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eLEARNING: BOON OR BUST
The description of this presentation
spelled it out clearly: "Will eLearning revolutionize higher
education as we know it? And, if so, in what ways? Or has
eLearning’s promise been vastly overrated? Two experts face
off."
On one side of the stage was Gene I. Maeroff, senior
fellow, the Hechinger Institute, and author of "A Classroom
of One: How Online Learning is Changing Our Schools and
Colleges," published in 2003 (see
www.amazon.com/Classroom-OneLearning-Changing-Colleges/dp/1403965374).
As noted by Publishers Weekly, Maeroff "sees online
education as an important and growing part of traditional
instruction, a tool that will help solve many existing
problems" (which is a much different point of view than
what’s professed by the educator who sat on the other side
of the stage, Robert Zemsky).
Chairman of The Learning Alliance for
Higher Education, Robert Zemsky, is also co-author, with
William F. Massey, of a controversial paper, titled
"Thwarted Innovation: What Happened to eLearning and Why,"
which was based on a study launched in the summer of 2001
and published in June 2004. Zemsky and Massey reported that
"only course management systems and PowerPoint lectures have
been widely employed," that "there has yet to emerge a
viable market for eLearning products," and that "eLearning
took off before people really knew how to use it" (see
www.irhe.upenn.edu/WeatherStation.html).
Sarah Hardesty Bray, Chronicle reporter,
was the moderator sitting in the middle of the stage.
Online Learning Resembles Electronic
Workbooks And is Not a Problem Solve r
Probably the most controversial statement made during this
interactive debate was, not surprisingly, offered by Zemsky,
who, in a similar fashion to the Thwarted Innovation report,
categorized online learning as simply being an electronic
workbook that has not solved any problems for the Academy.
To bolster this point of view, Zemsky
pointed out that web usage today is mostly about
communications and distribution, as evidenced by the way
today’s Net Generation uses the web to interact and share
with each other through social bookmarking, social networks
and instant messaging. "What the web gave us is the most
wonderful distribution system that I have seen in my life,"
he said, adding that the web is "not a learning device."
Plus, course management systems are communication tools
more than they are learning platforms. And, in general,
online learning courses are like electronic workbooks; "they
are like the ones I did in junior high school," Zemsky said.
"It is not so wonderful for synchronous learning. You begin
to think that maybe we need to rethink all this and not call
it eLearning; this is distributed learning. Maybe we would
develop better workbooks if we actually thought about it
that way."
Moreover, online learning hasn’t really solved anything,
according to Zemsky. "I thought that eLearning would, in a
rich media sense, provide some solutions to problems that we
have. We don’t teach science well. We teach language worse
than we teach science, and we are not very good at teaching
math. . . What really happened to eLearning is that the
early adopters and innovators got way out in front and they
began saying things like ‘let me show you what we can do’
instead of showing what problems they could help solve."
Online Learning in Its Modern Stage of
Development
This
gave Maeroff quite a bit of ammunition for counter points.
Maeroff noted, for instance, that online learning has
reached major levels of new and brighter development and
progress since the 2001 through 2004 Thwarted Innovation
exercise. "It has become very clear now that, more than
anything, it [online learning] benefits people who are
mature, who are self motivated, who are looking for various
aspects of career development," Maeroff said. "There seems
to be a very clear market, and I suspect that you will see
more and more in professional development for teachers at
the post baccalaureate level going online. There is
potential for lots of enrollments because we are talking
about millions of K-12 teachers who will have to do
something in connection with licensing and re-certification
requirements. The Zemsky/Massey report was right on with
regard to what the early misconceptions were [about online
learning], but now we are past that and into a second or
third stage."
Maeroff also noted that online learning
is, indeed, solving education problems in a number of other
ways. For example, online Advanced Placement courses are
helping to provide access to students in rural areas who
otherwise would not have access to such courses at the
classroom level; millions of home school students are
getting access to better content through online learning
environments; and teachers who move to the online learning
modality typically reflect on and improve their course
content and pedagogy. Additionally, online learning does
provide numerous opportunities for students to interact with
each other and their faculty - depending on how it is
structured and taught - as opposed to it being only a
distribution/electronic workbook system.
A Message for Academic Leaders
A
member in the audience noted that for any online learning
initiative to be successful there has to be a firm
commitment from top administrators to support faculty,
"because if the faculty do not have anyone to work with them
on how to use technology appropriately, then they are going
to take their PowerPoints and put them into a course
management system and call it a course." So, there’s a large
issue that revolves around academic leadership commitment,
or lack thereof, in regard to the development and provision
of online learning courses and programs that should
obviously be much more than electronic workbooks. And the
important question becomes what would you tell academic
leaders who are thinking about supporting online learning
initiatives?
Zemsky responded that one-off courses are
a waste of money, and removing online courses away from
faculty ownership, although difficult to accomplish, is
necessary for success. Additionally, standards for course
design must be established so that faculty members who tend
to dumb down online courses will not be tolerated. Last,
"you have to believe that it [online learning] is solving a
problem and not somebody’s itch to use the technology. If
you are a president, and you don’t have problems that
technology can solve, then you are probably wasting your
money to play around with it. What problems do you have that
you want the CIO, the academic dean, and the people from
distance learning to work on?"
Maeroff added that "institutions have to be willing to
invest in faculty development if they want it [online
learning] to be done properly. And faculty have to be
willing to avail themselves of what’s offered to them."
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