Online Education

Foundations, Planning, and Pedagogy

Anthony G. Picciano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351851077
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Online Education is a comprehensive exploration of blended and fully online teaching platforms, addressing history, theory, research, planning, and practice. As colleges, universities, and schools around the world adopt large-scale technologies and traditional class models shift into seamless, digitally interactive environments, critical insights are needed into the implications for administration and pedagogy. Written by a major contributor to the field, this book contextualizes online education in the past and present before analyzing its fundamental changes to instruction, program integration, social interaction, content construction, networked media, policy, and more. A provocative concluding chapter speculates on the future of education as the sector becomes increasingly dependent on learning technologies.

Chapter 1
Introduction to Foundations, Planning, and Pedagogy

In 1971, I taught my first college course on computer systems and programming. The student computer laboratory housed a remote job entry (RJE) station with a card reader and printer. Students keypunched decks of cards that contained their COBOL program instructions and datasets and then submitted them on the RJE station for processing on a mainframe computer that was housed miles away. Turnaround time was usually 10 to 15 minutes assuming there were no technical communications problems between the RJE station and the mainframe. When problems did occur, students might have to wait hours or until the next day to receive the results of their programming efforts.

In 1981, BITNET (“Because It’s There Network” which eventually came to mean “Because It’s Time Network”) was launched by the City University of New York, Yale University, and IBM. It provided basic data file transfer and email services using point-to-point or store and forward transmission where entire files and messages were sent from one node in the network to another node. At its height, BITNET included more than 500 organizations and 3,000 nodes. Connections to BITNET from home computers generally operated at speeds between 320 and 9600 bits per second.

In 1992, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation established the Learning Outside the Classroom Program later renamed the Anytime, Anyplace Learning Program. This was quite a significant development given that the Internet and World Wide Web as we came to know it did not exist until 1992 and didn’t become a major resource until the mid-1990s. Over the 20-year life cycle of this grant program, the Foundation made awards in excess of $72 million to colleges and universities developing online education programs.

In 2004, the University of Illinois at Chicago sponsored an invitation-only workshop to explore blended learning, a relatively new phenomenon which sought to integrate online technology into mainstream higher education courses. Thirty experienced online education course developers debated definitions, pedagogical techniques, and the possibilities of blending online learning into all aspects of college teaching.

In 2014, I gave the keynote address titled The Online Learning Landscape at a conference in New York City. The purpose of this talk was to provide an overview of the current state of online education and to offer possible scenarios regarding its future. After the address, an associate professor from a local community college came up to me and asked if I thought that she would be out of a job in ten years. I told her that I didn’t think she would be out of a job, but it was very likely that the way she teaches and the way her students learn would change. As instructional software evolves, making greater use of artificial intelligence and adaptive learning techniques, it is possible that teaching and learning will look very different in the not too distant future.

These ten-year scenarios of occurrences in my personal background provide examples and illustrate where I am coming from in presenting the material for this book. Online technology, as manifested by the ubiquitous Internet, has impacted all aspects of human endeavor including education. As a result, understanding this technology has become fundamental in the 21st century to understanding humankind’s existence including how we teach and learn from one another. The purpose of this book is to examine the foundations of online education focusing on its historical, theoretical, and pedagogical bases as well as its practical applications in our schools and colleges. These bases and applications are critical to understanding online education’s present proliferation as well as speculating on its future.

Foundations, Planning, and Pedagogy!

Foundations are the bedrock of a society, its organizations, and its functions. Foundations of education focus on the history, theory, research, pedagogy, and societal influences of what we do in schools. In the first part of this book, each of these will be explored as related to online education. It is important to understand them if we are to understand how online education has achieved its prominent position in what we are doing in education in general.

