Open the Virtual Classroom Doors
I had an interesting, though short, discussion with a member of our IT team last week during one of our “play to learn” sessions. This is not a criticism, as I respect and admire him and am interested in his thoughts. He mentioned that he’s taking an online program now and that it is important to him, as a student, to be able to log in to one location to access all the course content and materials. While he appreciates the open source tools, he doesn’t see that they are currently capable of containing all the needs of a course in one location.
I always respect the time of the adult learner and understand it is one of the primary reasons people seek online learning. However, the more I think about this, the more I wonder why we would need a single location to access everything. I have seen many campuses and state systems go through the nightmare of integration and single-sign-on portal planning. While these are conveniences, I wonder why we even have a goal of convenience.
How strange would it be if we expected our face to face learners to conduct all their learning in a single classroom? Can you imagine bringing in every library book, film, journal, experiential lesson, group project, lab, subject matter expert, etc. into one classroom? We expect out f2f learners to make some effort to gather resources and materials outside the classroom. Why not expect the same of our online learners? I don’t see the need to limit the online classroom to a single site. I do see the need for structure, balance and clarity, but I feel it can be accomplished while also opening the doors to the virtual classroom as we do the f2f classroom.
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:28 am
The online courses I’ve taken include required and suggested readings on blogs and other sites.
The alternative would be to get permission & “paste” everything into the course site. Or considerably “dumb down” the content.
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:44 am
I went to a session this weekend at a conference about “Face to Face or Cyberspace” and we discussed advantages or disadvantages of taking an online course. This professor teaches the same course online and another section as a face to face. She shared the evaluations of the courses including positive and negative statements. She didn’t see many differences in test scores so concluded that the success of the course mainly depended on what kind of access the students had to the internet (dial up, etc.) and what kind of tech skills the students had. It was an interesting discussion.
March 2nd, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I agree - students of both online and f2f courses need to be able to gather, evaluate and share and discuss information from a variety of sources. What bothers me most about many online courses is their closed nature. I understand the need to provide a safe learning space, especially for younger, less experienced learners, and the desire to maintain control of intellectual property within a course but as soon as discussion, forums, chats and other communications disappear behind a portal you are effectively confining meaningful interaction to just the individuals enrolled in the course. Always seemed like a silly idea to me. See ‘Cone of Silence’ video from Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLZKEre3yJ0
March 2nd, 2008 at 8:43 pm
I’ve found its the older students coming back for a degree that need the safe environment. The average 18-24 yrs old has grown up online. They are totally comfortable using a variety of tools.
The one sign on to me is a support issue more than anything. At ecu we use Bb, Turnit In, Centra as our main tools. It’s a pain in the a** to remind students what user and password to use for what tool. Makes little sense to me.
March 3rd, 2008 at 6:59 am
I understand the concept of keeping course content and activities in one place as a way to keep user confusion down. However, when that one place is a CMS that isn’t compatible with some browsers and isn’t designed for user-friendliness then those advantages are lost.
Jean, I loved that video. It really does remind me of the closed environment of putting everything into a CMS (they’re using a system that doesn’t work well for the users in an attempt to lock-down information).
March 3rd, 2008 at 8:35 am
I think there is a difference between open source tools and open educational resources. An open source CMS like Moodle can be locked down as tight as any commercial CMS. One can also choose to open the courses up so that anyone can view the resources within it. The issue to me is access to the resources and work that I, as a learner, have done. Once a course on a CMS like Blackboard or Moodle, is over and a student is removed from that course, do they still have access to the content they created? Tools that are more open and more easily controlled by teachers and students can continue on long past the end of the formal course. The learning community need not stop if we can have the course resources distributed in tools like blogs, wikis and social spaces like Ning. There may be an inconvenience for having multiple logins but in my opinion that is a small price to pay for having the choice to continue the conversation and the learning after the course is finished.