How to cite item. A decade later, not only the OU UK, but also nearly every postsecondary institution in the developed world has launched hybrid courses, if not entirely distance degree programs. Resource 21 offers many references about online journals, virtual institutions, online databases, and CMC software.
The heart of the book is found in chapter two where Salmon presents a five-stage model for computer-mediated communication CMC in education and training. How can e-moderators support the modular study of students with different subject-matter requirements? Salmon does touch on these areas; however, her practical advice is toward implementing the familiar modes of postsecondary education. E-moderators must accommodate various learning preferences, be patient and respectful to all students — some of whom may have particular needs of which the instructor is not immediately aware.
What about students who come into and exit the online course based on individual needs and desires to slow the pace or accelerate their studies? I remember logging on from Syracuse, New York to the text-only online course with four e-moderators and 45 other participants scattered throughout the world — from Israel, Australia, Latin America, the United States, but mainly Great Britain.
Online learners will need to become more self-directed, cooperative, capable information handlers, critical thinkers, and team players. One issue she engages head on is the labor-intensive nature of e-moderated learning at course and institutional levels, suggesting practices to make this endeavor more cost-efficient. For example, Salmon shows how longer academic course can be adapted to a one-day asynchronous virtual seminar pp.
Salmon claims that many traditional colleges and universities that cannot adapt to online modes of instruction will face extinction. What about the development and sustenance of a learning community to span an entire degree program through e-moderating, not just the interactions of individual online courses?
Early in the course, students are gaining access, becoming comfortable with CMC software features, introducing themselves to other participants, and forming impressions of others moderatng initial interactions. Gilpy the author Login required. Salmon outlines so clearly most of the aspects of effective learning environments that I discovered through phone interviews with sapmon, email exchanges, and transcripts of computer conferences.
Adult distance study through computer conferencing. The future workforce will moerating in continual flux as employees constantly upgrade their capabilities through continuing education. Likewise, students also need an introduction to online instruction. Second, collaborative learning and student teamwork were the educational methodology Hiltz, which was shown in later studies to be a key factor in making distance courses as good or better than face-to-face courses Hiltz and Wellman, These results indicate that distance courses can be as effective as face-to-face courses when using any of the traditional measures, such as exams and grades.
They are significantly more motivated to participate in a meaningful way when their fellow students can view their contributions. The transcript or electronic recording of the discussions shows who is and is not participating. It is visible to both the instructor and other students that someone is being lazy. In fact, students seem to be more concerned with what the other students will think of their performance than what the professor will think.
The communications systems permit them to catch up, because they are able to obtain a better understanding of the material with which they are most uncomfortable or have the least background knowledge.
While these conclusions need confirmation through long-term longitudinal stud- ies of student performances, the marketplace is also providing confirmation of the beliefs held by many experienced in teaching these classes.
We are seeing that collaboratively oriented programs offer a solution to the problems, which are inherent in traditional correspondence courses. Students benefit from the ability to electronically store lectures alone or in chunks integrated into other material on the Web.
Electronic storage of lectures gives all students the power to choose freely whether they want to attend a face-to- face class or take the same course remotely. Traditional face-to-face students can later hear a lecture missed due to illness or travel. Students with English as a second language can listen to a lecture multiple times. In our view a student in a face-to-face class that is not augmented by a collaborative learning approach and by asynchronous group communications technology is not getting as good of an education as the distance student who has those benefits.
It is the face-to-face student who may be suffering from the segregation of the college system into separate face-to-face and distance courses. These observations about the past and the present lead to some speculations about the future.
The more pragmatic the course content is, the more important it becomes for the instructor to convey his or her mental models and assess student assimilation. Communication among students and with the instructor is particularly valuable in courses with high pragmatic content. By discussing and comparing their interpretations, student can reinforce their understanding and reduce their conceptual errors.
Mixing distance and face-to-face students in the same discussion space results in having students with a great deal of work experience virtually mingle with those who have had none. Often undergraduate students who take distance courses are working, and most of those in the face-to-face courses are not working.
Mixing both a distance and a face-to-face class leads to a better balance of backgrounds. Students, who have work experience, may have had an example from their life that illustrates a theoretical concept presented in the class. When a student shares this experience, it reinforces the importance of the concept and encourages other students to pay attention to the presentation.
