Are you an online evangelical?

What is your vision for online education? I've recently finished reading Edward Hamilton's Technology and the politics of university reform, and his position that there is nothing deterministic about online education, and how universities might apply it forces this question.

At the heart of Hamilton's critique is, broadly, who should determine the application of online technologies to higher education: administrators, or faculties. I'll clumsily try to summarise how Hamilton contrasts the two:

Think
"Think": Brian Siewiorek, Flickr
Administrators: Seeking efficiency and competitiveness (the evangelical discourse):
  • Inevitability of change toward efficiency and access
  • CAI (Computer Assisted Instruction) and automation
  • The virtual university
  • xMOOCs (illustrative of paradigm)

Faculties: Maintaining freedom and tradition
  • Harnessing technologies to extend traditional academic role
  • Experimentation based on faculty-driven innovation
  • Blended learning (online and on-campus)
  • cMOOCs (illustrative of paradigm)

In my view Hamilton polarises things unhelpfully; my personal view is very much between these extremes in ways more nuanced than Hamilton permits. Not all with backgrounds in distance education or wanting to see education more efficient, for example, would like to champion the xMOOC! I am convinced, though, that Hamilton's core thesis is the correct one: technology is ambivalent. Any agendas for online education are formed by us, so the question in the title of this blog is a very important one. What is your vision for online education?

I'd like to challenge you, dear reader, to give some thought to this - and feedback your own vision. Here's my own starter:

My vision for online education starts with a firm sense of education itself: the opportunity to broaden how one thinks, tailored to the theories and practices of an academic discipline. Online education is at its best where academics provide a subject with its voice; learning designers provide it with structure and support the development of learning activities; and students are required to learn the discourse of each subject as they develop interdependence of thought with other conversants. I think online education should be concerned with the cognitive development of students, in the context of a qualification-oriented learning journey, exercised at scale.

Thoughts, on what is surely one of the more important considerations of online education...?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A further update to "Reading and studying from the screen"

Image
Elevator tale: Like the previous post " An update to "Reading and studying from the screen " updating my 2016 paper " Reading and studying on the screen ", this post surveys various articles not previously considered. This time ten articles released subsequent to mine and a further thirteen not included are considered. The additional articles help to portray a much richer series of nuances to what it means to read on-screen and how comparison studies between on-screen and print reading might be furthered.  Image: Hobbies on a Budget, https://www.flickr.com/photos/62030038@N02/ Earlier this year I posted an update to my 2016 article in the Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning " Reading and studying on the screen: An overview of literature towards good learning design practice ". The article considered much, but not all, of the scholarship at the time related to how on-screen education might be advanced in the face of student preferenc
Read more

On AI in Ed

Image
I'm presenting a paper at next week's EDEN conference in Barcelona , on the topic of ethics for AI in education. In researching the paper, I took the time to get up to speed with some of the latest ideas. I read Frankish & Ramsey's Cambridge handbook of artificial intelligence and Boddington's Toward a code of ethics for artificial intelligence to ensure a good foundation on top of some article and internet research. Let me begin by saying that there is a HUGE array of literature already developed on the subject of AI in education (AIED). A regular AIED Society international conference generates substantial proceedings and there is at least one dedicated journal (the International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education ), ensuring that momentum is ongoing. In considering how AI might be applied in education it’s helpful to think about AI in terms of weak and strong forms. Weak AI is based on acting intelligently and the automation of specific ta
Read more

Into cognitive theory: Making it stick, How we learn, and more smudging

I recently finished reading Make it stick  by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roedigger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, published 2014 by Harvard University Press. The Kindle version is available here ; a summary version is also available on Kindle here . What I like about the book is summed up in this paragraph: Much of how we structure training and schooling is based on learning theories that have been handed down to us, and these are shaped by our own sense of what works, a sensibility drawn from our personal experiences as teachers, coaches, students, and mere humans at large on the earth. How we teach is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition. But over the last forty years and more, cognitive psychologists have been working to build a body of evidence to clarify what works and to discover the strategies that get results (p.7).  The difference is between common sense (likely a projection of our own preferences!) and evidence when it comes to promoting effective learning. Without giv
Read more