the second kind of teaching. (Even many “high end” liberal arts institutions arguably make it too easy for students to tiptoe around mastering challenges of either the interpersonal or the analytical kind.) Replacing a really bad traditional college experience with a less bad experience that was purely online might be an improvement, and probably some online learning approaches are so crummy that even poor traditional instruction is better.
But it seems highly likely that as technology continues to advance, a really good college education at a reasonable cost will contain elements of both online learning and traditional classroom experiences. We would include in the latter category technologically enhanced face-to-face synchronous interaction where travel distances make a common classroom too expensive.
The trick is to figure out where the human beings on the faculty and staff can do the most good, and use that scarce resource well. At the same time, invest in developing high-quality interactive online teaching tools, and then use them on a large enough scale to defray the substantial development costs. This implies sharing the same or very similar materials across a range of institutions (much like textbooks), which will require overcoming difficult “not invented here” and related governance problems.
Will all this work? We won’t really know until such a strategy is tried at scale and results (and costs) are measured with a care that is not much evident in most work to date. But our view is that this mixed strategy makes a lot more sense than either the idea of replacing colleges with online substitutes or slamming the door on what technology can do.
source: Chronicle
(Source: linkedin.com)