Creative, interactive software programs accompanied with background tutoring can effectively teach students to master the skills currently taught in many undergraduate courses. When these courses are automated, the costs incurred are far below typical college tuition.
In the future, colleges and universities will not be able to continue to charge current tuition costs for introductory courses that are largely skill oriented. For example, there are many stand-alone and Web- based software programs that offer introductory programming courses, as well as skills in many other areas. These courses are comparable to college courses and some are even based upon a textbook used on some college campuses.
They are available for a few hundred dollars. The major difference is that they do not carry college credits. Today, private firms are willing to invest a millions dollars in single multimedia, largely automated courses to sell to industry that can afford to pay thousands of dollars of tuition for each student. Some companies had created their own internal college and claimed their employees did not need outside education. Unfortunately, some institutions of higher education are no longer certain about whether their client is the student or industry.
Until an enlightened consumer marketplace emerges, many transient but inferior offerings will be available on the market. With the recent recession we find some institutions, like Duke, have cancelled their on-line executive M. The recession has had the obvious results of discouraging and terminating a number of private sector efforts to enter the distance education market. The cream has largely turned sour. Now that we have a national and international competitive market in courses, those colleges that accept skill knowledge from unaccredited sources, such as training courses and work experience, will obtain a market edge over those that do not.
In fact, the student population will begin to expect institutions of higher learning to accept courses from any accredited institution. In addition, institutions with clearly stated credit transfer policies will also obtain a marketplace edge.
Individual courses, as well as total programs, will be the basic units in a national and international marketplace for higher education. There are no longer geographical monopolies on higher education. Only consor- tiums based upon real cooperation among the participating institutions will succeed. Many current attempts to market only the separate offerings of the participating institutions, or to impose added layers of administration between the courses and the students, are doomed to a marketplace failure.
There are numerous group conferences for educa- tors and administrators, as well as a newsletter and journal. The ability to review whole class discussions after the class is over gives senior faculty the ability to evaluate distance instructors hired to teach previously developed courses, as well as to review on-site instructors and junior faculty.
Thus, they can improve and extend their mentorship and apprenticing relationships. While educational institutions are rapidly developing programs for large popula- tions of distance students, it does not appear that universities are creating tenured faculty lines that can be occupied by remote faculty. When additional faculty are needed to teach distance courses, instructors, rather than tenure track faculty, are often sought. Since the success of distance courses is largely dependent upon the capabilities of the instructor responsible for the particular course, the value of instructors able to master teaching at a distance will rise within institutions of higher education.
The technology we are using for distance education can allow faculty members to live anywhere they want to. Unique benefits will be available to outstanding teaching faculty. For example, one of the best full-time instructors for NJIT, which is located in beautiful downtown Newark, is a mother with two small children who never has to be on campus.
She is teaching other instructors how to teach remotely. Similarly, a University of Colorado accounting professor, on sabbatical in Thailand, is able to teach a course in the Distance M. There have been a few master programs where some or all of the instructors are located anywhere in the world. It is technically feasible for those wanting to escape winter cold to teach in places such as Hawaii that we could only dream about. The technology makes it feasible, but various administrative policies, unions, insurance companies, benefit programs, etc.
There is increasing emphasis by accrediting agencies on treating remote instructors the same as faculty are treated. This is likely to bringing about a greater degree of equality between instructors and tenured track faculty.
The outcome is uncertain, but it may mean that the costs for remote and traditional classes will equalize so that the profit margin in on-line classes will not be quite so high.
This improves the quality of the discussion and changes the psychology and the sociology of communications. Students can address topics in the sequence they chose rather than in a predefined order. This leads to the development of different problem-solving strategies among the individual members of the class. Instructor control of online conference and roles: With online course conferences many per course , instructors control the membership of each, assign roles and enable other instructors to monitor conferences for joint teaching exercises involving more than one course.
Groups within courses are able to set up private online conferences for team and collaborative work group assignments. Joint editing of items facilitates team work. Question and answer communication protocol: Instructors are able to ask questions during discussions.
They can control who views the answer and prevent other students from seeing the answer of the others or engaging in the resulting discussion until they have entered their answer. In studies of Group Decision Support Systems, it has been shown that asynchronous groups in an online Delphi mode generate many more ideas than unstructured discussions or face-to-face groups of similar size Hee-Kyung et al.
