Going Online

Perspectives on Digital Learning

Robert Ubell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138025318
• eBook ISBN: 9781317686644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In Going Online, one of our most respected online learning leaders offers insights into virtual education—what it is, how it works, where it came from, and where it may be headed. Robert Ubell reaches back to the days when distance learning was practiced by mail in correspondence schools and then leads us on a tour behind the screen, touching on a wide array of topics along the way, including what it takes to teach online and the virtual student experience. You'll learn about:

• how to build a sustainable online program;
• how to create an active learning online course;
• why so many faculty resist teaching online;
• how virtual teamwork enhances digital instruction;
• how to manage online course ownership;
• how learning analytics improves online instruction.

Ubell says that it is not technology alone, but rather unconventional pedagogies, supported by technological innovations, that truly activate today's classrooms. He argues that innovations introduced online—principally peer-to-peer and collaborative learning—offer significantly increased creative learning options across all age groups and educational sectors. This impressive collection, drawn from Ubell's decades of experience as a digital education pioneer, presents a powerful case for embracing online learning for its transformational potential.

PART I
Virtual Classes

1
DEWEY GOES ONLINE

Nearly a century before the Internet entered college and university life with online learning, the American philosopher and progressive education champion John Dewey recognized that traditional classrooms can often stand in the way of creative learning. Troubled by passive students in regimented rows, Dewey worried that docile students, accepting the unquestioned authority of teachers, not only undermined engaged learning, but thwarted democratic practice in the social and political life of the nation. Instead, Dewey called for a “spirit of free communication, of interchange of ideas” (Dewey, 1915, p. 11), encouraging “active, expressive” learning (Dewey, 1915, p. 20).

Taking up ideas suggested by Dewey and others¹, progressive educators in the 1920s proposed that students learn best by performing real-life activities in collaboration with others. Experiential learning—“learning by doing”—coupled with problem solving and critical thinking, they claimed, is the key to dynamic knowledge acquisition. Rather than respect for authority, they called for diversity, believing that students must be recognized for their individual talent, interests, and cultural identity.

Ever since John Dewey proposed learning by doing as the most fruitful way to absorb and create knowledge, progressive educators have been devising ways to encourage students to get up from their schoolroom seats and do things— experiment, experience, think, and reflect—key principles of experiential learning, theorized by the noted scholar David A. Kolb (Kolb, 2015). Often called “hands-on” learning, experiential education is an umbrella concept, under which a number of common and innovative practices fall—case methodology, for example, as well as problem-, project-, and inquiry-based leaning. Lately, “active learning” has become one of the most widely accepted terms (see Chapter 3). The key concept is that merely reading books or listening to lectures is a very poor substitute for discovering and experimenting with concepts and things first-hand. At its best, experiential learning, rather than passively listening to lectures, offers students opportunities to take the initiative, to make decisions on their own. Actively engaged, learners are encouraged to pose questions and solve novel problems, bridging the gap between theory and practice.

In a classic example of experiential education, now more than a century old, some engineering schools open their gates, freeing students to work in industry as part of their undergraduate education. Acknowledging the benefits of learning by doing, cooperative education programs have been sending students off campus for years, experiencing part of their undergraduate studies in college classrooms and labs and partly on the factory floor. Commonly known as “co-op” education, initially launched at Lehigh University in 1901—at about the same time that Dewey was encouraging active learning—and now offered at dozens of college and universities, including Northeastern, Cincinnati, Georgia Tech and others, it provides academic credit for structured job experience, frequently alternating school with work in partnership with an employer (Kerka, 1999).

Working professionals who participate in online programs come to virtual classes already practicing real-life problems on the job. Since only a third of enrollments at US colleges and universities study as residential students, most students today work and go to school part-time (NCES, 2016). Many take courses online, participating in an unprecedented national experiment in informal co-op education. Unlike their peers in co-op programs, they are not guided by faculty nor do they receive academic credit for their work experience. Pursuing part-time online academic studies in parallel with their jobs, many work in the same or similar fields as in school, absorbing the theory of their disciplines online while they practice at work. Others go online to increase their competencies in domains for which they lack critical skills. Still others gain knowledge in new disciplines in order to leave those they’re in. The freedom open to virtual students is vast. Students can go online, taking classes anywhere in the country or around the world to study at schools where their career objectives correspond with the curricula offered by college and universities far from home. Before the introduction of virtual education, workers were forced to quit their jobs and uproot themselves to study at faraway schools. Today, many stay at their jobs, acquiring the knowledge and credentials they need online.

