rhyl macfarlane's List: E-Learning

• Course material is accessible 24 hours a day 7 days  a week. Students have the ability to read and re  read lectures, discussions, explanations and comments.  Often spoken material in the classroom passes students by  due to a number of distractions, missed classes, tiredness  or boredom. 

       

• Using the internet to attend class, research information  and communication with other students teaches  skills in using technologies that will be critical  to workers in the 21st century business community that  works with colleagues globally and across time zones. 

       

•         8.
       

    Because online institutions often offer "chat rooms" for  informal conversation
• The online environment makes instructors more  approachable. Stude
• nts can talk openly with their  teachers through online chats, email and in newsgroup
• Online course development allows for a broad  spectrum of content. Students can access the  school's library from their PC's for research articles,  ebook content and other material without worries that the  material is already "checked out."
• Students often feel that they can actually listen to the  comments made by other students. Because everyone  gets a chance to contribute,
• Over 75% of colleges and universities in the U.S. offer  online degree programs, with online degrees
• Online classrooms also facilitate team  learning by providing chatrooms and newsgroups for  meetings and joint work.
• Students often comment that online learning lets them  attend class when fully awake
• Because there are no geographic barriers to online  learning, students can find a diversity of course  material

9 more annotations...

• Nearly a century before the Internet brought online learning to college and university life, American philosopher and progressive education champion John Dewey recognized that traditional classrooms often stand in the way of creative learning. Troubled by passive students in regimented rows, Dewey worried that students who accepted the unquestioned authority of teachers not only undermined engaged learning but also 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,”¹ encouraging “active, expressive” learning.²
• Taking up ideas suggested by Dewey and others, 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.
• Forming Groups in Face-to-Face and Online Learning
• Face-to-face teaching, the most common style of instruction and, consequently, the practice that seems most natural to people, is often valorized as the foundation against which all other methods are measured.³ Many people take for granted that the classroom is the normal place for learning, yet little evidence supports that assumption. The basic idea is that face-to-face students form a cohesive group, participating in discussion, listening to lectures, and building intellectual and social relationships with teachers and peers inside and outside class. But as Anthony Picciano pointed out, this is not always the case. Classroom students often feel alienated, drawing away from others and isolating themselves.⁴ While face-to-face interaction is often thought of as giving us perfect knowledge of student behavior, in fact, physical presence can often obscure crucial hidden social and psychological relations.
• Today, the unprecedented demands of online learning — specifically, finding ways to engage “invisible” students — have reclaimed Dewey’s ideas. Suddenly, the lessons of progressive education have become relevant, and Dewey seems 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 Dewey’s legacy.⁵

• Most universities have already introduced most of the technical infrastructure required to support virtual collaboration on campus, across the country, and around the globe. At most schools, virtual teams can be launched seamlessly without introducing high-end video conferencing or wall-to-wall visualization or engaging added technical personnel. Virtual teams can be set in motion on campus by exploiting currently installed commercial or freely available open-source software. As Anu Sivunen and Maarit Valo wrote:

  “Without the numerous tools and technologies now available to communicate and collaborate, virtual teams might never have become so widely successful. Because team members are often situated in distant geographical locations and since they rarely engage face-to-face, they must rely on robust communication technologies to accomplish their tasks.”⁶
• Tools for Communication

• Even with more sophisticated tools available, e-mail is the most common application employed by virtual teams. When real-time responses are not needed, e-mail allows team members to send well-crafted messages and gives recipients time to respond thoughtfully. Archived, messages are easily retrieved for review. In virtual teams, as in every other online environment, however, the common complaint is that e-mail contributes to information overload, causing stress and taking time away from other critical tasks.

