Colleges Consider Updated Pager Technology for Emergency Alerts

Am I the only one who thinks this is grotesque over-kill? (Pardon the violent metaphor.) How much funds, attention, time and effort does this system divert from education? Seriously, if a message is REALLY important, it only needs to reach one person in each place, who will make sure everyone there finds out. This seems to be about looking good and empire building more than it’s about safety. The University where I work hasn’t even figured out how to send their monthly test messages with a non-alarming email subject; this crying “Wolf!” more or less guarantees that many people will ignore any real message (of which I haven’t seen one yet). Is this just one more attempt to substitute technology for thinking? Universities spend SO MUCH money on junk, then wonder why they can’t afford a traditional faculty.

Text message systems have been slow? How slow are we talking about? How many emergencies happen in a year that justify this kind of technology? If less than one per year, how long do you think people will bother to carry around this device (or carry it in a place that they notice a new message on it) that doesn’t do anything for them month after month? I sense a case of trying to throw technology at a problem without adequately analyzing the human behavior aspects of the design. Mr Spera “wanting” his kids to carry it will have no bearing on what they would actually do.

Sounds it does as though H M Government may not know what a university is for.   Which might be a good thing, because if they did, they might very well not want any.

There is extensive research on this topic.  These anecdotal articles do little to inform the subject.
I’d suggest serious readers start with “Research in online and blended learning in the business disciplines: key findings and possible future directions.  J.B. Arbaugh (2009)

Also agreed. As someone pointed out in response to Part I of this blog, this author is inclined to treat as anecdotally interesting, topics for which 20 years of research exists and for which we are well past the stage of speculative anecdotes.

It would be one thing were the author’s speculation limited to questions equivalent to wondering aloud if we will ever have portable telephones, but it does not stop there. For example the author concludes,  

” . . . Finally, ‘Creative Teaching.’ An utter joke. The Online Network is simply ignoring the material circumstances of online teaching.” 

This conclusion is based on  . . . well . . . his opinion, unfettered by relevant facts. I don’t know what the hard evidence says with respect to dimensions of creativity by modality. I doubt that there are too many seminal studies on the topic (but that may be my ignorance showing). My personal opinion, based on many years of teaching in both general modalities, is that that this particular dimension is more-or-less empirically unrelated to modality but is related to pedagogy, learning environment structure, and teaching skill. That said, a rational person could hardly conclude that the question is a joke much less be certain that the answer was black or white..

(Amended from original post)

I appreciate your new direction. I can offer a few thoughts today and I know that many others out there have considerable expertise in online education. 

First, almost an aside, I suggest that the for-profit issue is an irrelevant distraction. Very few of the thousands of for-profit schools, colleges, and universities offer any online education at all. To varying degrees, the very large institutions do, thus the public attention. Even the pioneering University of Phoenix had 12 campuses and 50,000 students before they offered their first online degree. Today, they still enroll perhaps 200,000 students in traditional classrooms. 

Various models of online education are being refined in all types of institutions as well as in corporate and military education. Anyone who assumes that traditional universities occupy the high ground in this progress is uninformed.

It helps to recognize where we are coming from. While we expect scientific and technological progress in medicine, communications, physics, travel, and virtually every other facet of modern life, we academics still teach as if there were no such thing as learning and evaluation sciences. We teach largely the same way our grand-professors taught, ignoring 50 years of highly relevant scientific progress. The height of hypocritical behavior is seen when a learning scientist teaches the discipline via the 1906 “read this chapter/listen to me lecture/take an invalid multiple-choice mid-term and final” model while his subject matter constitutes the foundation for increasing the rate and generalizability of learning by 50% or more, depending on the discipline. 

When it comes to online education, one must first specify the general model before further principles can be specified. Synchronous or asynchronous? Facilitated or instructor led? Expert or novice learners? Horizontal and vertical learning components or vertical only? Structured curriculum with authentic activities and assessments or unrealistic and distant content that requires a high degree of extrapolation to apply? This is a very long list so I’ll stop here because I’m certain you get the idea.

In general, we in the professoriate are thinking of asynchronous approximations of the physical classroom when we think of online learning. This is one of the problems. Lacking creativity, we force the new virtual classroom into the Procrustean bed of the 1906 physical classroom with which we are comfortable. This creates a lose/lose situation, realizing the full potential of neither model.