This area has proven to be a valuable tool in forcing equal participation. Use of question-and- answer communication protocol can be used to force each student to indepen- dently think through their answer without being influenced by the other students. Anonymity and pen name signatures: When students with work experience are part of a discussion, they can use their real life experiences to illustrate the concepts the professor is presenting.
Furthermore, students can talk about disasters in their companies with respect to decisions in any area and provide detail, including costs, when they are not identified and the anonymity of the company they work for is preserved Also, the use of pen names allow individuals to develop alternative personas without divulging their real identity and is extremely useful in courses that wish to employ role playing as a collaborative learning method.
How Distance Programs will Affect Students, Courses and Faculty 9 This allows the instructor to detect when a student is falling behind. Student collaborative teams can make sure that everyone in the team is up to date. Furthermore, students can easily compare their frequency of contributions relative to other students in the course.
Voting: Instant access to group and individual opinions on resolutions and issues are enabled by voting capabilities. This is useful for promoting discussion and the voting process is continuous so that changes of views can be tracked by everyone. Voting is not used to make decisions. Rather, its function is to explore and discover what are the current agreements and disagreements or uncertain- ties polarized vs. Students may change their votes at anytime during the discussion. Special purpose scaling methods: These useful methods show true group agreements and minimize ambiguity.
Currently we have a system which allows each student at the end of the course to contribute a statement of what they think is the most important thing they have learned in the course and then to have everyone vote by rank ordering all the items on the list. It has been surprising what some of the results have been in some courses. The professor was quite surprised by this result until he began to realize that the students were using this concept of a mental model in which to integrate many of the other things they had learned.
Online discussions allow individuals to enter comments whenever it is convenient for them, without waiting for someone else to finish the point they were trying to make. This makes it physically possible and also very likely that a great deal more discussion will take place and much more information will be exchanged among the group than if only one person can speak at a time, as in the face-to-face classroom environment.
Selection lists: The instructor can set up lists of unique choices so that each student may choose only one item and others can see who has chosen what. This is very efficient for conveying individualized assignments and reduces a large portion of communications. Factor lists: Members of a class or group can add ideas, dimensions, goals, tasks, factors, criteria, and other items to a single, shared list which may then be discussed and modified based upon that discussion and later voted upon.
Notifications: Short alerts notify individuals when things occur that they need to know about. For instance, students can be notified that a new set of grades or vote distribution has been posted, eliminating the need for individuals to check for these postings. People can attach notifications to conference comments from a select list that provides alternatives like: I agree, I disagree, I applaud, Boo! Such appendages reduce significantly the need to provide paralinguistic cues of reinforcement as additional separate comments.
Calendars, agendas or schedules: Students have access to a space to track the individual and collaborative assignments and their due dates. These are listed in an organized manner that links detailed explanations for each assignment, as well as questions and answers related to the assign- ments. The State of the Technology The technology available today includes at least versions of group commu- nication software. However, some of them may not survive the recession.
There are a growing number of software packages for course management. The online learning product landscape is changing at a rapid pace as companies are acquiring their competitors to expand functionality. A recent article gives an excellent summary of the popular platforms and the evolving nature of eLearning Gray, There are only a few of these that have wide usage and they are beginning to raise their prices to capitalize on their popularity.
Most of these packages charge a fee per user, which is not the desirable fee structure for the customer. It is far cheaper to spend more on the hardware and a get a more powerful server. Also, the course management systems do not provide many of the useful software features one would like to have for group communications. Given the way prices are going, it might be better to pay some of the undergraduate students to educate some of the faculty on how to create their own web sites and have their own pages for their courses that they update and maintain directly.
This also has desirable long-term consequences in raising the ability of the faculty in this area. Right now, software development is undergoing rapid evolution and no customer should put them- selves in the box of only being able to use one vendor.
If it is clear you are using a number of vendors, you may even be able to get some breaks on pricing and will certainly get the top level of service when each of them knows there is an alternative service readily available to the customer.
In the coming decade, one can expect major upgrades of these software systems every few years and the best one today may not be the best one tomorrow. Course Development and Delivery Technology Unfortunately, many faculty do not know how to use the technology to design a successful course.
As the historical record shows, it is a mistake when transferring an application to computers to just copy the way it used to be done onto the computer. Utilizing the methodology of collaborative learning is the key to designing courses using group communications technology. Simple systems, which attempt to impose a discussion thread on top of what is electronic mail technology, allow the student or the teacher only to view one comment at a time. This approach does not allow an individual to grasp the totality of any complex discussion.
