Laura Sexton's List: Online learning

• • Misconceptions: "essentially 'teacher-less'"
    "easy to pass--and easy to cheat in"
    "only good for highly motivated, highly able students (or conversely for dropouts in need of remediation)"
    "isolated from their peers and short-changed on important socialization skills"

• the "age-old concerns about ethical    practices in assessment … take on new twists in the distance-learning environment"    (Abbott, Siskivic, Nogues, and Williams 2000)
• on online assessments; instead of developing codes or passing    erasers, students pass private emails, which instructors have no means of    intercepting. In some cases, students can also download an assessment, look    up the answers before actually taking it, and share those answers with classmates.    Instead of using crib notes or writing answers within the margins of the textbook    or on the desktop, students simply use the "verboten" sources during    the assessment.
• According to Hinman (2000), there    are three possible approaches to minimizing (online) cheating and plagiarism:    first, there is the virtues approach. The virtues approach seeks to develop    students who do not want to cheat. Second is the prevention approach, which    seeks to eliminate or reduce opportunities for students to cheat and to reduce    the pressure to cheat. Finally, there is the police approach, which seeks    to catch and punish those who do cheat.
• • Parents probably do these assessments sometimes
• The first and most serious disadvantage is    the instructor’s inability to ascertain who is actually taking an online assessment

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• it is likely that students need be highly self regulated and responsible for organising and reflecting on their learning. Indeed, this is one of the purported advantages of the online environment - it is thought to require and encourage self directed learning that is central to the concept of "lifelong learning".
• As the semester progressed, they picked out the essentials of learning online (as they interpreted the intentions of the coordinator and tutors) and tailored their use of the online environment to try to maximise their assessable contributions and minimise problems.
• For most interviewees the online learning environment significantly lacked what they called "interaction" by which they meant face to face communication. The value they set on "interaction" appears to be related to opportunities it affords to obtain immediate feedback; to engage in spontaneous exchange of information and ideas; and to seek cognitive and affective clues from the coordinator, tutors and other students to guide their learning.
• Most of these students were saying in effect that learning is a social rather than a solitary pursuit and the online environment dose not provide the same social structure and support they were used to and expected to have. For example, some students referred to learning online giving them a feeling of 'unreality':
• I feel like I'm not really connected and maybe I'm slipping behind or I've got no idea what's going on but you, know. I think if you examine that though it's ok, it's all there on-line, I know that. But I just always feel better after I've had some live contact.
• Recommendation 2: Acknowledge the affective dimension
• Ways should be found to stimulate students' positive feelings towards the online environment.
• Frank discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of learning online should therefore be encouraged.
• Older students in our study tended to feel more competent with and adjusted to online learning even if it was a new experience for them.
• At this stage in the development of the online learning environment units should not be totally online
• The online mode should be used for what it is best at, which for these students is for linking material, for researching the literature and for (in some instances) discussion.
• Mixing online components with face to face tutorials, workshops or seminars seems to be called for at this point in the development of online education.

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