Online education was reviewed three years ago preceded by Oscar Wilde’s quote “All modern educational theory is radically wrong. Fortunately, in England, in any case, education has no effect.” My intent was to amuse, rather than denigrate, online education, although the conclusions reached in the literature at the time about its success were mixed. This special issue comprises a series of articles primarily from people working in various parts of the world; content and technology are very well balanced.
You will notice that there is a noticeable tendency to address the difficult but essential topic of evaluation discussed by Merisotis and Phipps. James Merisotis and Ronald Phipps are senior staff members at the Higher Education Policy Institute in Washington.
There seem to be roughly equal numbers of enthusiasts and skeptics, so Merisotis and Phipps’s conclusions are not surprising. During their review, they uncovered “several hundred articles, papers, and dissertations” and list what they consider to be the shortcomings of the research on the subject. They believe that “more emphasis has been placed on the utopian possibilities of technology and its potential to work as well as classroom instruction, but not enough pragmatism has been applied to allow a discussion about the practical implications of online education as complement to improve teaching and learning.” They also believe that technology can “take advantage of teachers’ time, but it cannot replace most human contact without significant loss of quality.”
Gordon Joyes and Rachel Scott from the Center for the Improvement of Teaching at the University of Nottingham write about teacher shortcomings. They are commenting on a European project of ten universities called SteelCAL. New learning technologies are not effectively “integrated into the day-to-day practice of learning and teaching in most higher education institutions…the main reason is that many academics have been untrained and have little experience in using the new learning technologies.” information and communication technologies as a medium. educational tool.” Note that Joyes and Scott mention in “Full Evaluation” that they are comparing “the effectiveness of SteelCAL with an experimental group of students with a matched control group taught traditionally.” It will be interesting to hear exactly how they do it.As they say this exercise is “difficult to organize”.
Dr Martin Oliver, a member of University College London’s Higher Education Research and Development Unit, describes the difficulties of evaluating online teaching and learning. Speaking of the importance of evaluation, he says: “The drive to evaluate has not been matched by the support and training of the professionals who are supposed to carry out these processes.” He concludes that the issues raised in his article “represent only the starting point for an ongoing discourse on learning assessment and online teaching.”
Anthony Rosie’s article discusses his experience covering “meaningful engagement and enjoyment of learning” following ideas developed by Biggs, who suggests that “relational knowledge engages students in developing interconnected systems between concepts and approaches of learning with teaching as a contributor to this link”. .
Bernard Scott of the Center for Educational Technology at De Montfort University talks about the CASTE system for course design and the topic of “conversations” between the system and the student. Scott was associated with Gordon Pask, who died in 1996 and is considered the founding father of Cybernetics. Web of Science shows that Pask’s 1976 book on conversation theory has been cited 66 times since it was published. CASTE is being used at De Montford as part of a Master’s level program in learning and teaching.
Diana Thompson and Garry Homer are based at the University of Wolverhampton, which is also active at other sites in Shropshire, notably the new town of Telford. Wolverhampton and Telford are two of the few large cities in one of England’s most rural counties with a widely scattered population mainly engaged in agriculture. The authors describe the way IT training is carried out at all levels for people in the county.
Mr MJ Wood is the enterprising head of a Maidstone secondary school who recently won an award for his website. He is under no illusions about what needs to be done “on a scale of 1 to 20 to measure the potential use of IT in teaching and learning. I wouldn’t trust ourselves to go beyond a 1.” She comments on the climate of opinion at home: “If parents realize there is a shortage of textbooks in a school, they will quickly complain, but they still see access to computers as a luxury. One of our teachers discovered recently that 24 students out of a teaching group of 25 have access to the Internet at home. I suspect that next Christmas our students’ stockings will be filled with cheap portable devices that, among other functions, will provide Internet access” .