I had an online student once who told me at the beginning of a 20-week online course that eLearning was clearly going to be an inferior experience compared to face-to-face learning.
Many people feel that way, partly because for most people eLearning is unknown whereas they have been doing face-to-face learning since they were 5 (and in reality since birth). But if, as I suggest in my previous post, we take learning as a starting point rather than face to face learning, then we open the possibilities to discovering ways in which the digital learning experience can not only equal but also surpass, the face to face experience. For example, the student I mentioned at the beginning, was based in China and for him, the choice was either an eLearning course or no course. Clearly, in this case, eLearning was a wise choice. But more than that, as part of a global group of students, he was able to interact with people from all over the world, working in many different contexts and it was clear over the following weeks that he learned a great deal through his interaction with them.
Below you will find examples of comments made by some of my online learners.
I feel quite surprised that I can do so many things that I could not do before. I am also quite confident now as I did not think that I myself was a good online learner.
I found the flexibility of work, the work with my fellow peers and the assignments all rewarding, enjoying and really worthwhile.
I was pretty surprised to see how much has been covered in the first three weeks and how much I have actually learnt. I feel more confident with my ICT skills than I did before and I love making knew discoveries and trying them out.
I have seen countless similar comments over the years, expressing delight and surprise at how much has been learned, at how much it is possible to learn online and finally when we come to the end of the course, how much they will miss the interaction now that it is over.
What is the secret?
Clearly there as as many different varieties of elearning as there are of classroom learning. And we know from experience that quality learning in the classroom is rarer than we would like.
So what is it that we can achieve with digital tools that enhance learning? I am not saying that online trumps face to face every time, nor the opposite for that matter. What I AM saying is that we should learn more about what digital tools can offer us so that we can make an informed choice about what is best learned online and what face to face. Or, if we find ourselves in the situation of having the medium forced on us, how can we make the best of both or either.
What I have found helpful recently is Kalantzis and Cope’s 7 affordances framework which I learned about in a recent Coursera MOOC.
As they describe it on their website:
Technology … need not necessarily bring significant change or even represent a step forward in education. We propose ‘seven affordances’ of e-learning ecologies which open out genuine possibilities for what we call a ‘New Learning’ – transformative, twenty-first century learning. These affordances, if recognized and harnessed, will prepare learners for success in a world that is increasingly dominated by digital information flows, and tools for communication in the workplace, public spaces and personal life.
- Some of the affordances are more obvious than others. Transferring learning activity to the digital format leads to ubiquitous learning: learning that is possible anywhere, anytime.
- Differentiated learning is also easier when using digital tools, either through the use of mechanical adaptive learning tools or simply enabling a teacher to make available learning resources tailored to different levels, that are easily retrievable.
- Multimodal learning, using additional media rather than just text, can have enormous advantages when used appropriately. For example, audio and video samples for language learners are not a problem to source, wherever you happen to be in the world. It seems to me obvious that we crave the audio and visual elements when we see which are the most popular websites. For the passing on of ‘How to’ skills, video is the best choice in many cases.
- Hattie’s work on what works in learning shows us the importance of feedback as the factor with the most effect. Technology can vastly increase the scope for feedback whether it is through automatically marked quizzes or the comment function on a blog.
- The recognition that learning is helped by meta cognition is leading to changes in the classroom, for example by implementing the thinking protocols suggested by Ritchhart, Church & Morrison but can also be enhanced by digital tools which allow a backchannel such as Today’s Meet.
- Collaborative intelligence refers to the way in which we can stand on the shoulders of giants through search engines, wiki projects and all the knowledge that is so easily accessible online now. Every time we ‘just Google that’ we are taking advantage of collaborative intelligence. But we can also use this collaborative intelligence in a more pro-active way by using digital tools to reach beyond the classroom walls and ask the whole world to chime in. My favourite example of this was Silvia Tolisano’s Christopher Columbus project described here.
- Active-knowledge making: This is perhaps the affordance which requires the most change in received wisdom viewing learning not as the remembering of agreed knowledge but as the embedding of knowledge through experiential learning. This points to project-based learning, the answering of essential questions, the crafting of essential questions and a design thinking approach to the answering of those questions. Where technology can help is in making contact with people who can contribute.
When looked at in terms of the seven affordances, it becomes clearer where technology can help or even lead. So is online learning any good? Yes, if you let it.