Only by placing the complete discussion thread in a single scrolling page can a person review and understand a long discussion. They can browse the discussion and cognitively comprehend it without having to perform extra operations and loose their cognitive focus. Users of such simple systems cannot generate a large complex discussion and have no way of realizing that complex discussion is even possible.
When online discussions are successful, they can easily go from enthusiastic wonderful discussions to information overload. The system should allow students to not only develop their own conceptual maps for understanding a problem, but also to detect disagreements about elements of the conceptual map and the meanings of terms.
This is valuable preparation for problem solving in their professional life, a process that requires removing inherent ambiguities and individual meanings in the language used to communicate about a problem with others from diverse backgrounds.
Routines should be included that are based upon both scaling and social judgment theories which improve the ability of larger groups to quickly reach mutual understanding.
Currently, few tools exist in current systems that support the use of collaborative model building, gaming, and Delphi exercises. The current generation of software does not often include the functions of anonymity and pen names. Course instructors need to have complete control over course communication structures and processes and should be able to use their recently acquired knowledge for future offerings of the course.
Currently, systems lack the needed integration of functions to easily evolve the changes in both the relationships and the content in a given field. A long-term advantage of teaching in the collabora- tive electronic environment is that the students create useful material for future offerings and can aid the instructor in monitoring the new professional literature. Future technology will allow faculty to organize their material across a whole set of courses into a collaborative knowledge base available to the faculty teaching those courses.
This would allow students and faculty would be able to create trails for different objectives and weave the material in that knowledge base to suit a group of students or a set of learning objectives. Faculty, individuals or teams would take responsibility for a specific domain with in the web of knowledge representing a degree program. Collaborative technologies are changing the concept of what constitutes a course. Program material could be an integrated knowledge web based largely on semantic hypertext structures.
Over time, the domain experts, the faculty, would continue to develop and evolve their parts of the web and wait for learning groups, composed of any mix of distance and regular students sharing the same learning objectives and needs. Current vendor systems focus on the mass market and concentrate on tools to standardize and present course content. Group communication tools are usually just disguised message servers that offer only a discussion thread capability and little more, certainly not the complex capabilities discussed above.
Vendors have not yet recognized the primary importance of group communications and how faculty members can guide and facilitate the process and be available for consultation as needed. Based upon the conceptual knowledge maps they design, faculty should be encouraged to develop content structures that are character- istic of their subject matter.
In the end, faculty should have the ability to insert group communication activities anywhere in their professional knowledge base e. These online course offerings still use the correspondence course model. These offerings typically include e-mail systems for one-on-one communication be- tween an instructor and an individual student, but do not include effective group communications featuring course content and delivery methodologies reworked for a distance-learning environment.
E-mail is better than nothing, but no one would claim that e-mail is preferable to a face-to-face college course. The typical consumer of distance education does not understand the difference between courses with only simple e-mail systems and courses that have introduced sophisticated group communication processes. Students in the United States pay the equivalent of the price of a used or new car every year to attend college.
A student and his family make a major financial investment for a college education. Some guides have already appeared, but some of them make money by charging the schools to list their programs. There is, as of yet, nothing comparable to Consumer Reports or even the yearly US News and World Reports independent rating of universities.
Ultimately, these sources will support more intelligent consumerism about college education. Since no educational institution or organization has had the foresight, so far, to do this, there is now a commercial Web firm that sells books, student services and other products and has committed to putting up a recommendation system to evaluate any distance course anywhere and have the results made Web accessible.
Today, university faculty are not rewarded as much on the quality of instruction as on their research and external funding. To obtain tenure and promotions, their instruction quality merely has to be acceptable and new faculty cannot afford to prioritize exceptional, innovative teaching. The problem is often with university administrations that focus their attention more on efficiency rather than effec- tiveness when it comes to teaching.
Instructors and Rewards Administrations place most of their priority on competitive research and spon- sored funds. Many face a rude awakening, as they are less in touch with the fact that the educational process is undergoing an unanticipated, unexamined, funda- mental change. Some of these institutions will not realize until it is too late to change entrenched attitudes and bureaucratic processes fast enough to compete in the new competitive environment.
