My understanding of online schooling has been built over the past several years of knowing my own (generally AP-caliber) students enrolling in such classes. Mind --> blown after this week's readings. That's not an exaggeration.
Going over the year-by-year reports showed me the tremendous growth of online schooling over the past several years. I had no idea the exponential degree to which this has accelerated--the number of states offering online education, the policies involved, the numbers (and the diversity!) of students participating in online instruction, or the variety of ways in which online schooling is being used. I found the scope of it to be staggering. Here I am in a district that prides itself on the degree to which technology is integrated into instruction, and I had no idea that this was happening.
Myth #2: Online courses are for gifted and talented students only.
D'oh. I got this impression because those were the students I saw taking online courses. They were the ones adding the "8th period" to their schedule or doing online coursework in the library instead of blowing off a free period as a teacher's aid (translation: Starbucks go-fer). It's good to know that this is atypical rather than the norm and that students of all kinds across the country are taking online courses.
Myth #3: Online courses lack interaction.
This is another impression I got from students I knew. Over the last several years, students taking AP Macro- or Microeconomics online have come to me with questions that their online instructors would not (or could not) answer. They got frustrated with how many times they were laughingly told to "just Google it." I'm encouraged to know that this problem is also atypical in the grand scheme of things.
Since I am currently completing an online degree, I think I can weigh in on this myth from my own experience. All online courses are not created equal. My tenured professors have generally been more interested in me, my work, and my progress than some adjunct professors who barely check in. I can think of one particular professor who praised my work to the skies and then didn't remember me the very next term when I took another class with her. I never had that happen in a face-to-face class.
Myth #10: Online courses represent an “add-on” to already burdened school systems and teachers.
I got this idea from a couple of teachers I used to know who taught online classes in addition to their traditional courses. It was the one more thing they had to deal with that was an additional source of stress and anxiety. Administratively, online courses around here seem like a necessary evil rather than a positive good, and that is truly unfortunate for staff and students. It sets the wrong tone.
I definitely feel like I now have a more complete picture of what online schooling currently is. I started this unit without having any sense that I didn't know what I didn't know. Nothing like plumbing the depths of one's own ignorance to get a sense of perspective. Perspective is good.
Well said Rebecca! I completely agree with you, especially with how astonishing the growth of virtual schooling has become over the past ten years. The exact word "exponential" came to my mind as I read the facts from one year to the next in the Watson articles.
ReplyDeleteRebecca, I love your points made here. It's rather daunting to know that the students you encountered had experiences that were not satisfactory. It's even more surprising that these teachers would advise their students to "just google it" frelating to answers to questions they had.
ReplyDeleteAs to why teachers would not be more available for their students is beyond me. Stating things like "just google it" may lead students to develop a lackluster behavior and therefore make them uninterested in online learning courses moving forward.
It really did sour those kids toward online courses. Part of the problem is that for classes like AP Econ, all a person technically has to do to be qualified to teach them is be a social studies teacher--when in reality, without a background in the relevant theory, it's hard for many teachers to cope with the course material themselves. That's an unfortunate reality of the discipline.
DeleteHello Rebecca. I like your input on E-learning. The one thing that seen to jump out to me is that most of the teachers are using E-learning as a tool to help support, re-enforce, and deliver the curriculum to all types of learning styles of students. Using E-learning as a tool in these ways makes it a great tool or resource for teachers to have at their disposal. Great Job.
ReplyDeleteI love the added potential that having my classes essentially online, through Blackboard, gives me. Fifteen years ago, I kept a little tape recorder sitting on my podium during my history classes and would dub tapes after school for kids who wanted to replay lectures at home. Now, I can record them with period theme music, upload the mp3 files, and anybody who wants to can grab them. Time have certainly changed!
DeleteRebecca, I think you make a very good point that not all online courses are the same. It does seem that if interactions between students are teachers are purely text-based that it may be easier to forget students an instructor has had previously. Maybe by having face-to-face virtual interactions, students and teachers could better remember one another.
ReplyDeleteFace-to-face interaction (versus only words on a computer screen) has made a huge difference in the courses I have taken online at Wayne State. That has definitely shown me how important such exchanges can be from both the instructor and student perspectives.
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