Can experiential learning be done online (Bates, 2014)? The answer is embedded in the very practice of digital education itself. Participating in an online course is a creative form of experiential learning. As a virtual student, you engage in real-world communication practices, employed by workers and scholars everywhere. Using the technologies that drive digital courses—e-mail, chat, video, multimedia, collaborative software, simulations—virtual students exploit the tools used routinely by executives, academics, scientists, and engineers worldwide. Commerce, scholarship, personal relations today are commonly conducted online. By contrast, the classroom, despite its face-to-face medium, is artificial, often a space for listening, rarely open to practice and reflection (see Chapter 4). No other human engagement, except perhaps theater and spectator sports, is as unlike real-life as the classroom, with students fixed in their seats in rows. In the far more real world of virtual instruction, students are liberated from their inert positions in class to participate daily in extended digital conversations as they do with friends, family, peers, and coworkers. Perhaps, the most remarkable thing about digital education is that its very form is experiential, requiring skill to become expert as a virtual student. Just like learning how to play a musical instrument, digital students must acquire essential competencies, absorbing far more proficiency than on-campus students, whose only effort is to walk into the class and take a seat. One example is the virtual lab, now common in computer science, bioinformatics, business analytics, knowledge management, and other advanced fields. Today, digital students can manipulate the same software remotely as do scientists, engineers, and scholars (Waldrop, 2013). Accessing large-scale systems remotely is now possible in many industries, with virtual students performing experiments or running operations remotely with the same facility as those on site. Virtual education emerges as a workshop in which online students exercise functions essential for scholarship and professional life. Following Dewey, digital learning hones contemporary workplace skills—teamwork, problems-solving, reflection.

Building on the work of Dewey and others, constructivist² ideas emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. Constructivists believed that knowledge is built on experience mediated by one’s own prior knowledge and the experience of others, a philosophical tradition that goes back to Immanuel Kant. According to constructivists, learning is a socially adaptive process of assimilation, accommodation, and correction. For constructivists, students generate new knowledge on the foundation of previous learning.

By contrast, objectivists³ believe that learning results from the passive transmission of information from instructor to student. For them, reception, not construction, is the key. Objectivists assume that reality is entirely open to obser vation, independent of our minds. Modern neuroscience appears to support the alternative constructivist claim, concluding that the brain is not a recording device, but rather, the mind actively constructs reality, with experience filtered through a cognitive framework of memories, expectations, and emotions (Dehaene, 2002).

Progressive education was never widely embraced. Apart from a handful of elementary and high schools and a few colleges,⁴ for the most part over the last century, schools rejected progressive theories, preferring conventional practice instead, with students seated in rows facing the teacher, a scene reminiscent of turn-of-the-century vintage schoolroom photographs. Face-to-face teaching, the most common style of instruction, and consequently, the practice that appears to be most natural, is often valorized as the foundation against which all other methods are measured (Russell, 2001). It is taken for granted that the classroom is the normal place for learning. Yet there is little evidence to support the claim that traditional education is the standard. The basic assumption is that face-to-face students form a cohesive group, participating alike in discussion, listening to lectures, building intellectual and social relationships with teachers and peers inside and outside class (see Chapter 5). But as Anthony Picciano points out, this is not always the case. Classroom students often feel alienated, drawing away from others and isolating themselves (Picciano, 2002). A significant population feels estranged and falls into a pattern of failure.

Conventional education assumes that because students occupy the same space and are subject to the same conditions, they are fairly similar and should emerge with the same or similar learning outcomes, regardless of the economic or social status. Because students are visible at their desks—rather than invisible in a virtual classroom—somehow we assume that we can know them and understand them. We believe that when we see students in physical space, we can actually gain access to them. Yet it’s their invisible qualities that mostly determine who they are. According to Pierre Bourdieu, we forget that the truth of any interaction is never captured entirely by observation (Bourdieu, 1989). So, while face-to-face interaction is often thought of as giving us perfect knowledge of student behavior, in fact, physical presence can often obscure crucially hidden social and psychological relations.