During the next decade, many institutions may fail as a result of intense international and national competition. How Distance Programs will Affect Students, Courses and Faculty 15 institutions will be forced to reevaluate their faculty incentives and the relative importance of teaching and research. Marketplace mechanisms will also force this reevaluation, as the relative quality of teaching for each institution becomes more visible to the public and prospective students.
These pressures will force the threshold for acceptable teaching quality definitely to rise. As the quality of distance learning increases, the view of distance education courses as inferior to traditional classes will disappear.
It will become the talent of the instructor and his or her facility that will determine success. Additional organizational layers of intermediaries will doom a program to failure. For example, the majority of students taking distance courses in the future will be regular students who schedule a mix of distance and face-to-face courses to accommodate their schedule, family commitments, work commitments and their desire to complete their education in a timely manner. Their course ratings do not distinguish distance courses and face-to-face courses, but distance courses are even rated higher in many ways.
Alternative Versions of the Future Students of the future will have many choices, the spectrum of which can be illustrated by examples of two students at extremes: The Positive Future for the Student After careful consideration of my options, I decided to turn down a scholarship from an Ivy League university to go to eU Electronic University.
I was convinced when I discovered that eU was rated as highly as the Ivy League school for the quality of its courses. Also, I found the comments of the professors about their courses much more extensive in the eU course ratings. All of that encouraged me to check the resumes of most of the eU professors. The results were quite surprising.
Most of them are retired from other univer- sities where they had tenure before they came to eU. The eU classes usually range from 20 to 50 students with a great deal of emphasis on class discussion and collaborative work. As a result, class discussions are high caliber. I got to actually eavesdrop on some ongoing courses once I had submitted an application. I can take my exams at the local community college, which has a franchise from eU, and I can also use their sophisticated multimedia computers.
With the three- semesters-per-year program, I can move a lot faster than in most two-semester programs. I am concerned, however, with getting in, as I am fresh out of high school and they take very few students like me. I have tried to convince them that my four years of part time work in the family business should be counted. I hope that helps. Oh well, it is a lot cheaper than Harvard and a lot of those video lectures were prepared by top notch professors at places like Harvard and the University of Chicago.
They claim having a professor from Harvard on video is far better than just any old professor in a classroom. Most of the instructors for technology courses are from industry and I am told that if you get one from the company you are interested in working for and do a good job, you are more likely to get a job offer in the future.
Courses in other areas seem to be mostly those tapes and automation. They require a computer joystick for the educational software packages, so the school cannot be too bad, plus major Hollywood studios produce their multimedia software. I did not realize their tuition was geographically dependent. Their software costs are quite high since each course uses unique packages, including the ebooks generated by the professors.
Even though the average course size is one thousand students, eU does have these small discussion sections of 50 to students run by the course graders. So, at least you can get help when you need it.
Still, some courses use automated graders and I am not clear how that works, yet. I was told the compositions in the first writing course and the programs in the first computer course are completely graded by the computer without the need for any human to look at them. An intelligent system not only designs the exam so that every exam is unique to every student in the course, but also uses your past performance profile to tailor the exam to your performance level.
This allows even C students to get high point scores so they can feel good about themselves and show good results to their parents, who are probably financing their studies. Students are classified as Outstanding, Above Average, or Average, and then receive grades within those categories. Everyone has a chance to get a lot of A grades. They sent me this funny form with their acceptance letter, where I must promise to not divulge any of my experiences in courses to any data collection process not approved by eU.
Oh well, I have no real choice, given my situation. Summary In the first scenario above, the student will receive the same quality of education whether he studies on campus or at home. He will participate with a group of his peers and will establish a network of relationships to utilize throughout his career. He can also get to know his instructors and his fellow students well. In the second scenario, the student will participate in a distance-learning program set up like a mass production process.
This is a clear second choice, apparently forced on the student by circumstances and costs. This option sacrifices the quality of education for the ultimate efficiencies and mass delivery of courses. The real variable, which will decide between these future alternatives, is whether higher education institutions integrate all their face-to-face students in the same communication environment, prioritizing collaboration for all students and re- warding faculty who introduce new technology in this way.
Regardless of what is written down, in most universities the rewards for faculty are inextricably linked with research and external funding and instruction needs only to be acceptable to obtain promotion and tenure. Innovation in education and excep- tional teaching are not prioritized for young faculty at many institutions. While administrations focus their attention on competitive research and sponsored funds, the educational process is undergoing an unanticipated, unexamined, fundamental change.