Generalizing in this forum is, as you have learned, is a risky business. Thus, with all the usual caveats in mind, a well-designed async online learning environment:

– Is a highly scrutable environment, much more so than the standard physical classroom. One “exists” only via activities that create a permanent record that can be analyzed in an indefinite variety of ways.

– Moderates the impact of marginally relevant or irrelevant variables such as appearance, shyness, gregariousness, and distractions.

– Is, for many learners, a more contemplative and reflective environment. Assuming that standards are set and reinforced appropriately, students consider their words carefully and learn by reflecting on the work of themselves and others.

– Is somewhat more conductive to structured horizontal learning which, for most applied disciplines, substantially accelerates the rate and generalizability of learning.

The list from which I am drawing above is long. I will stop here because I want to get to the business rules common to effective online learning environments.

– Frequent participation is required by structural elements and is evaluated in relation to core strands (communications, critical thinking, etc.)

– Instructors and students are required to respond quickly to queries and to deliver assignments (students) and performance evaluation feedback (instructors) on time. Time management is evaluated for students and instructors.

– Ideally, but not always, good online courses employ structured learning objects, each with well designed learning objectives and associated authentic activities (group and individual; active and passive, horizontal and vertical, etc.) and assessment metrics and rubrics.

This list is also long but you will see where it is going by the examples.

I want to offer a global view of why online classrooms sometimes outperform traditional classrooms. I base this on having taught a few thousand students over a 20 year period.

– If managed, mental attendance is higher. You can show up in a physical classroom and be somewhere else mentally. In an online classroom, you only show up via work product. Many of the criticisms of online courses go to this point inappropriately. They examine online courses with no or poor structure and conclude that the medium is to blame.

– While my lower division courses had a slightly higher dropout rate until I learned how to manage the classroom better, students always turned in better performance scores than did comparable students in physical classrooms. There are many potential contributions to this well-documented effect but I believe that the scrutability of the environment that I mentioned above facilitates higher performance standards.

Finally, my observation is that the type of courses that can be taught effectively online is limited only by our competence. Initially, we held the view that only highly structured content (accounting, etc.) could be taught effectively. Today, medical schools and other hands-on disciplines offer courses online and are achieving the noteworthy gains in learning that you see reflected in the meta-analysis to which I referred.

To be clear this is not a complete response. It is not even a full outline. What I hope to have done is identify a few important issues that may cause you to take the time to develop and teach an online course through the initial learning curve of a half-dozen cycles.

If you choose to do so, I suggest that you read some of the references mentioned above and secure some expert advice. You may not like this (I suggest not getting stuck on it) but some of the best online classrooms I have observed are offered by for-profits. They hire leading content experts and pair them with competent instructional designers. (The MBA courses of the old Cardean University, not the new one, were designed by Nobel-level faculty at Stanford, LSE, Chicago, and Columbia and were structured by leading course designers and programmers from Europe and the US.) The worst I have seen is at public universities where someone throws his syllabus (a weak one at that) into Blackboard and calls it an online course. This happens all the time and it is professionally reprehensible.

However you inform yourself, there is no need to invent wheels that were perfected and trued long ago. As for the workload, it is greater on the front side, the same in process (if you are already an actively engaged teacher) and less on the backside after you have perfected the business rules, etc.

This is an excellently stated reply. Again, as both a student of an online course and an instructor of an online course (as well as within a classroom), I can really see no reason why the online course cannot be just as justifiable as the classroom setting.

Laura Ringer, It doesn’t cost less, properly done. Ideal (most effective) class size is slightly smaller than ideal size for comparable F2F programs. Retention-to-graduation rates are lower in some settings. Instructional costs are about the same or higher. Operations costs are lower. IT costs are higher. Marketing costs are much higher. Bottom line: if you do it well, It costs more to attract and retain students but access is increased, catchment area is substantially increased, and learning outcomes are increased. Too much hype by people who have never created, managed, or balanced the books in online programs.

Proud . . . but lacking in critical thinking and ignorant of the nature and capabilities of measurement science. 

The outcomes you seek are yours to define, including various instantiations of creative thinking. 

Ask yourself this: If I can determine this student’s learning well enough to assign a rational grade (accurate, defensible, consistently applied, equitable, etc.), why would I not realize that the same criteria I used to make the determination can be applied as an outcomes assessment? 

I see more uncreative, uncritical thinking in service of these constructs than I see in opposition to them.