Thursday - Sep 15, 2011
Distance and online education isn’t a novel idea in the United States. In fact, some may be surprised to discover e-learning began as early as the 1960s. Since then schools, universities, academies, and nonprofit organizations have taken to the Internet to disseminate and teach knowledge to people around the world. While this type of education must often still be purchased, some public schools and universities are expanding their online offerings.
Take Stanford University for example, which plans on offering three free introductory online courses this fall on weighty topics like artificial intelligence, databases, and machine learning. The online classes won’t consist of a boring lecture, but rather they will contain interactive multimedia presentations broken up into digestible 15-minute chunks.
Cambridge University’s Lynne Harrison likes the idea, telling The Independent: “A good lecturer will change the tempo after 15 minutes, and the Internet allows that to happen more naturally. The technology that Stanford has put in place makes lectures more watchable, and we’re looking at doing a similar thing for our free online courses launching next spring.”
Stanford isn’t the first U.S. university to offer free online material, however. Open Yale Courses has been offered by Yale University since December 2007, spanning 20 different departments. MIT recently celebrated ten years of offering its OpenCourseWare, which covers a broad range of departments and topics.
However, online schooling (free or not) has had its fair share of challenges in the U.S., ranging from the stigma placed on it to the relatively slow placement of necessary Internet infrastructure. Two stories from earlier this week highlight the problems rural and remote areas of the country are dealing with in expanding online education.
The Houston Chronicle posted a story on Sunday about Alaska’s Learning Network and the challenges the school consortium faces in providing students in remote areas with online classes. The network includes about 140 students spread across 20 different schools in two school districts, all receiving vital online courses. Many of those courses are required to qualify for the heavily-pushed Alaska Performance Scholarship (APS), which provides an important source of funds to high school students intending to go to university.
Federal Recovery Act money has gone towards establishing the network, also covering the cost of helping school districts add classes required for the APS. Yet funding concerns continue to threaten the program, which is currently running on a one-year startup grant. Ensuring those in even the more remote parts of Alaska can access the network is another vital issue, as many portions of rural Alaska still grapple with reliable Internet connectivity.
Another part of the U.S. struggling with high-speed Internet access — necessary for streaming multimedia and digital downloads associated with most online courses — is Idaho. In a New York Times story published on Tuesday, a somewhat bleak picture of Idaho’s rural Internet speeds was painted.
“Without broadband, especially in rural areas, kids might not reach their full potential,” Jonathan Adelstein, administrator of the fed’s Rural Utilities Service, told the Times. “And we can’t expect to be competitive in a global economy.”
Rural Utilities Service is apparently one of many entities involved in a $25 million project to establish high-speed broadband to rural Idaho. But simply adding more broadband service may not be enough. The cost of broadband service is often prohibitive to rural citizens, making it more difficult to access online education. The Idaho Education Network attempts to offset this problem by offering high-speed Internet to all the state’s public schools, also allowing businesses and residents to access that service at the schools. Yet cuts in education funding have forced the program to cut back this service at some schools.
While many questions loom concerning online education (who pays for unprofitable broadband infrastructure to rural areas? what are the consequences of removing the social experience?) there is no doubt that it’s increasing in popularity and necessity. With the current U.S. education crisis being hotly debated, it’s not difficult to imagine that popularity and necessity growing even further. And so will the growing pains, especially for rural America.
Photo via D’Arcy Norman, Flickr Creative Commons
Tuesday - Nov 23, 2010
A new study released in the UK blames social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for the decline in students’ concentration and grades. According to a survey of 500 British teachers conducted by JCA, the more time students spend social networking, the poorer their grades.
While I don’t doubt the findings of the study, I have a sense of deja vu: The same charges have been leveled at television. (I fully admit to watching many, many hours a day as a child.)
A study conducted in New Zealand in the early 1970s concluded that “Television viewing in childhood and adolescence is associated with poor educational achievement by 26 years of age. Excessive television viewing in childhood may have long-lasting adverse consequences for educational achievement and subsequent socioeconomic status and well-being.” Sound familiar?
Another study from 2007 found that “The mean of hours of television viewing during childhood was associated with symptoms of attention problems in adolescence.”
Here’s a quote from a 2006 New York times article by Elizabeth Jensen: “There is very little that television has not been blamed for when it comes to children, whether it be shortened attention spans, a predilection to violence, earlier sexual activity or a general decline in values.” But she reports that a University of Chicago study found that TV had no effect on children’s test scores.
Nevertheless, the blame game continues. There’s got to be a reason why kids are doing so poorly in school. Could it be that traditional classrooms don’t engage students?
In an ironic twist, a study published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, students who used Twitter during a controlled semester-long experiment boosted their GPA. Now that’s something to tweet about.
Tuesday - Sep 21, 2010
As texting and friending and web browsing have entered the classroom, the question remains as to whether digital technology has improved education. Technology in the classroom is nothing new, but until recently, most didn’t require batteries.
One of the first learning aids was the horn book, paper printed with the alphabet pasted on a wooden paddle, used by students in Europe and colonial America in the 17th century.
Two hundred years later, the magic lantern entered the classroom. A forerunner of the slide projector, it cast hand-drawn images on to a screen. But the technology that has withstood the test of time–still a fixture in most schools–is the chalkboard.
The New York Times has an interactive timeline that chronicles these learning machines, ending with the iPad, a device that echoes the horn book and may replace textbooks. But will it make kids smarter and maybe more importantly, will it help them think outside the box?
While digital life has its benefits, according to technologist Jaron Lanier, it falls short, “Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please.”
With digital technology inextricably integrated into modern life, it’s not surprising to find it in classroom around the world. While some educators argue that it’s a distraction, most agree that computers are a powerful learning tool. What do you think?
