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About the Author
Bob Zemsky describes himself as being old and round enough to be mistaken for a pooh-bah. He was a member of the Spellings Commission and, as an author and researcher, has focused on making colleges and universities mission-centered and market-smart. He has focused on what globalism might really mean for higher education, on what technology has not accomplished, and how to make learning important to the higher education market. Bob currently serves as professor and chair of The Learning Alliance at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Recent Posts
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The Wrong Way Web
The absence of sustained demand and a viable link to educational reform only partially explain higher education’s tepid response to electronically mediated learning. The rest of the story involves the nature of the World Wide Web and its limitations as a platform for learning.
From the outset the Web has been a utility for connecting people with people and people with things. Think Amazon.com or Netflix.com, or any of the dozens of sites you use to make airline and hotel reservations. MySpace, Facebook, even YouTube are sites that primarily allow you to see other people’s postings — and then encourages you to share your own experiences. Facebook probably says it best when it describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” Blogs distribute ideas. Wikipedia is a collection of definitions and short essays collectively posted. The Web is primarily used to buy and sell things — books, cars, hotel rooms, old antiques, clothes, gardening supplies, exotic spices, tools, you name it and in all probability you can find a vendor that will sell it to you online.
The fact that the Web is primarily a distribution system helps explain why Blackboard and other course-management systems are the most widely used e-learning technologies across higher education. Course-management systems give students what they want most — their assignments, their course packs, and their grades. This distributional quality of the Web also helps explain why the great majority of learning routines that students can access through and use on the Web — that is, online — are in reality not much more than automated workbooks — multiple-choice exercises that let the student call up discrete learning modules and questions in a largely preset order.
One should not be surprised. The Web began primarily as a network for distributing messages and data among a limited number of researchers in the physical sciences. To run their complex, often collaborative experiments they needed to be able to communicate quickly. For the most part, their experiments produced large data sets that needed to be processed by individual members of the network working in different locations.
In general, mainstream e-commerce Web sites have shied away from the kind of real-time programming and simulation that e-learning’s advocates promised. The routines themselves are expensive to develop, their actual presentation on different platforms hard to control, and the returns difficult to translate into revenue streams. If the product is complex, like a movie in a DVD format, better to have a short preview, a catchy review, and a simple read-and-click order form for sending the movie in the mail.
The moral? Better to think of e-learning modules as things to be distributed on the Web rather than programs to be run there.
(Image from Photobucket.com)
Posted at 11:57:48 AM on April 11, 2008 | All postings by Bob ZemskyComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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Yes…and no. Commercially, yes. But these are universities, are they not? They have tech departments and local support programs, right?
If the faculty want control (which is what they should want, rather than handing all control to the profit sector), there are all sorts of things that can be done to “personalize” the Web experience to the instructor’s desires: running filters, agents, real-time conferencing across campuses and even continents, etc. These often require robust local servers well-maintained, collaboration with computer and information science faculty and students, specialized faculty personnel in support of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary curriculum development, etc.
The problem is that faculty and administrations by and large want products not processes to use. Processes are on-going and evolving — and that’s what the technology of e-learning in the hands of faculty (as a collectiive body, collaborating) should be.
Instead, what is desired by those born into earlier technologies, in general, is something to “plug and play” and be done with it. Buy it, open it, plug in the stuff from the yellowed notes, use it, leave me alone, leave the campus support staff alone as much as possible, etc.
What higher ed has forgotten — in so many of its endeavors, not just the technology of e-learning — is that learning is a process of change born of conflict, where “process is our most important product.”
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 11, 12:22 PM · #
I have always been more than a little dense and therefore slow on the uptake, especially where complex human emotions and complex technologies are concerned. So it is no surprise to me that the large amounts of thinking and assembling of materials and the large amounts of judgement about what topic goes where and when, preceeded by what other topic and preparing for what later topic—in other words, the most ordinary work of course design—when done with paper media, with which I am familiar, is much faster and easier than when done with electronic media. Even assembly of articles is faster in paper because the gigantic costs ($40 an article and up) of web available articles have created a heuristic in me—never, never use for any purpose whatsoever any article available only or primarily on the web (for a price greater than $5).