During the past several decades, there have been debates about the relationship between online education and distance education and whether the former is an outgrowth of the latter. Keegan (1993) conducted a review of the literature in the 1990s just as the Internet was evolving. He concluded that online technology had the potential to change the concept of distance education and make existing distance education theories and practices less applicable. He recommended research “theoretical or otherwise, to determine if virtual systems were a subset of distance learning or a new field of study in their own right” (Keegan, 1996, pp. 214–215). More recently, there have been several fine texts that begin with a distance education perspective that examine the foundations of online education such as Terry Anderson’s Theory and Practice of Online Learning (Au Press, 2009) and Michael Moore and Greg Kearsley’s Distance Education: A Systems View of Online Learning (Wadsworth Publishing, 2011). Building on Keegan’s work, they examine how online education has developed as the next technological step in the evolution of distance education following earlier radio, television, and videocassette-based course packs. But with the convergence (Tait & Mills, 1999) of distance and online education models and especially the development of blended learning models, the case can be made that online education has evolved as a distinct movement resulting in its own modes, applications, and dynamics. A case can also be made that online education evolved from earlier digitally-based instructional software as developed by B.F. Skinner, Patrick Suppes, Donald Bitzer, and others who focused on traditional education applications and not just on distance education. An important consideration of this book is that online instructional technology had much of its genesis in digital technologies developed for traditional learning applications and not solely or directly for distance education.

In the second part of this book, planning and pedagogy, or the application of technology for learning, will be examined. In the last 20 years, “how to” books and articles have proliferated offering recommendations and guidance on how to develop online programs and courses. While some of the “how to” is covered in this book, foundational contexts provide insights as to “why” certain approaches are appropriate and useful. Practices based on theories and concepts such as learning styles, teaching styles, community of inquiry, and blending with pedagogical purpose shape parts of this book. Critical aspects of developing online education applications including institutional planning, policy issues, instructional design, and library and student services are also considered.

Foundations, planning, and pedagogy help us to speculate on and plan for the future. The third part of this book suggests that online education as made popular by the Internet and World Wide Web, has a future that is both bright and threatening. The future is explored in depth in the concluding chapter of this work.

Definitions

This book focuses on online education as provided by the Internet and World Wide Web starting in the early 1990s. Online education applications using local and wide area networks existed before the Internet; however, the primary model that has evolved over the past 20 years relies on data and communications equipment that are owned and operated routinely by students in their homes, places of business, and increasingly on mobile devices. Large percentages of people living in countries all over the world are now using laptops, tablets, and cell phones to stay connected with family, friends, and their studies.

The term online education is defined as all forms of teaching and learning using the Internet. It refers to the plethora of names and acronyms that have evolved over the past two decades including: online learning, e-learning, blended learning, web-enhanced learning, hybrid learning, flipped classrooms, MOOCs (massive open online courses), and adaptive learning. Notice that the terms distance education or distance learning are not included in the previous sentence. While it can be argued that online education is the latest evolution of distance education, it is the position of this author, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, that online education is not just an evolution of distance education; it is a distinct entity that has provided new instructional models for all education and not just for students who study at a distance. Blended models, possibly the most popular use of online education technology today, have blossomed and represent instructional applications across a wide spectrum of education. However, a definition of blended learning is elusive at best and perhaps impossible because there are so many different varieties of it in operation at all levels of education. It will receive a more thorough treatment later in this book.

Allen and Seaman (2016) and Picciano and Seaman (2009) have conducted a number of studies on the development of online education. Their work, going back to the early 2000s, represents the most comprehensive treatment of the evolution of online education that presently exists. For the purpose of their national surveys, they defined an online or fully online course as one where 80% or more of the seat time is replaced by online activity. The word blended was used to designate courses where some percentage of seat time (less than 80%) was conducted online. Web-enhanced courses were defined as courses that do not necessarily replace seat time but have substantial Internet-based activity. The point is quickly being reached in education where the majority of all courses will have some Internet components ranging from the fully online to blended to Web enhancements. In a mere 20 years, online education has become integral to the delivery of instruction in our schools and colleges. No longer a novelty, it is becoming integrated into all teaching and learning. As Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle Corp., has often been quoted as saying “The Internet changes everything, I really mean everything” (Schlender, 1999).

