Making Online more F2F...

When I started this course, I thought online schooling was in direct opposition to face-to-face learning.  You could have one or the other.  You were either going with the flow of technology or holding onto the past.  Which side are you on? I see now that this is not the case with strong third-place and blended educational environments that take advantage of the benefits of each mode of learning.  This is wonderful!

In reality though, I still think the extremes, f2f vs. online, are going to be directly compared for budgetary, administrative, and policy reasons.  Is this right?  Probably not, but there is a lot at stake for a lot of people and we are not just talking about for future students.

This realization got me thinking again about some of the problems that I originally had with online learning and the quality of student life and development.  Schooling and development is more than just book smarts.  It extends beyond academic standards to the development of students in other ways.

The OpenCourseWare initiative out of MIT supports this idea as they have made much of the content from their courses available online for free.  As altruistic and egalitarian as this program sounds, I think MIT is comfortable with this move because they know that the real value of an MIT education reaching far beyond lecture notes, readings, and assignments.  

• Athletics
• Clubs - Computers, Chess, Drama, etc...
• Student interaction
• Teacher interaction
• Interships and research
• Socialization
• Physical education
• Cambridge, MA and Boston 
• Other extra curricular activities

I've loved technology my entire life, but I am a skeptic when it comes to application and penetration.  I find that technology is too often portrayed as the much hyped panacea for everything... and I mean EVERYTHING.

This week I will be turning my attention to exploring whether purely online students can really make up for the loss of these extra curricular activities and see what people are currently doing.  I am going to concentrate on athletics and physical education since they are two things that I only have a vague understanding of how you might pull them off remotely.

I thought this was an interesting online fitness program.

“The difference between combat and sport is that in combat you
bury the guy who comes in second.”
Unidentified Navy SEAL on the Discovery Channel’s “U.S. Navy SEALs II” 1999

SEAL FIT Online Coaching Program

" ... Access to our Online Training Platform and Online Journal"

REsearch

Research is Necessary
For online schooling to succeed, research is necessary to find out what works and what doesn't.  I think research should be done both in-house and by third parties for completeness.  I am a HUGE proponent of data transparency and think that the best results will come when data is in the hands of motivated unknowns.  I bet some kid in the middle of nowhere will crunch through endless numbers to find the best high school program just right for her, before dropping out to sell her analysis for millions.... if she ever gets the data that is.

Privacy and Security
Before our heroine can get the data to produce her analysis to make her millions to catch the spider, many privacy and security issues must be overcome.  How much information can be released before infringing on student privacy?   All?  Some? Filtered data?  This question gets tricky pretty quickly when you think about all of the different things that can be captured nowadays in the digital realm.  IP addresses?  Access times? Submission times? Locations?  Video? Audio?  Contact networks? family income?  Lunch program?

From a security stand point, we have to be mindful of what researchers or girls in the middle of nowhere are going to do with potentially sensitive data.  Will they sell it with other identifying information?  Will they be able to protect it if it is not truly public?  Are schools equipped and knowledgeable enough to collect and store raw data effectively?  Technology is a beast that affords people great power without full understanding.

Technology Moves Fast
With technology advancing the way that it does, it will be hard to make apples-to-apples online program comparisons through the years.  Cutting edge technologies will be recycling bin fodder in just a few years.  It was interesting reading some of the articles that spoke about online learning just a few years apart and how different they were.  This trend is most likely going to accelerate as further innovation comes to education.

Who Should Have Access?
One of the questions that I had about research was who should have access to the data?  I say everyone. Should average joes on the street have access?  Should this information be sold like market data on the stock exchanges?  Should students and parents be given incentives to participate?  Maybe for more money for the school?  Would people exchange free cellphone minutes for giving up some personal information? Should people be allowed to individually opt-out?  Should parents have access to all of their student's work?  How much information about teachers and administration can be included with student data?

Can Data be Used Across Domains?
Can an online math class be compared to an online music or humanities class?  Is that fair?  Is all of this research ultimately overly narrow with limited applicability?

These are all questions that are bouncing around my head.  This week was interesting, but not as interesting as it could be since we were mainly reading...  The next couple of sessions should be fun as we are off to explore some of these ideas with our own research!

I almost forgot my picture!

In college, I would always flip through REsearch magazine while waiting in line at Tower Records... always an interesting read.

Meta this, meta that...

Studies related to technology are somewhat frozen in time.  By the time that they are produced, they are already dated.

Metaanalysis is a wonderful stop gap technique, but should not take the place of actual first-hand studies.  I hadn't read papers using effect sizes in forever, so I had to review my stats to make sure that the methods that I was familiar with were the ones that they were using in the studies.

I still find it interesting that there aren't baseline academic metrics yet.... like they would emerge in the weeks since I last noted this.  It seems like someone should market an "online education rating" service to do this.  Anyone want in?  The more schools that get involved, the more necessary it becomes for others to publish specific and timely academic metrics.  Kind of like a Moody's rating service, but for schools... and without the conflict of interest that throws the world into financial peril.  Paying a profit making establishment to rate you provides too many incentives that can lead to doom.  We don't need an educational crisis of financial proportions.  Can this be done efficiently by a third-party?  I would think so.

There was a lot of talk of meta this week, but I would like to see a meta-recommation that creates a consolidated data and practice recommendation based on the recommendations from all of these studies.  I am sure that I'm losing some great ones from week to week.

The reports this week were interesting, but I felt like I was reading, and reading, and reading, etc...  I still want to know who gets their hands on them?  Who reads the THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION?  Can parents find these reports?  Can teachers?  Can students?  We know it is out there, but who else is reading?

The Hughes paper touched on the subject of cheating... "support" as she called it...  I have been ignoring this aspect of online learning entirely, making the assumption that people are learning for the sake of learning, but this is naive.  Maybe for a college student.... Just maybe, but for K-12?  I think I need to think about this some more.  We discussed this for a second in our group, but thought that it was outside the scope our our project.  Should curriculum designers overly concern themselves with this?  Should an online teacher?

From an assessment standpoint, it should be a hassle to cheat for the majority of students. With digital rights management for example, a level of protection that thwarts the majority of "casual" pirates is good enough because they know they can't do anything about "motivated" pirates.

To what lengths must teachers and writers ultimately go in light of the fact that we are moving into technologies that are abstracted and obscured from all but techies?  This is like the analogy that I made previously about people no longer being able to DYI tinker on their cars anymore because of all of the computer assistance.

... but they didn't.

There was no chem regents that year because of "motivated" pirates.

My final grade was my regents grade and that was fine with me.

Should teachers and unit designers plan for this case?