Teaching & Learning Online

New Pedagogies for New Technologies

John Stephenson, John Stephenson

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781135382414
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Bildung
• Categoria: Bildung Allgemein

A guide to teaching and learning online. It presents a wide range of experience and research findings from leading practitioners and organizations around the world, including case studies from the Open University, the BBC, ICL and leading international academics.

Part 1
From theory to practice: the academics

The main focus of the items in Part 1 is pedagogical, not operational, although each chapter is grounded in some practical experience of online learning. The authors review the challenges and opportunities of online learning from their own distinctive pedagogical perspectives. Alexander and Boud take an experiential view of learning, arguing that online learning is, in itself, a misnomer. It is more appropriate to see online learning as a tool or support for learning that will substantially take place offline. Mayes presents a strong case for a constructivist view of education and sees ways in which well-constructed online learning can sustain such an approach. Hase and Ellis argue that learning as a whole should be much more learner managed even than conventional distance learning. They further argue that online learning has the capacity, if used appropriately, to help bring it about. The authors of all three items share the view that, without careful structuring, online learning is likely to replicate the pedagogical stance of its designers and users.

1
Learners still learn from experience when online

Shirley Alexander and David Boud
University of Technology, Australia

Editor's introduction

Alexander and Boud argue that much of the potential for online learning is being lost because too much of the pedagogy of online learning has been transferred unreflectively from didactic traditional teaching where the computer substitutes for the teacher and textbook as conveyor of information. A more productive approach is to regard online learning as an example of learning from experience using a new medium and access to new resources. The authors draw on work about how learners learn from complex experience and show how these ideas can be used to conceptualize opportunities and constraints in online learning. Five propositions about learning from experience are illustrated with examples of how online learning can be used to facilitate rich experiences beyond those available in other media.

Over the last two decades there has been a steady rollout of new information technologies such as multimedia-capable computers, the ever-increasing power of which is accompanied by a reduced cost. More recently, the rapid growth of the Internet has resulted in enthusiastic claims for technology's ability to provide high-quality education for all. This combination of factors has created a climate in which investors and entrepreneurs have identified online learning as a major market area of the future. In many cases the predictions for growth are accompanied by claims that the technologies will lead to 'revolutions in learning' and those revolutions are often attributed to the particular information and communication technologies (ICT) themselves.

The rise of the new technologies has coincided with a crisis of confidence in traditional education and increasing demands for higher and continuing education that have not been able to be adequately met by institutions constrained by years of public sector financial stringency and regulation. Information and communication technology has been looked to as providing solutions to a wide variety of problems.

The use of ICT in learning

There is no doubt that the physical environment has a surprisingly powerful influence on teaching. The lecture theatre makes possible certain forms of large-group presentation; the overhead projector makes possible the presentation of text and images to all those in the room, and the networked computer makes access possible to a vast range of digitized information. The environment makes some activities possible and constrains others but it does not change the fundamental processes of human learning. Students still need to actively engage with what is to be learnt; they still have to have ways of expressing their understanding if they are to be confident that they have learnt and they need to feel that what they are doing is worthwhile.

However, in the most basic sense, the online learning environment is just another physical environment: more complex than some others, but a new space for teaching and learning. Technology itself does not improve learning (Alexander and McKenzie, 1998). Its use makes possible some kinds of activity (such as one-to-one communication with many different people) and limits others (such as spontaneous spoken conversation). Until recently it has been seen by many educational practitioners as an alien environment in which those with an interest in teaching and learning in non-digitized environments (that is, most teachers and educational developers) are somehow deskilled and rendered unable to contribute effectively to the discussions about the new medium. With some notable exceptions, developments have often been driven by those wanting to explore the limits of technology rather than understanding how it influences learning.

Acceptance of the online environment as just another space for learning does not deny its potential to reconceptualize what is possible in teaching and learning. We observe that it has generally failed to do this so far. Online learning has been far more successful in eliminating the limitations of time and space for learning transactions with origins in face-to-face and text-to-text encounters.