Assembling the stuff of courses and preparing them is a little faster and easier on the web (on computers), once that heuristic is firmly in place.
However, use of that stuff by students is not much affected by the web.
1) students used to not really read in two senses—they did not even pretend to do most assigned readings, and, the quality of their average readings was somewhere between earthworm and cockroach level
NOW—they still do not read in the same two senses to the same degree SCORE new media 0 improvement
2) students used to ignore my feedback in the form of class comments, answers to questions, and marginalia I wrote on graded papers NOW they ignore my emails to the same degree SCORE new media 0
3) student teamwork, interactions with other students, use to suck because of lousy basic morality, culturally sub-optimal parenting, sicko overly male competitiveness in American society, and a host of other obvious reasons NOW student teamwork across the web is far worse with flameouts and anti-person campaigns in email SCORE -25 for new media
4) students used to get prodded into study by surveillance available from public embarrassment when confronted by my questions in class NOW students bleep over non- and poor- responses to my emails to particular students SCORE new media 0
Overally new eLearning media are a technology push effort entirely by tireless industries looking to foist their stuff on anyone with money to pay. It helps that their sales reps lack all respect for, familiarity with, and interest in learning in all its forms and seem to have graduated from the world’s oldest and largest driver education graduate school somewhere in Atlantis.
Finally, the ONLY learning anyone does in eLearning systems is learning how to do simple functions in the damn system. There are huge amounts of this type of learning but they do not translate well except into similar learning when the same vendors foist the same type of techo junk onto later employers of students.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 14, 07:16 AM · #
I disagree with many of Richard Greene’s assertions. Much of the challenge comes in using course design which directly counters the issues he names. Don’t get participation? Make 25% of the grade dependant on it and have quality criteria for that interaction. Work groups not working? Find another way to cluster work, or make a way for students to report non-supporting members. Can’t get students to read? Change the testing design to require reading. The answers aren’t simple, but most problems can be addressed. A big part of the solution is to work at it and keep trying alternatives.
However, aside from the process problems faculty encounter, the big challenge is that faculty are not rewarded for teaching online; they are rewarded for research and publication. If you want them to really get creative and solve these problems, and to spend enough time to design a good course and stay involved in it, then reward them at tenure and promotion time. Otherwise they’ll paste up a textbook online and students will have to deal with poorly-designed online junk which doesn’t involve or interest them.
— Al · Apr 14, 11:56 AM · #
On comment 3:
Yes, exactly.
And that brings us to a “brother CHE blog” thread by Mark Bauerlein on “The Productivity Craze” (http://chronicle.com/review/brainstorm/bauerlein/the-productivity-craze) where, in my comment 1, I posted essentially the same critique of the current rewards system.
Indeed, what century is this?
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 14, 02:05 PM · #
One of greavest fault of our education system is that it is not thought provoking. Teacher must raise the problem or question, and let all student take part in discussion, that is best teaching system. Our proffeser never raise question, they only lacture and expect let student hear and not raise any question, this I think worse hatable system.
— Ramesh Raghuvanshi · Apr 17, 11:18 AM · #
If by electronically mediated learning Zemsky means computer aided instruction, then perhaps higher education’s response has been tepid. If he means online learning, then the response is far from tepid. As just one example, this site: http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/survey/index.asp
shows that online enrollment is increasing. But in agreement with post #3, course design is important. According to Dr. Mark A. Clarke, learning is change over time through engagement with activity. And good online professors, such as Dr. Joni Dunlap, engage their students in activity and in communication. It’s the model of learning that matters, not the medium. A F2F classroom lecture where most students sit passively listening generally leads to less learning than online group projects where students work together virtually to put together a project or presentation that can be shared with fellow students. And with web cameras, microphones, and such software as Skype, students are not limited to text alone for communication. While information is indeed distributed over the web, it’s the activity and communication that happen around that information that help students learn. There’s no virtue to finding information on paper, when the careful student can find reliable information on or through (in the case of electronic databases from libraries) the Web.
— Venita · Apr 17, 11:21 AM · #