Monday, March 4, 2002

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Nishikant Sonwalkar Online Education Must Capitalize on Students' Unique Approaches to Learning, Scholar Says By MICHAEL ARNONE To be successful in the long run, online education must allow students to learn according to their personal styles, says Nishikant Sonwalkar, principal educational architect at the Education Media Creation Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Sonwalkar, founding director of the Hypermedia Teaching Facility at MIT and founder and chairman of Intelligent Distance Learning Systems, a company specializing in distance-education software, specializes in the pedagogical use of computers. Q: What have you learned about online pedagogy? What is required for online pedagogy that isn't required for traditional pedagogy? A: In my view, online learning provides tremendous opportunity for providing pedagogical choices to learners that cannot be provided by a single professor or teacher in a classroom situation. Online education provides a unique opportunity to use multiple representations of knowledge in terms of media. At the same time, it also provides opportunity to sequence this knowledge in a way so that it makes more pedagogical sense, by providing different learning strategies. Q: What are some of those learning strategies? A: There are fundamental learning styles that appeal to the learner in order to process knowledge. One is acquisition of knowledge via different media -- text, graphics, audio, video, animation, and simulation. The other part is how to process that information through fundamental learning models, like apprenticeship, incidental learning, inductive learning, deductive learning, and discovery-based learning. With that framework we can provide various choices -- if you took a six-by-five matrix, you could provide 30 different ways of learning. With that, we can accommodate individual learning styles of the students in a way we could not do in a classroom with an individual teacher. For online education, there is an opportunity that has not been completely utilized right now by the page-turner courses, because they do not address the issue of individual learning styles and the media preferences. Q: Are you saying that online education now hasn't taken advantage of the medium to promote better learning? A: Yes. What I'm saying is that online learning has a lot more potential of accommodating the individual learning experience than the way it is currently used. Q: What needs to be done for online education to meet that potential? A: One, you have to provide a paradigm shift in terms of thinking about content in terms of learning strategies and putting the media in the context of learning strategies, rather than tacking on multimedia and static Web pages, which really don't help to engage students' learning models. The second thing you have to do is to provide a framework so that the content they are using for static pages can be a dynamic page, and that dynamic page can change according to the learning style of the user. The third element is to provide interactivity, so that based on the trajectory that the student takes through the content, a system should be able to provide meaningful feedback to the student about their success or failure in learning certain concepts. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

Texas A&M U. withdraws admissions proposal that was criticized as race-based Community colleges cannot block university expansion, Mississippi Supreme Court rules U. of California at Berkeley reinstates controversial sexuality course on probationary basis 3 students say their expulsion from McIntosh College was race related Oilman pledges $150-million estate to U. of Texas at Austin Software piracy seems rampant among students in survey at 2 universities Online education must capitalize on students' unique approaches to learning, scholar says