We tend to believe that visual cues—facial expressions and body language— offer us sufficient social communication markers to understand one another. Yet these actions, while open to inspection, fail to give us access to unseen psychological and status relationships to which we are often blind. The classroom resists distinctions that are formed by groups and hierarchies that crisscross it from outside. Traditional instruction—especially the classroom lecture—is a one-size-fits-all product that ignores student identities as multiple, overlapping constellations of real and imaginary selves.

What is visible can often be damaging, turning common experience against us (see Chapter 4). Hair style, clothes, our perceived ideas of physical beauty, and other personal characteristics can often undermine us, even as they have the capacity to move us closer together. The classroom is a place where ordinary misperceptions by teachers and students can easily defeat effective learning. It is place where ethnicity, gender, and race are in plain sight, sadly subject to the same stereotypes and prejudices found on the streets. Online, however, students are often able to enter the virtual classroom anonymously, avoiding the stigmatization that can occur in a physical space (Kassop, 2003).

Dewey raised his voice against the ordinary schoolroom, a place made almost exclusively “for listening.” Following Dewey, Paulo Freire recognized the narrative character of the teacher-student relationship. “Education is suffering from a narration sickness,” Freire observed and famously ridiculed conventional instruction for its “banking concept of education,” with students mechanically memorizing content, turning them into instructional depositories (Freire, 1970).

Today, the demands of online learning—finding unprecedented ways to engage invisible students—have reclaimed Dewey. Suddenly, the lessons of progressive education and the constructivist legacy have become relevant. Rather than being discarded, Dewey is now seen as prescient. In one of the principal online learning research texts, Starr Roxanne Hiltz and her colleagues claim that collaborative online learning “is one of the most important implementations of the constructivist approach” (Hiltz & Goldman, 2005).

Constructivist strategies were introduced in online education and in virtual teams in industry to overcome what Karen Sobel Lojeski and Richard Reilly call “virtual distance,” a consequence of a number of potentially alienating factors (Lojeski & Reilly, 2008). Members of virtual teams are often widely separated geographically, with many located in distant time zones. Frequently composed of students from different cultures, who work in different organizations, with unfamiliar standards and models of behavior, virtual teams may also consist of participants with varying technical proficiency.

According to Lojeski and Reilly, virtual distance is composed of three principal disturbances—physical, operational, and affinity distance, with physical distance emerging from obvious disparities in space and time. Operational distance, on the other hand, grows out of workplace dysfunction, such as communication failure— for example, receiving an e-mail from a colleague whose poorly articu lated text cannot be deciphered. Affinity distance reflects emotional barriers that stand in the way of effective collaboration. Lojeski and Reilly claim that absence of affinity among team members is the greatest obstacle to quality performance. For them, reducing emotional estrangement in groups is the single most import ant task.

Pedagogy has never played a significant role in higher education. Instructors walk into most college classrooms without any special training in teaching skills. In universities, pedagogy is often dismissed as a discipline appropriate for kindergarten and elementary school, not a proper subject for higher education. With online learning, however, pedagogy emerges as a necessity. Without training in how to engage students, helping to close the online psychological gap, faculty are essentially unprepared to teach. In a turnaround, faculty now demand that they receive quality instruction about how to teach online before they enter their virtual classroom; otherwise they feel stranded. For many, teaching online often requires wholesale reconsideration and reformulation of subject matter and delivery, an assessment that can lead to rejuvenating faculty engagement and heighten the granularity of content.

Still, teaching online can be quite disorienting. Faculty can no longer rely on their ability to deliver performances that engage students intellectually and emotionally. In classrooms, professors practice many of the techniques employed by stage actors —rehearsal, scripting, improvisation, characterization, and stage presence (Pineau, 1994). Exploiting tension, timing, counterpoint, and humor with dramatic effect, skilled classroom teachers exhibit qualities that can stimulate thought and action. We are often drawn to content and energized by instructional performances.

But a practiced, smooth presentation ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Virtual Classes
• Part II: Migrating Online
• Index