eLearning eVolution

Hi everyone,

Having been in the vendor world of real-time collaboration for about 12 years now, I am very used to hearing analysts and prospects and customers say “That’s cool, but it is still about five years away” when talking about the real-time component of online learning being “mainstream.”

Imagine my surprise when this morning, my alarm woke me to NPR’s “Morning Edition” and I was hearing a student at the University of Illinois Springfield (logged in from California) being interviewed online with Elluminate!

I guess five years away is finally today.

Reporter Abramson (with no apparent help from evil vendor “spin doctors”) in about seven minutes gently and in layperson language hit a number of points that Elluminate and our educational and commercial brethren in the eLearning landscape have been saying for quite a while (see this link). Here are two points that I personally walked away with from that report.

First: The ‘is it really a class’ pedagogy concerns were allayed in a matter of fact way. Warmth and interaction can happen remotely and there are actually attention and interaction advantages to being online rather than in person. Yes, there may be more work prepping for an online course, but darn it, it is REAL teaching, not a ’second class’ (ahem) alternative.

Second, as editorialized by me, but not directly present in the piece: Administrators should be worried about attraction and retention of students and staff to make their enrollment and instructor quality numbers work. If they are not offering some kind of online class alternatives or enrichment in the mix they are officially behind the curve. Students will seek enrollment in an institution even if it is far away as long as the institution can meet their needs. If they don’t get it from you, they are going to get it elsewhere, like the report’s example of a California learner taking an English course from The University of Illinois Springfield.

Maybe the past 12 years of my career spent promoting these tools have not been in vain!

Best to all, and keep on onlinin’,

Gary Dietz

A customer recently commented that the virtual classroom enables them to move from a regimented, formal situation to promoting the use of collaborative groups where kids help each other and teachers are facilitators, not power brokers. This fits right in with the discussions I’ve been seeing that debate the roles of teacher versus facilitator in the eLearning environment.

Here’s the thought-provoking blog entry by Leigh Blackall from New Zealand that started me thinking about this. Turns out this topic is on a lot of teachers’ minds as there were 20 comments posted that last time I looked. Here’s a related blog entry from Graham Wegner in Australia. Like Graham, I like the comment from Canadian middle-school practioner Konrad Glogowski who has the roles meeting somewhere in the middle as content or subject matter expert.

I guess I’m thinking it doesn’t have to be one or the other or the other but rather moving from one to the other to the other, and/or some how blending the roles, depending on the age of the student, the content, the objectives, and so on. Perhaps this is a new area for instructor professional development. What do you think? Like my previous post on online learning communities, this topic would be a great one for an Elluminate webinar. I’d like to hear from you.

- Beth, Elluminate Goddess of Communication