The next decade will bring some rude awakenings. Because of the time needed to change attitudes and bureaucratic processes, some of these awakenings may occur too late. Competition in instruction on an international and national basis will become the principle determinant of institutional success or failure in the next decade. We are entering a free marketplace era for the enterprise of education at the university level.
The Web is the first communication system where consumer reaction to experiences with alternatives is cheap and easy to collect, organize and provide.
One of the key premises underlying the concept of a free market is the free flow of relevant information and that is going to happen for individual courses, as well as degree programs. The most important factors for future success will be the quality and talent of the instructors and their commitment to excellence in learning. Many institutions may well have to reassess the relative imbalance in faculty rewards between teaching and research.
In addition, marketplace mechanisms will make the quality of teaching more visible to the public and prospective students. We can expect the threshold for acceptable teaching quality to rise. Regular students will opt for distance participation in some of their courses, not only because it is convenient, but also because they perceive no loss of quality.
As long as both versions of the courses utilize the same technology and learning methodology this is going to be true. Ultimately, the fundamental changes that could ensure the future success of university and college level institutions may well have to come from the accreditation agencies in realizing that we are evolving in a competitive marketplace and that it is their role to ensure that the consumer has access to the information needed to make fair market decisions.
Ensuring that courses in accredited degree programs can always be transferred among accredited institutions and that accreditation might have to be assigned to individual faculty as well as individual degree programs will most likely be a part of that evolutionary process. References Cho, H. The impacts of Delphi communication structure on small and medium sized asynchronous groups. Gray, S. Moving — elearning vendors take aim in the changing environment.
Syllabus, 16 1 , Harasim, L. MIT Press. Hiltz, S. Correlates of learning in a virtual classroom. Intellect Press. MIT Press original edition What makes learning networks effective. Communications of the ACM, Asynchronous learning net- works as a virtual classroom. Communications of the ACM, 40 9 , Howard, C. Louis, Missouri, October The emergence of distance learning in higher education: A revised group decision support system typology with empirical results.
Lau Ed. Idea Group Publishing. McIntyre, S. Beyond lecture-test: Expand- ing focus of control in the classroom. Journal of Education for Manage- ment Information Systems. Nelson, T. A file structure for the complex, the changing and the indeterminate. Turoff, M. A marketplace approach to the information highway.
Boardwatch Magazine. Costs for the development of a virtual university. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 1 1. Communications of ACM, 40 9 , Alternative futures for distance learning: The force and the darkside. Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, 1 1. Remote learning: Technologies and opportu- nities. Software design and the future of the virtual classroom.
Journal of Information Technology for Teacher Education, 4 2 , Endnotes 1 A great deal of recent evaluation studies are beginning to confirm our earlier findings based upon extensive and large scale studies at such places as SUNY, Drexel, Penn State and others. Boettcher Designing for Learning, USA Abstract This chapter describes a multi-level design process for online and distance learning programs that builds on a philosophical base grounded in learning theory, instructional design, and the principles of the process of change.
This chapter does the following: 1 describes a six-level design process promoting congruency and consistency at the institution, infrastructure, program, course, activity and assessment level; 2 describes a conceptual framework for designing online and distance learning programs; and 3 suggests a set of principles and questions derived from that framework. This chapter includes a set of principle-based questions for designing effective and efficient online and distance learning programs.
Do successful online and traditional programs share a common set of instructional design principles that might be more consistently applied? This chapter describes a six-level design process that promotes congruency and consistency at the institution, infrastructure, program, course, learning, activity and assessment levels.
This multi-level design process builds on a philosophical base grounded in learning theory and instructional design, as well as in the principles of change processes.
The design process includes perspectives from a Life Style and Learning Style Design Framework LS-TWO that recognizes the influences of the life styles and learning styles of learners and faculty, and the challenges and power of the new technologies and their impact on commu- nications and resources. It is hoped that the questions and principles derived from this framework will support instructional planners in the near term and also into the future.
When a reader completes the chapter, they should have at their disposal a set of principles and questions for designing effective and efficient online and distance learning programs. These principles are derived from the Vygotskian theory of cognition that focuses on four core elements of any teaching and learning experience. Design Principle for Planning Distance and Online Learning A fundamental principle for designing online and distance learning is that design happens not just at the course or program level by a faculty member.
