Question 3 - Assessment of Online Learning

From your experience in this course, critically assess the role of online learning in education. Does online learning have a place in schools? Why/why not?

If on-line learning means an electronic learning environment, then I think any other learning environment is not an option in the twenty first century. This statement was probably also true of learning in the last decade of the twentieth century.

It is untenable that this generation of Prensky’s “digital natives” learn without using the tool that is the workplace standard. Pen and paper are a previous generation’s standard workplace tools. Students’ parents expect to use a computer at work. It is an odd viewpoint that would expect the next generation in the work force to be trained according to a previous generation’s methods.

For the last six years, I taught English in a school with a student notebook computer program. This meant seamless incorporation of technology into the curriculum – IT integration within standard teaching and learning. Students used the same computer at school and at work and this turned any classroom into a computer laboratory without the usual problems of multiple log-ons to machines.
In assessing the success of this program that I introduced into Emanuel School, I speak first as an English teacher. English syllabuses had long spoken about the necessity of drafting and re-drafting texts. The computer simplifies the editing of documents in a way not possible with pen and paper, but the on-line connectivity of notebook computers in a wireless network allow the publishing of documents to different audiences anywhere. This allows for “authentic” writing tasks – tasks that equate to a professional writer in the work-force targeting not just a sole teacher/marker as an audience, but multiple readers. The computer will allow the document to be changed as the intended audience and purpose change. The web’s connectivity will allow meaning to be constructed through the social connectivism (Siemens’ term) established by the web and in line with the NSW Board of Studies definition of a text – the interplay of meaning established between a composer of a text and a responder to a text.

As a Director of Studies, I had presided over school inspections. Teachers have long resented the paperwork needed to satisfy the Board of Studies that the syllabuses have been followed. I developed academic programs written to an audience that was my students and their parents. In this way, the “programs” I created were an essential part of my teaching and learning and not just a bureaucratic imposition. While the programs had all the components required for Board accountability – a set time-frame, Syllabus outcomes, content and strategy, assessment and evaluation – these programs also recorded the content of the lessons taught. By e-mailing the programs to the students and their parents’ e-mail addresses, students had access to lessons they had missed through illness. Electronic records of the lessons provided the basis for revision. Parents could share in the knowledge of what was happening in their children’s classes and know the nature and deadlines for homework and assignments. On-line learning in this simple sense had turn a “closed shop” – the classroom – into a place of open access to the whole school community. And this is using “on-line” in the sense of only of e-mail online connectivity.

Access to the Internet in the classroom whenever the lesson required – even in unplanned moments – meant that information could be up-to date. In an Economics classroom, daily exchange rates could be tracked, as could decision of the Reserve bank as soon as they were made public.

This year, I have used my “blog” (weblog) in teaching a Year 11 English student I tutor and the BEd students I teach at Notre Dame. This has allowed access to pre-prepared graphics, video clips, text, photographs and music within the classroom via a data-projector…or to the students at their computers at home.

Wikis, webquests and interactive games will help remove the sage from the stage and allow students to develop problem solving skills – Bloom’s higher order thinking skills – with greater access to preferred learning styles.

The Nuclear Disarmament Game

http://nobelprize.org/educational_games/peace/nuclear_weapons/game.html