Forces Shaping Education

While technology is considered as a driving force in bringing about change in our schools and colleges, it must be recognized that other developments both outside and inside of education are just as important. Social, political, and economic concerns focusing on global competition, income inequality, and social justice dominate and influence much of what is being done in education. Policymakers in countries around the globe see a desperate need to advance and improve education opportunities for their citizens. Primary, secondary, and postsecondary schools are seen as critical for their future and their stability. Investments are being made, but the resources frequently are not sufficient to address the needs of growing populations or years of neglect. In looking for economies of scale, online education increasingly is being considered as one of the vehicles for bringing education access to students at reasonable costs in countries desperate to catch up to those more economically advanced.

Even in the economically-developed countries, there is a concern that education systems are not doing as much as they can. In the United States, for instance, the call for more accountability and assessment has increased over the past 20 years as policymakers question whether the schools and colleges are as effective as they should be. Calls for school choice, common core curricula, and teacher accountability all relate to a desire on the part of policymakers to improve K–12 education while controlling costs. At the postsecondary level, there have also been calls for greater accountability and cost efficiency. The non-profit public higher education sector where the majority of American college students are enrolled has seen a significant shift in funding away from government subsidy to student tuition. Contingent faculty, especially lower-paid adjuncts, now teach the majority of all postsecondary courses. It is not by accident that public higher education systems have emerged (along with for-profit institutions) as among the most prolific in developing online education programs. They were forced to do so to meet student demand for their academic programs. Increasing enrollments and stagnant state government subsidies moved many public systems to adopt online instructional technology in hopes of stabilizing costs especially for capital and campus-building projects. As we approach the 2020s, practically all segments (non-profit, private, public, and for-profit) of higher education have embraced online technology as critical for their academic programs. The same is true for the K–12 sector where online technology has become integrated for many of the same reasons as it has in higher education.

Cost-efficiencies were not the only drivers for expanding online education programs. A good number of teachers and faculty saw the pedagogical benefits to integrating technology into their courses and programs. Many of the blended learning models, for instance, were not developed for cost efficiency as much as for pedagogical benefits. These models were seen as helping to prepare young people for 21st century skills. Finally, fully online models were seen as important vehicles for expanding education access to more students who, because of geographical distance or time commitments, found it difficult to receive an education in traditional brick and mortar institutions.

Technological Change

Much of this book will deal with technological change. Over the years, and especially as applied to education, digital technology has been both canonized and demonized as a vehicle for change, transformation, and disruption. This book will consider technological change in terms of evolution rather than revolution. The word technology derives from the ancient Greek “techne” that translates to art or craft-knowledge. It specifically refers to the knowledge and practice of making things. Technological change has been a fundamental aspect of human existence since homo-sapiens started to walk on two legs and possibly before. Stone tools, metals, and the wheel have each had a profound impact on how the members of our species have interacted with the environment and with each other. Aristotle wrote about and examined the dichotomy between things that occurred naturally and those that were made by humans. Francis Bacon in New Atlantis, written in 1623, presented a vision of society in which natural philosophy and technology coexisted in the centrality of human endeavor. Hegel’s dialectics— thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—served as a foundation for Marx and Engels in terms of the effect of technology on societies and the interplay of capital and workers. In the modern era, Neil Postman (1993) refers to the dialectic of technological change and warns of its light and dark sides. Clayton Christensen (1997) sounded the alarm throughout corporate America to be aware of “disruptive technology” that can...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• List of Boxes
• About the Author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction to Foundations, Planning, and Pedagogy
• SECTION I Foundations
• SECTION II Planning and Pedagogy
• Appendix A Case Studies in Online Education
• Appendix B Evaluation Criteria for the Administration of Online Education Programs
• Appendix C Evaluation Criteria for Blended Learning Programs
• Appendix D Evaluation Criteria for Quality Course Teaching and Instructional Practice
• Appendix E General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Overview
• Index