  Information-sharing among team members often relies on text-based “threaded” discussions, an essential virtual teaming application housed on school-wide learning management systems or as part of groupware. In addition to forums, most learning management products offer other common features such as document distribution, grade books, live chat, and online testing. Collaboration software suites may also include calendars, application sharing, time-tracking, surveys, and content and workflow management, all designed to make it easy to share information online among team members.
• Forums are the principal channel through which team members communicate. Often used as bulletin boards to store messages and documents, forums open a space where students can post questions and instructors can broadcast answers to the whole team rather than responding to each student individually. Using forums prudently, instructors can dispense useful, widely applicable information to all.
• Perhaps the most creative aspect of discussion forums is their unexpected support for peer-to-peer communication, a consequence of online learning that follows Dewey’s principles of engagement as a key element in quality learning. In forums, team members interact with one another in ways that are very limited in conventional classrooms. They can engage in round-the-clock sharing, argument, and extended discussion — practices rarely open to students on campus.
• Blogs have emerged as a common web application that can replace discussion forums with many of the same options and extend them by combining text, images, and hyperlinks. With blogs, team members can categorize entries and restrict visitors’ postings to designated topics only. While blogging is fairly common, other instructors have turned to wikis as collaborative websites, permitting members to add and edit content. In some wiki applications, tracking allows team members to view the sequence of text changes and revert to earlier versions as needed.
• With online learning emerging as a highly competitive marketplace, a wide variety of meeting software is now available. Virtual team members can hold meetings online, with faculty and students delivering real-time audio slide presentations. More formal webinars typically provide limited interaction, but most offer chat and “hand raising” features aimed at stimulating student engagement. Some instructors encourage students to deliver their own webinars, giving students the chance to report on team projects in real time. Most webinars can be archived, permitting those unable to attend the option of retrieving missed presentations at any time. Archiving is also an essential feature used to review content later.⁷
• Podcasts allow team members to retrieve presentations on demand. With merely a microphone and recording software, students and instructors can easily create podcasts and upload them for easy access, including on mobile devices. Instructors frequently encourage students to produce podcasts to share their work with the team. Mobile phones have replaced landline instruments for many students. With their SMS capability, cell phones have transformed into a text-based asynchronous tool thanks to texting. Using Skype and other voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications, computers can link to high-speed telephone connections, permitting team members to call each other without charge. Teleconferencing, on the other hand, is not frequently scheduled by virtual teams. More recently, social networking and social media sites — such as Twitter, Friend Feed, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Delicious — give team members alternative and engaging ways of keeping in touch.
• Facilitating Virtual Teams
• Merely assigning students to groups and encouraging them to work together will not yield desirable results — students do not automatically transform into involved and thoughtful participants when they go online. Poorly prepared peer-to-peer learning can exacerbate status differences and generate dysfunctional interactions among students.⁸ At worst, virtual teaming can result in “the blind leading the blind” or “pooling ignorance.”⁹ Aided by university IT infrastructure, faculty must orchestrate online learning, building “intellectual scaffolding” and prompting students with projects, discussion topics, and questions that encourage them to think deeply, creatively, and interactively.¹⁰ Ironically, moving from physical to online space often requires faculty to become far more engaged than in the classroom. Instructors become facilitators, propelling students to engage in discourse through discussion and argument to generate and link ideas.
• At their best, online faculty achieve what is known as “teaching presence,” a constellation of actions that give students a vivid sense that virtual instructors are fully engaged.
• Teaching presence emerges from online faculty-student interaction and feedback that exploits e-mail, chat, discussion boards, webinars, and other applications that defy the limits of space and time.
• Unlike the time constraints imposed by the physical classroom, online instructors and students enter a borderless space, open to the possibility of continuous dialogue.¹² In asynchronous communication, the give and take of online discussion is conducted at a much slower pace, giving students and teachers time to reflect and more room for analysis, critique, and problem-solving.¹³
• Virtual teaming opens online space, allowing students to work together in pursuit of a shared goal or to produce a joint intellectual product. Student-to-student interaction in small groups permits the acquisition of knowledge and skill through collaborative help.
• For virtual teams to succeed, instructors must encourage students to practice collaborative skills — giving and receiving help, sharing and explaining content, and offering feedback but also interrogation, critique, challenge, argument, and conflict.
• With the teacher largely out of sight, whether online or on campus, student team members assume positions rarely taken before — as leader, facilitator, reporter, observer, or participant
• In virtual teams they play an entirely new and radical part, setting the stage for students to act on their own.

20 more annotations...

• • This is a really good tool
• showcase here please email us at showcase@pebblepad.co.uk