Response Week 4
Tony Reetz
The Question:
What do you consider the three most important sentences in this article? Discuss why you selected these particular sentences and relate them to your personal experience with learning.
The Three Most Important Sentences in the Article
by Greg Kearsley
Version: 7/1/97
This article is intended to evaluate the implications of a few of the concepts in the above named article, particularly as they relate to my own learning experiences. I will show how the author's bias results in a skewed perspective on the efficacy of online learning.
Statement #1: A Problem with Authority?
The author's attitude toward a traditional instructional delivery model is apparent. In his view, an instructor in the traditional model is a little pope, forcing his subjects to assimilate his or her point of view until freed by the expiration of a set time period.This negative attitude surfaces again later when he writes:
First of all, it's true that the online classroom has no physical correlation to anything other than text or multimedia used in a traditional classroom. However, the authority of the instructor is not lessened because of that fact. The author's attitude toward authority seems to be the issue here, rather than exploring the implications of a physically invisible authority.
My experience with the ASDO course is that the mentor is not only physically absent, she is also absent from impact. I am receiving extremely little input from the mentor. As I mentioned in my Response Week 3 article, I'd rather sit down with a high quality manual for all the interaction there is.
An instructor I will always remember and appreciate "pontificated to a captured audience until the bell rang." He was an older gentleman, a white-haired music theory professor at Western Washington University's School of Music. He used every minute of the class time to teach and drill us on the concepts and practices of musicianship. We came to expect that we would be learning until the last second of the class.
In my opinion, the author's perspective on the superiority of online learning with an instructor on equal footing as the students undermines the benefit that students can receive by respecting the position, accomplishments, and expertise of the instructor.
Statement #2: Very Rich and Very Personal?
No distant, text-based, electronic interaction can be more rich or more personal than face-to-face communication with other human beings. To say that people typically are much more involved in the subject matter of online courses is a gross generalization. If the emphasis of a traditional class was equally placed upon student to student interaction as that of an online course, I don't think that the online course would have any advantage.
The real issue is if emphasis is being placed upon student interaction. The more people communicate about what they are learning, the deeper will be their involvement in the subject matter. An online course may or may not emphasize student interaction, just as much or as little as a traditional course.
A course that stands out in my mind that generated a deep involvement with the subject matter was an introductory Astronomy course at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The lectures were in a large hall, typical of undergraduate work, and included high quality, high content information as well as a fully equipped lab on the backside of the turntable lecture platform. The student interaction and deep involvement in the learning occurred in the lab sessions outside of the lecture hall. We had nighttime observing sessions where we learned constellations and viewed special events and features of the universe. We had sessions in the observatory, the planetarium, and a lab where we viewed and mapped solar storms. No online course could approach the hands on study of the universe that we experienced in that course, nor the sense of learning community we experienced viewing once in a lifetime events. Friendships were also established that lasted beyond the end of the class, and in a much more personable way than email can produce.
The author's opinion that people are much more deeply drawn into the subject matter of an online course because of the discussions they generate assumes that students do not have discussions about the subject matter of traditionally delivered courses.
Statement #3: Immune to Poor Quality?
I agree with this statement, and apply it equally to traditional delivery models in the sense that any highly motivated group of students are going to learn, even if the instructor's skill in teaching is lacking.
Face to face instruction can also be student centered, and highly motivated students working as a team can have an equally (if not more) powerful learning experience.
Problems with the quality of an educational experience are not just limited to the quality of the instructor, they include the quality of the materials as well. A text-based online course has the same susceptability to poor quality as any traditional delivery course. A poorly designed online course is as bad as a poorly designed traditional course, and may be worse, since there is no person to talk to about your problems.
The author's statement that online learning is relatively immune to poor quality teaching does not take into account that the online materials themselves are a form of teaching and can be poorly designed.
Summary
I have illustrated here that the author's bias has interfered with a balanced guide to online learning. He has undermined the unique authority of any instructor, whether traditional or online; he has ignored the deep involvement in learning that can occur in a traditional course; and he has implied that motivated students can more than make up for a poor instructor if the class is online, not acknowledging that online courses themselves may be poorly constructed. Other statements that the author made in this article that are equally open to rebuttal will not be addressed here.
My personal belief is that there is a place for online learning, and that it meets needs in some areas that other forms of learning are not as effective in addressing. The general attitude communicated in Kearsley's article that online learning is superior to traditional learning is not substantiated in his text or in my experience.