Design Levels for Distance and Online Learning 23 effective and efficient online and distance learning programs requires research, planning, and program design on many levels.
For institutions wanting to get started in offering courses online or at a distance, this can be a good strategy, as it makes visible many of the unanticipated require- ments and services for providing teaching and learning in virtual or distant spaces. The next section briefly describes these six levels of design and provides lists of questions to help the design process at each level.
These two top- level designs are best served with the involvement of those representing the entire campus community and high-level leadership. Why is this multi-level design process recommended? To work well, the institutional vision reflects a shared philosophy of teaching and learning.
A shared philosophy of teaching and learning cannot be assumed, nor can it be easily or quickly achieved. Fortunately, it is not necessary for design to be operationalized at the campus level to launch a single online or distance learning program.
Many successful online and distance programs can be and are envisioned and designed at the college level and at the graduate professional level with only nominal support at the institutional level. However, any online or distance program requires close cooperation and visioning with the central infrastructure operations group. The design approach for a college program is the same as the design at the institutional level; what changes is the unit of design and the analysis and processes for design.
The primary goal is that of design congruence among goals, infrastructure, program, students, activities and evaluation. Characteristics of the Design Process A key characteristic of instructional design is its iterative nature. All systems are by their very nature interdependent with the other elements within the system.
As systems change and as the environment within and about an institution changes, all elements of a system need to be systematically reviewed to be congruent and consistent with one another.
This means that the timing of the design at each level must be planned for as well. Is design ever complete? Only temporarily. Another key characteristic of design is perspective. Ideally, groups responsible for design of teaching and learning should share common philosophies and viewpoints. How we think about teaching and learning impacts the decisions we make regarding environment, expectations, resources and goals.
This is why our institutional staff, including developers of content and systems should all be constantly learning, not just about technologies and systems, but also about teaching and learning. How we think impacts how we act and how we design. Even decisions about the design of administrative systems cannot be done in isolation from the design of courses and degrees.
For example, the process of applying to an institution, of being admitted to an institution, and queries about programs all become part of the total learning experience for students.
Design Levels for Distance and Online Learning 25 learning that are consistent with the institutional mission and consistent with the expectations of the students and society being served. Figure 1 summarizes these six levels of design, and identifies the group or individuals usually responsible for the design at that level.
The length of time for a design cycle at each level is also suggested. The principles suggested by this framework — or by any other chosen frame- work — inform all six levels of design. The people involved in designing for teaching and learning at an institutional and infrastructure level include a wide range of institutional faculty and staff. Viewing design as a multi-level process keeps the process practical and realistic. The first two thirds of the book lay out the most salient aspects of online instruction — from educational characteristics of the virtual environment and the software systems that support it — to issues surrounding training of e-moderators.
How to cite item. The book also discusses common challenges; such as how many participants does an ideal conference take? These are engaging new learners, usually working adults who can now access a college education from an institution located far away from their home. Dianne Conrad Rory McGreal. One ,oderating the institutions to experiment, foster, and promote computer-conferencing from its inception through to current Web-based forms is the Open University of the United Kingdom OU UK.
Institutions moderafing plan, sustain, and enhance this activity will thrive in the future. What a thrill it was to upload and download messages to these threaded discussions located on a server hundreds of miles across the ocean, to ruminate throughout the day about the conversations I read there, and to return to the conference the next day to post my thoughts and to find responses to my koderating as our conversations unfolded. Email this article Login required. Article Tools Print this article.
However, as insightful, accurate moderqting stimulating as this book is, I would have liked more information on how to implement new modes of distance learning.
The future workforce will be in continual flux as employees constantly upgrade their capabilities through continuing education. This superb book distills the lessons learned, particularly for faculty members, trainers, instructors, and facilitators who need to effectively move from traditional face-to-face modes of instruction in a classroom to the online world, an environment characterized by hearty peer interaction, learning communities, and knowledge construction. E-moderators are often part-time faculty, whose credibility comes from professional practice in their full-time employment not from advanced research and scholarship about the course content.
As a participant, instructor, e-moderator, trainer, and researcher, Salmon has been a major player in this Internet revolution. Resource 21 offers many references about online journals, virtual institutions, online databases, and CMC software. Based on her research over several joderating, the model progresses from the early concerns in stages one and two that learners have aalmon technical skills and social relationships to later stages of learning.
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