Virgil Varvel, distance education guru, presents ongoing commentary and notes on educational research, issues, and publications.« September 2005 | Main | November 2005 »
October 25, 2005
Confusing Modernity and PostModernity in the Virtual World
For the last couple of days, I have been at an online education retreat. I heard a very interesting paper read (the speaker, rather than present a talk, read a paper), where the speaker discussed how all realities are becoming linked to the virtual.
I found this idea interesting up to the point of symantics. The questions becomes really where do we draw the line between reality and non-reality or virtual. If you were a post-modern radical constructionist, then you might argue that all things are just a construction and thus the real may or may not exist, but we will never know it since we can only interpret our perceptions. The speaker did not go that far, but was learning towards a multiple perceptual constructed reality. He was also clearly in the social learning model camp, although at this point, there were no clear indications of any constructivist leanings. Therein lay the problem.
Although the speaker had just spent 10 minutes reading a paper on how reality is constructed to the point where most experiences could be considered virtual and thus virtual may have little meaning, he then went on to state what was the best way to teach online, in a narrative structure of right and wrong. I find it very difficult to resolve this interpretation. It can be argued that everyone has a perspective to bring to a discussion and thus a discussion allows for more viewpoints to be entered into discussion, but that in no way says that I should teach addition through group discourse as the best method for all individuals if any. It presents an argument for group discourse about controversial topics but does not prove that the discourse is the assignment rather than a final individual interpretation of that discourse along with other readings in the form of a paper or other assessment.
Why bring this topic up? I simply want to argue that you cannot suggest a philosophical standing, then use that standing to support the ideals of group work in a manner that denounces principles within the philosophical set. At one point, it was stated that all people would agree that group work is the best way to go, and online, and I think that the speaker believed it.
Posted by vvarvel at 03:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 19, 2005
Outside Accessibility
When developing an online course, much care is often taken to insure that the materials are accessible. Usually, such items as screen reader readability, colors, size, transcripts, etc. are taken into account. When reading through some survey responses this morning, I thought of something that I have not really been taking into account. The readability of external links within my courses. I have many external links as I try to put all of my readings online. Sometimes there are on pages that utilize a css style not allowing for easy resizing of text or initial readability. There is nothing that we can really do about the other sites, but I just wanted to blog this as something to keep in mind when evaluating resources to include in a course.
Posted by vvarvel at 09:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 18, 2005
WebCT and BlackBoard
If you're reading this blog, then unless you've been living under a rock you have probably already heard that WebCT and BlackBoard are merging. See http://www.blackboard.com/webct/. But let's look at some of the implications that I've been hearing around the Web and other thoughts.
1. What will the new system be like? Will there even be a new system or will you simply choose between a two program system where the back-ends will now be even more compatible? My guess is that there will be an integrated system taking the best of both systems. As with any new creation, there will be initial resistance, but in the end, I'm sure that it will probably be one of the best course management systems for a time.
2. Why do I say for a time above? The thing about these technologies is that they can only go so far before everything has been exploited. It then becomes a matter of taste, support, and maybe functionality primarily for those picking one. Right now, after about 6 years of heavy development, there are a lot of players on the market, and if you ask me, they are all getting to be pretty similar. This merger actually shouldn't have been such a shock to people. You have two major companies with similar market shares in a market that is growing slower than the expanding number of available programs. To keep share holders happy, the pricing was already starting to get a little excessive, making it easier for the smaller companies to make inroads. If they had learned from MS and their making Office ubiquitous, you have to make it cheap. The situation is sort of similar to the IE/Firefox/etc. situation. A new program can be free and have all of the same functionality in a different package. In that case, they are both free, so it's not exactly the same. O.K., there are a lot of differences so forget that example. I admit that it was a surprise that these two merged. I thought that a few smaller companies would be swallowed up first.
3. Then where is the innovation? The innovations right now seem to be in the synchronous systems. It will probably be quite a while before we see a free open-source alternative to Horizon-Wimba (already showing some merging there), Elluminate, or other that has the same power. If I had money, I'd put it in their stock right now rather than a CMS. We will also probably see more 'hosting' companies come out for a while, where they will host your system externally, such as several Moodle companies are doing. I'm not sure how these will fair, as there are FERPA issues and registration management issues.