In this chapter we argue that greater acknowledgement should be given to the fact that most of what we know about teaching and learning is applicable in all learning environments, including online. We further argue that, given the nature of the medium, it is particularly productive to view online learning as examples of students' learning from experience. The ideas on which we draw are represented in two previous projects. The first is collaboration between the second author and a group of educators who were interested in making sense of how we learn from complex experience. This resulted in the books Using Experience for Learning (Boud, Cohen and Walker, 1993) and Working with Experience: Animating learning (Boud and Miller, 1996). The second is an evaluation study undertaken by the first author in which she was commissioned to undertake a national study on how the use of information technologies in universities benefits student learning. The subsequent report An Evaluation of Information Technology Projects for University Learning (Alexander and McKenzie, 1998) was the first study that investigated how the large number of projects supported by an Australian government funding agency were or were not contributing to learning.

Our interests lay in the ways in which learners approach learning tasks, the conceptions they have about what they are doing and the factors that influence learning in complex environments. We intend to draw upon what we know about learning from experience to illuminate some of the issues involved in online learning and to suggest that it is helpful to conceptualize online learning as a process of students learning from experience. We start with some observations about early uses of online learning and proceed to examine more recent ideas.

Opportunities for online learning

Much of the early use of the Internet in teaching has been to automate existing practices in a way that appears 'up-to-date' but which is essentially a more time-consuming and expensive way of reproducing existing (and often ineffective) practices. The reproduction of lecture notes on a Web site, for example, when coupled with an automated version of multiple choice questions to test the students' ability to memorize the material, has been a popular early method of 'teaching online'.

E-lectures

The teaching strategy that has been used for centuries is lecturing - an expert telling groups of students what they should know. Attempts to describe the learning that results from the teacher's actions have resulted in descriptions of the very different reactions and responses that students have (see, for example, Ramsden, 1992).

Some lecturers have attempted to break down this one-way method of communication by using various techniques such as buzz-groups so that students have an opportunity to discuss and compare their understandings with others but, by and large, students spend most of their time listening and writing notes. The effectiveness of this technique has been reported as not being as great as many obviously assume given the popularity of this technique (Bligh, 2000).

The news about lectures is not all bad, however. They can have an impact in stimulating and motivating student interest in a subject. A teacher's personal enthusiasm for a subject can be transmitted through non-verbal behaviours such as eye contact with students, voice projection, body language and story telling. Students can be stimulated by seeing and hearing a person talking about what excites him or her, and provoked by observing an expert showing or demonstrating alternative ways of thinking about problems. This physical presence of the lecturer who uses a variety of communication strategies conveys to students that what they are learning is not something that is disembodied, but something that is humanized. Lecturers who rarely, if ever, use these techniques invariably receive poor feedback from students.

Despite what we know about effective and ineffective lecturing, much of what is passed off as 'online learning' or 'e-learning' is little more than lectures that are delivered online in the form of text, audio and/or video. E-lectures have been described by Harasim et al (1995: 125) as a way of 'providing a crucial concept or technique that students need to be able to apply to a problem or discussion'. In the case of text and audio-delivered lectures, gone are many of the motivational aspects of the teacher's physical presence as described above and their ability to respond to the cues presented by a live audience. There is, however, some potential added value in online learning such as that described by Paulsen (1995) who notes the particular advantage of providing the opportunity for guest experts from around the globe to contribute to a class by posting excerpts of articles, statements and so on.

Despite their potential for stimulation, lectures and their electronic form (e-lectures) are clearly regarded as a way for students to be exposed to a body of information. The over-emphasis of knowledge transmission characteristic of the conventional lecture-based courses is often reproduced in new media. As has been noted above, the delivery of information per se does not promote the kind of learning outcomes that constitute a university education where independent thought, reflection and abstraction are valued. It is critical, therefore, for learning designers to provide activities to facilitate students' engaging with and making sense of that content. These complementary activities should provide opportunities for students to find a bridge between what they already know, and that which they have read, heard or seen in the e-lecture. Students need opportunities to reflect on the ways in which their individual understanding aligns with that of the lecturers, and the ways in which it is different. Without such activities, learners may attempt to simply memorize information contained in the lecture so they can reproduce it in examinations or other assessment activities but be unable to use it.

The activities should also provide opportunities for students to actively construct their own understanding of the subject matter. We know that learning is never a passive act. It involves active construction and reconstruction of ideas and experience, usually through a range of carefully designed activities by a teacher who not only has expert knowledge of the content area, but also knows about the ways in which students come to understand that content (Laurillard, 1993). Designing these activities is one of the most important roles undertaken by teachers. To abrogate that role to the student, as occurs when e-lectures are used in isolation from other activities, is to deny the important professional role of the teacher and place a greater burden on individual learners than they are able to carry.

Finally, the complementary activities should promote the social construction of understanding. Ε-lectures, in isolation of other activities, do not facilitate the important discussion in which the learners' own experiences are interpreted and tested against those of others, resulting in the construction and reconstruction of ideas and meaning.

Learning from experience

Before proceeding to look at what we regard as more productive uses of online learning, we will consider what is known about learning from experience. Learning from experience is neither a special activity nor one that needs to be facilitated by others. It is what human beings do all the time throughout their lives. It can be useful, therefore, to examine formal teaching and learning activities from the perspective of what we know about learning from experience. This enables us both to see some of the ways in which this understanding has been ignored and how learning events can be redesigned to make them more effective experiences for those involved.

The earlier study identified five propositions about learning from experience that have informed a vast array of rich educational practice in the non-digitized world (Boud, Cohen and Walker, 1993). These are:

• Experience is the foundation of, and the stimulus for, learning. All learning builds on what has gone before. A new experience is understood in terms of what is already known. The desire to learn emerges from the experience of the learner, either arising from an existing commitment or from the challenge of a new situation.
• Learners actively construct their own experience. Learning is never a passive act. It involves active construction and reconstruction of ideas and experience. Only the trivial or the fragmentary can be learnt by rote and even then there can be considerable expenditure of effort on the part of the learner. Learning can be enjoyable and engaging, but only when the learner is substantially involved.
• Learning is a holistic process. Learning, even of academic subjects, is never solely a cognitive endeavour. It involves the emotions and the will. A focus on one to the exclusion of others creates a partial and impoverished experience. Satisfaction derives from engaging as a whole person.
• Learning is socially and culturally constructed. Learning does not occur in isolation. Peers influence it, by social and cultural expectations and by what is accepted by the community as legitimate outcomes. In order to learn we all need interventions from outside ourselves whether these are the direct influence of others or their indirect influence transmitted through learning resources.
• Learning is influenced by the socio-emotional context in which it occurs. Learning does not occur in isolation and it is not a purely intellectual enterprise even when dealing with academic subjects. The extent to which we can sustain learning over time is a function of the emotional and personal support we can gain from others. The extent to which we are motivated to learn depends as much on the context of learning as it does on intrinsic interest in the object of study.

Realizing the potential of interactivity

In contrast to the automation of transmission modes of learning, characteristic of e-lectures, other practitioners have seen the Internet not as a tool primarily for the dissemination of content (the automation of books, papers and so forth) but as one to facilitate communication between students, and between students and their teachers. The emergence of online learning strategies such as computer conferencing, including online debates and role-play/simulation...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: From theory to practice: the academics
• Part 2: Researchers
• Part 3: Practitioners
• Part 4: Transition
• Part 5: Designers and producers
• Part 6: The vanguard
• Endpiece: Learner-managed learning - an emerging pedagogy for learning online
• Index