Most students do not want an online education, and many are calling for reductions in tuition fees to compensate for what they perceive might be a lower-quality education and experience. Some might choose to wait for a return to on-campus delivery.
Most professors do not want to teach in an online environment because they value engaging with students in discussions, debates, and laboratory demonstrations. There are many good pedagogical reasons why most post-secondary education continues to take place in a face-to-face, on-campus delivery mode despite the longstanding availability of technology to support online teaching.
Professor and student preferences aside, there is a more pressing problem looming.
There is precious little time for professors to change all of their courses to an online mode of delivery.
Nova Scotia Universities and Colleges need a significant and urgent infusion of funding from the provincial government to cover the increased costs of converting post-secondary education into an entirely different mode of operation over the next three months. Universities cannot be expected to cover those costs alone, and neither should students.
Importantly, today’s educators in the digital-era have a range of new teaching methods, activities and resources they can consider when choosing their learning designs. Although the traditional face-to-face lecture is not dead, delivering a monologue for an hour to a passive audience of learners is hardly the gold standard of good teaching in the 21st Century–irrespective of delivery mode. This point should not be overlooked in the rush to replace conventional teaching with live online sessions using platforms like Zoom.
Most importantly, what we want to avoid is using old 19th Century teaching methods on new 21st Century technologies to merely dump large volumes of undigested information down large digital diameter pipes to relatively inactive and passive learners.
ICDE has a series of forthcoming webinars you can join and you will find around a dozen different types of online course offerings available right now for educators on our NIDL Resource Bank.
National Research Council’s (2000) four types of learning environments: assessment-centered, community-centered, knowledge-centered, and learner-centered.
Moving instruction online can enable the flexibility of teaching and learning anywhere, anytime, but the speed with which this move to online instruction is expected to happen is unprecedented and staggering.
“Online learning” will become a politicized term that can take on any number of meanings depending on the argument someone wants to advance.
Online learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option
Researchers in educational technology, specifically in the subdiscipline of online and distance learning, have carefully defined terms over the years to distinguish between the highly variable design solutions that have been developed and implemented: distance learning, distributed learning, blended learning, online learning, mobile learning, and others. Yet an understanding of the important differences has mostly not diffused beyond the insular world of educational technology and instructional design researchers and professionals.
Typical planning, preparation, and development time for a fully online university course is six to nine months before the course is delivered. Faculty are usually more comfortable teaching online by the second or third iteration of their online courses.
In contrast to experiences that are planned from the beginning and designed to be online, emergency remote teaching (ERT) is a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances. It involves the use of fully remote teaching solutions for instruction or education that would otherwise be delivered face-to-face or as blended or hybrid courses and that will return to that format once the crisis or emergency has abated.
A full-course development project can take months when done properly. The need to “just get it online” is in direct contradiction to the time and effort normally dedicated to developing a quality course. Online courses created in this way should not be mistaken for long-term solutions but accepted as a temporary solution to an immediate problem.
10 years ago, we should have taught faculty how to be better at the internet: to design for privacy, security, accessibility. Even how to use keyboard shortcuts. Anything else but lecture capture, online quizzes, and boilerplate feedback. 1/2
10 years ago, we should have taught faculty how to be better at the internet: to design for privacy, security, accessibility. Even how to use keyboard shortcuts. Anything else but lecture capture, online quizzes, and boilerplate feedback. 1/2
This course is designed to introduce you to teaching online – the concepts, competencies, pedagogies, and practices that are required to plan, develop, and teach an online course. Along with introducing you to these key topics, this course will showcase the perspectives of students, faculty, and instructional designers who have a wide range of experience teaching and learning online.
44. Teaching in an online environment should be a team effort. You should be
able to call upon technology specialists, instructional designers, and many
others to help you develop and implement your course.
May 17, 2013 2:00-3:00 pm ET – free to all. Presenter; John Sener
This MOOCOW (Massive Open Online Course Or Whatever) to explore John Sener’s book “ The Seven Futures of American Education: Improving Learning & Teaching in a Screen-Captured World.”
NOTE: Login instructions for the session will be sent in the Registration Confirmation Email. Please check your Junk folder as sometimes these emails get trapped there. We will also send an additional login reminder 24 hours prior to the start of the event.
Stritto, R. A. T. and M. E. D. (2021). What is the Future of Online Education? The Perceptions of Instructors with Over a Decade of Online Teaching Experience. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 24(4). https://www.westga.edu/~distance/ojdla/winter244/thomas_stritto244.html
Rather than asking if online education is going to replace “traditional” education, institutions need to think through how different modalities can meet student needs. Institutions can also communicate with students about the tradeoffs associated with different educational modalities, so that students can choose courses that are the best fit for their lives.
