The trend towards online and distance learning courses at the university level has increased for the past decade and will continue to do so. The National Center for Education predicts there will be 18.2 million undergraduate students enrolled in long distance courses by the year 2013. And today, 90% of all industries surveyed state that video-conferencing is an integral part of their communication systems, whether it be for training or international meetings. Though the educational worthiness of these online courses is still in question, this technology and its integration into the college landscape are certain. For anyone involved in teaching and learning, or instructional technology, it seems to be the time to do some research and experimenting with online courses. So I jumped right in. I have just finished taking a three-day online seminar in Higher Education and Social Justice. I was online for about 6 hours each day and to my surprise it was great!
The seminar platform was through Adobe Conference Pro, which is basically an online series of conference rooms equipped with streaming video and audio as well as screen sharing and document display tools. Students and faculty just sign into their appropriate room and click on the camera and microphone options and all of a sudden you are talking and seeing anywhere from 3 -20 people all looking back at you from their kitchens or their offices. Talk about cacophony! It is like a moving imagery of inhabitants across the country all squeezed onto your computer screen. There is an amazing sense of intimacy, you are invited right into someone’s home and with a little scrutiny you can imagine so much about their lives, yet every time you get up to get a drink of water you are in your own house and no one is there.
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When the seminar really began, I found myself extremely concentrated on listening and taking notes on the speaker or questions from other participants. It takes discipline to wait one’s turn for discussion and debate as well as having noted content references in order to remind everyone where your question falls within the discussion. These are all strong academic skills and I found that I could not stop using these skills throughout the entire weekend. I can certainly see this as a significant skill for many students. Score one point for video-conferencing and learning. Another skill area that demands a lot of concentration is handling the many channels of communication going on at once. There are visuals, audio, texting, Power Point and keeping track of who has raised their hand, this all at once. Most undergraduate students can handle this multi-channeling, but I believe there is a generational divide and it is more cumbersome for others. Moderating online is also a demanding skill in communication and concentration. At one point each participant was asked to moderate the Q&A of someone else’s PP presentation. This was not easy to do and I can see it fast becoming a desired professional skill for the 21st century. Score another point for video-conferencing and learning.
There was a lot of fooling around at the very end of the weekend as many participants had gotten the habit of the technology and started to play around with our online classroom. Someone in California declared that the cats in NY were making the Vermonters sneeze, and people offered wine across state lines and so on and so forth. Score another point for bonding.
But the main question still remains. Was their real academic learning and can it replace the face-to-face? The answer is yes and no. I walked away from several of my courses with a deeper understanding of how people really look at Social Justice and of how complex our own versions of it really are, and that the philosophies of a just society are as transferable to media literacy and criticism as they are to Human Resource Management. I walked away with a list of books to read from faculty and participants, and I have notes on feminism, religion, education and social responsibility up the wazoo.
Though I feel very positive about this experience and think there might be some real potential in this sort of distance video-conferencing as a learning environment, there are some important points that I feel led to the success of this weekend. For one, I want to emphasize there was extensive training beforehand; we had three live online training sessions before the weekend. This seems crucial to the level of ease for each participant with the technology and perhaps for the sense of community later enacted during the online sessions. As well, this was an experiment in an ongoing Doctoral program and most of the participants have already had face-to-face courses together. This fact is central in thinking about an online learning experience. I believe the seriousness and sense of community that occurred this weekend was largely due to the academic level of the participants and their prior knowledge of what would be expected of them in the online seminars. These are significant aspects of this particular online experiment and I am not sure what the experience would have been without these two components.
So, yes I learned, and no, the human factor of prior face-to-face courses can not be ignored. It is a must, which cannot easily be replaced by video-conferencing software.
As always there needs to be more research and experimentation in this area and I will do some follow up interviews with the other participants and hopefully post on their experiences as well as my own. For the moment, my initial reaction is our students are walking into an amazing Internet world where the limits seem to me boundless. But there are major communication skills needed to make our students the actors in this world and not passers by.