4. One of the things I'm happy about is that I no longer will be asked (it happened about once a month at least) which one is better. UIUC is WebCT while UIS is BlackBoard, so even within the UofIllinois system, they can't decide. I know which one was better for me, but I'm partial having won the WebCT Exemplary Course Award. There are a lot of people unhappy about how WebCT Vista has been performing, but others still love it. I do not know which one is better for you. Now the questions will become open source or proprietary, which is an even harder question to answer, unfortunately.
5. Something that has a lot of managers worried is migration. Every time a new program comes out, there are migration issues. Are both BlackBoard and WebCT users going to have to migrate? Don't know.
6. Does anyone care about SCORM anymore? For a short while, SCORM seemed like a big deal. Now many don't seem to care. I know that this is off topic, but it just came to my mind. A way that brings it into topic will be how the new system deals with SCORM. Will it be a main tool or a complementary unadvertised utility?
7. An interesting Legitimate Peripheral Participation study would be to see how long this news took to travel throughout the community of online education practice. Problem with these things is that it is already too late to do it as it is happening. It would have to be a historical study already, even though it is only a few days old. I suppose I'm assuming here that it traveled fast, but I think that it is a safe assumption. If it were only possible to identity the participants at the periphery and see how long it takes them to find out. Ah, if only I had a clone of myself to do these studies.
Posted by vvarvel at 08:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 17, 2005
Barrett - Theory and Practice of Distance Education
Continuing with my notes from somewhat obscure sources, I present notes from Barrett's thesis titles, Theory and Practice of Distance Education. Here we see a study on best practice as ascertained by 3 interviews and a literature review.
Posted by vvarvel at 10:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 12, 2005
IVC 2005-2005 Enrollment Report
Iris Stovall, Director of the Illinois Virtual Campus, recently announced the availability of the latest enrollment reports. I include the majority of her announcement below.
The Illinois Virtual Campus has just released a report entitled "Distance Education Enrollments at Illinois Colleges and Universities - Summer 2005/Academic Year 2004 - 2005", and online course enrollments show no signs of slowing.
View the complete report:
HTML version:
http://www.ivc.illinois.edu/pubs/enrollment/Summer_05.html
PDF version:
http://www.ivc.illinois.edu/pubs/enrollment/Summer05.pdf
The executive summary of this report includes the following:
"Illinois colleges and universities reported offering 4,628 online class sections that generated 76,875 student enrollments during the Summer
2005 term. This is an increase of 21,532 enrollments (39%) from the
55,343 online enrollments reported for the Summer 2004 term."
You can find enrollment reports from previous semesters in the "Publications" section of the IVC Web site, http://www.ivc.illinois.edu/pubs/enrollment.html.
Posted by vvarvel at 09:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 10, 2005
Haehl - Characteristics of Online Student
One question that constantly comes up, even today, is what is an ideal online student. I personally don't think that this questions has an answer, because the ideal student should be dependent on many variables such as method of instruction, modality of instruction, topic, learning styles, etc. However, one thing we can look at is who the online student is and whether or not that student is succeeding. Here are my notes from a thesis by Haehl concerning online students. I thought this would be a good addition to my education reading notes here, because many may not have access to this thesis and may be interested at what is inside. She has also done some good work since then that you can look up.
Posted by vvarvel at 09:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 04, 2005
Lea & Nicoll Ch 10-12
I now finish my reading notes on Lea and Nicoll with chapters 10-12.
Culture, community, and identity are the main topics.
Posted by vvarvel at 01:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Lea & Nicoll Ch 8-9
Continuing with my reading of Lea and Nicoll, here are my notes on Chapters 8 and 9
Ch. 8 addresses the interactions in a community of practice.
Ch. 9 asks us to consider learning as a cultural practice
Posted by vvarvel at 01:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 03, 2005
Lea & Nicoll Ch 5-7
Continuing with my reading of Lea and Nicoll, here are some notes from Ch. 5 - 7.
Ch. 5 continues an activity theory perspective followed by globalisation issues in Ch. 6 and 7.
Posted by vvarvel at 01:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Lea & Nicoll Ch 3-4
I continue my notes from Lea and Nicoll.
Ch. 3 is a reprint of Lave and Wenger's Legitimate Peripheral Participation
In Ch. 4, David Russell looks at Activity Theory and distributed learning.
Posted by vvarvel at 12:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack