Is elearning really better?

For someone who works in elearning, I realize this might be a career-threatening question to ask, but it's not that I'm questioning the value of technology in learning, but that I'm struggling with the social and cultural values around technology and learning.

One of my tasks this week is to create the schedules for two hybrid courses I'll be teaching next week. The syllabi are ready, but I'm struggling with the schedules still. I know my learning objectives, and I know what results I want.

What I'm struggling with is what combinations of online and face to face (f2f) activities will be accomplish those objectives and produce the desired results.

Part of the problem is just scheduling. One of the hybrid courses meets only once a week, which means we've got 4 hours f2f then a stretch of a week of nothing but online. The students will mostly be first term students as well, which will mean they'll need LOTS of hand holding to adjust to this kind of class. But even for the course that meets twice a week f2f, the schedule is still less than ideal.

What would be ideal?

A schedule where we meet for about 6 hours a week f2f and 2 hours online for the first half of the course, then 3 hours a week and 5 online for the second half would be ideal. But I've yet to hear of a post-secondary institution with such flexible scheduling.

If I had a schedule like that, we could concentrate on learning the basics, practicing them in the lab, learning to collaborate within groups and as a whole class, then I could send them off to practice what they've learnt mostly on their own. That would fit the objectives of the course nicely, and it also follows the progression that writing naturally undergoes as well. Brainstorming is a mostly collaborative affair (even if the "collaboration" exists primarily in preliminary research, not discussion), and writing a mostly solitary one. So lots of f2f at first, followed by less direct contact and more remote, online contact as support for the writing would be ideal.

[At first I was going to write that the schedule would be unique to writing courses, but then I realized that might not be the case. Perhaps it would also be ideally suited for the teaching of science, or communication studies, or even engineering. I was going to say that teaching writing is more holistic and harder to divide into discrete units, but then thinking of my own science degree, I sometimes wonder if I might have had better insight into the discipline as a whole if all my classes weren't divided into distinct units, with testing and evaluation at the end of each of them. It made each topic seem so discrete from the others. Perhaps the scheduling of those courses could also do with some flexibility!]

Since I won't get my wish for needs-based scheduling, and will have to meet regularly online and f2f, I'll have to adapt the course. But that desire got me thinking about elearning in general.

There are a few things that I think I can state with relative certainty.

1. elearning has been around long enough that most educators are familiar with the concept. Early adopters still continue to push the envelope, but most post-secondary institutions and instructors (and a good number of primary and secondary school boards) are using at least some technology to "enhance" learning.

2. most educators did not experience elearning in their own education, and if they did, it was in its very early stages (I realize this is not universal, but note that I said "most") so it is sometimes a challenge to understand the learner's experience.

3. learners (particularly post-secondary learners) are generally familiar with at least some of the elearning technologies they will encounter in the classroom, so that as a designer of elearning and blended/hybrid courses, you can count on most of your students/users familiarity with some of the basics.

4. elearning has changed so rapidly that there is little long-term research on the effectiveness of various technological solutions to educational problems, although most educators and designers would seem to feel that at least some technology has made the job of teaching (or the administration behind it) easier.

Perhaps you might challenge some of these assumptions, but they are based on my observations both in post-secondary classroom settings, and in the corporate elearning environment.

But the title of this post asked if elearning is really better because I have some doubts about it.

To be honest, my doubt does not arise from some kind of anxiety about technology itself. I think as a tool, technology provides us with a means to produce effective learning. What I do have reservations about is that in adopting technological methods to try to deliver learning, we are adapting our teaching to the technology rather than using the technology to aid our teaching.

I'll try to explain by describing a few experiences over the last few weeks that have got me wondering about it all.

A few weeks ago, I assigned an essay to my students. It's a challenging essay, but I've taught it before, and when students are prepared for the challenge, encouraged to undertake it, and then supported in the classroom through their questions about it, then generally perform fairly well. Not this time. This time, even with extra support and time, the students disengaged. They thought the essay too long. They thought it "irrelevant" to their lives. They didn't like that they had to look up some of the words they didn't understand (or they didn't even bother and just ignored their ignorance). They complained en masse about the length of the assignment. As I'm working on the schedule for this term, this complaint is on my mind and I'm trying to decide whether to use the essay again.

A week after this, two of my students bragged to me that they hadn't read a book since high school. Another one told me that even in high school he hadn't read a book - he would just read the back cover when required to write about it!

Also a few weeks ago, I watched this video over at Phendrana Drifts, which began to worry me. The students in the video seem to justify their non-reading of course material by pointing to how much time they spend on Facebook or their cell phones. The argument seems to be equating reading a textbook with reading a social networking page. Call me old fashioned, but I think the cognitive engagement involved in reading a textbook is qualitatively different than what is involved in reading a Facebook funwall.

Then a few days ago during a family discussion, my children told me that their friends think they use big words. They also said this is because I use big words at home, and that being surrounded by a large vocabulary it became natural for them to adopt the same.

I object. I don't use big words. I don't use a big word just to sound more intelligent than I am - but I will use a less than common word if I think that it more accurately represents what I want to say. I am a bit particular in that way.

But the discussion got me thinking about vocabulary and how one acquires it. I never spent time reading a dictionary to learn the words I know. Sure, I've looked up a few words in my time, but mostly I acquired vocabulary from reading and discerning through context what a word meant. Usually multiple contexts. I surrounded myself with language, and it became second nature to me to use the language that I've read.

A light dawned then. Although I've known for a long time that good writers are also readers, I'd always had a bit of a suspicion that at least some of my students wrote so horribly (and inimaginatively!) because they just didn't want to try. It really hit home during that discussion that they just don't have big enough vocabularies to actually write accurately. They just don't know enough different words to be able to express themselves, or describe things, accurately.

So maybe you can see what I'm thinking now. For myself, I know that the sustained effort of reading books, including long ones, and reading many of them, has trained me how to read long pieces of writing and has given me a large enough vocabulary to be able to understand most of what I read. If my students have read only a handful of books in their lives, and their only current reading consists of magazines and webpages, then when will they have had the opportunity to learn how to maintain interest in a longer piece of writing or to even understand enough of the words in it to know what they all mean?

The problem with elearning is that it encourages this kind of superficial engagement with the material in the course. This isn't to say that it isn't possible to create elearning opportunities that go beyond just the superficial, just that the association between online and superficial is strong.

For learners/users who are accustomed to short, pithy online writing like they find in email, instant messaging and social networking sites, this kind of superficial writing becomes associated with the medium in which they view it. So they come to expect everything online will be a sound bite, a short, focused piece of writing, or that it won't contain any big words. When confronted with writing online that requires a sustained, thought-provoking engagement with the material, how are they then to respond? There is a good chance they will respond by rejecting the material, because it involves a level of concentration and attention they are not accustomed to giving to online content.

All this makes me think that there is a real value to the old fashioned book. Books require discipline to sit down for extended periods of time, focusing your attention on only one thing. I realize that many of my students can focus their attention on only one thing for a long period of time - I do have plenty of gamers in my classroom. But there's a difference in cognitive engagement with a book, which requires active imagination of the action taking place, and the reaction to a video game, isn't there? I realize many games require active participation - more so than say television watching - but they still are passive at a certain level, aren't they? Even if the cognitive activity of gaming is equal to that of the book, things like vocabulary development are still absent.

But even if we don't bring back the book as the standard text for education, as an educator and elearning designer, I think it's important to work to create that kind of discipline in students. In corporate elearning, the sound bite works, but that's because elearning is a secondary layer of education that always pre-supposes a more formal layer of education in the form of a degree, or training. eLearning in the corporate world is usually for upgrading or skills maintenance. But in that first degree, the one post-secondary students (and even secondary students) are pursuing, one of the skills they will need to develop is the ability to stick with a project for an extended period of time.

The challenge, at least for me, will be to develop the depth of understanding that students need while at the same time using the technological tools at my disposal to do it. Part of the challenge will be re-training students to understand that just because it's online, doesn't mean that it won't be hard and they won't have to work at it. Shifting students' mindset from online = superficial to online = just another medium is a challenge I think those of us who work in elearning have to manage in order for the technology to really make a difference in how we teach. The difficulties of meeting this challenge is part of the reason why I question a wholesale embrace of elearning in the classroom. Without understanding the nature of the medium, it would be far to easy to dumb things down to the level students come to expect from online instead of challenging them to reach the levels of complexity the content requires.

I've run across an analogy a couple of times that is usually used to demonstrate the need for technology in education. The analogy compares surgery and education. A surgeon of 100 years ago brought into a modern surgery would not be able to perform surgery because so much has changed, while a teacher from 100 years ago would be able to teach in a modern classroom (aside from lacking knowledge of what's happened in the last century). In other words, the practice of surgery has radically changed, but the practice of teaching has not. This story is usually used to demonstrate how teaching needs to get on the technology bandwagon and upgrade itself.

But I have to wonder. Is the practice of teaching mostly the same as it was 100 years ago because it works? Is this a case of "if it's not broke, don't fix it"? Surgical survival rates are higher now, which demonstrates the success of the changes in surgical practice. But is teaching the same because we've already figured out a good way to do it? After all, by most measures we're smarter, more literate, and better educated today than we were 100 years ago. We must be doing something right, mustn't we? Is elearning just a case of unnecessary messing with something we already do well?