Vol. 4 Issue 20 – Research Paper: ‘Does the Medium Determine the Outcome in Virtual Academic World?’ by Jit Shalin

The production and delivery of online courses through internet have gone quite beyond the simple binary alternatives – web / not web; discussion groups / no discussion groups; chat provisions / no chat provisions. Nowadays, it is not as simple as posting course outlines or reading bibliographies in HTML form. Online Education at tertiary level is a segment of a much larger organic whole in which the expectations, quality, communities, and content of online delivery are determined by the thoughts and deeds of approximately 100 million online users. The internet has presently been a powerful social phenomenon, leading as well as guiding an upward cultural revolution. The traditional strengths of higher education – a commitment to liberating knowledge, creating and sharing of new knowledge, open ended deliberation by communities of scholars, nurturing a refined comprehension of complex process or scholarly environments for the nourishment of future knowledge thirsty generations – take precedence in online learning too.

Virtual Education was popularized to overcome the obstacles of time and distance in its original state of commencement. However, both teachers and students in traditional classrooms began using online tools and resources for “blended learning” that enabled the tradition classroom to combine conventional learning with online resources to expand knowledge and research horizons with the help of continuing evolution of technology and the growing experience with digital resources. Virtual tours of historic monuments and museums, online experiments in science labs, lectures and guidance by online teachers and experts, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube sharings have become inevitable assets of contemporary classroom experience in the same way as the tool kit of earlier generations accommodated audio recording, visual videos, radio and television.

Broad band connectivity enables thousands of international students of all age, working parents, disabled people, and folks living in remote inaccessible areas of the world to explore new academic avenues available at door steps. Lifelong learning has become the basic mantra of concurrent life, provided that learners have access to broadband connectivity. The advent of sophisticated mobile devices that can stream data and images with a wireless link to the internet has proven itself as a magical miracle to get connected with knowledgeable favourite professors who might be available anywhere off campus in the world. More significantly, reliable researches establish the fact that online instructions and interactions are as effective as the conventional face to face discussions of teachers and students contained in a physical traditional classroom.

As the Federal Communications Commission in US observed in its National Broadband Plan of March,2010:
“There is strong evidence that online learning classes do not sacrifice quality of instruction for convenience and efficiency. For example, students attending Florida Virtual Schools (FLVS) earned higher AP scores and outscored the state’s standardized assessment average by more than 15 percent points in grades 6 through 10.”

E-learning has proved itself as a good omen to decrease students dropout rates, make possible for innumerable students to graduate on time and provide unique opportunities for aged persons who have been encountering insurmountable physical and mental life challenges. For instance, the National Broadband Plan of US reported: “Salem – Keizer School District in Oregon has re-enrolled more than 50 percent of dropouts and at-risk students through its online Bridge Program annually. At Florida Virtual Schools 20% of the students enrolled in the program for earning remedial credit. The passing rate of students taking makeup courses was 90 percent.”

It has already been established by now that online interactions can stimulate intellectual growth and academic progress competitively with campus-based classes. The 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) of US  found that, compared with their counterparts in traditional classrooms, online students were most likely to “very often participate in the course activities that challenged them intellectually, in discussions that enhanced their understanding of different cultures (and social responsibility), discuss topics of importance to their major.”

Due to higher level of independence and freedom offered by online courses, online students would use and exhibit a wider spectrum of effective LSWR strategies in their academic performance. This fact strengthens the theory put forth by Charlene Dykman and  Charles Davis that online learning is particularly well suited and tailored to newer approaches to instruction in which the teacher performs as a “ guide at the side” rather than as a “sage on the stage.”

The most recent and exuberant fact is that online educators and learners can adapt online teaching and learning to fit various learning styles, permitting learners to relish a high level of flexibility and customization that seems difficult or often impossible to achieve in a typical traditional classroom teaching. Online students have admitted that it is easier to ask questions, receive response, acquire attention from teachers, and exchange views and opinions with classmates in an online environment. Thus, e-learning offers a more informal ‘class’ atmosphere by encouraging increased intuitive interactions. For instance, new ICT makes it both possible and permissible for learners in an online environment to talk and walk during class and even to circulate notes and findings amongst themselves.

Most importantly, online learning can encourage educators to continue career advancement and professional progress in ways that match with their personal preferences and priorities. According to the National Broadband Plan of US, online post graduate studies for instructors is as successful as traditional teacher prep, and might be even more successful in achieving diversity and multi-ethnicity in race and gender.

Let us have a cursory look at the social components of online education system:

• The flexibility of online education can be translated into fruitful financial benefits because it allows lower-cost accommodation facility than is available on campus making it possible for the students to live wherever they want. Through lower tuition, lower boarding and lodging expenses, the possibility to work part-time or full-time, the student can accrue less debt and increase earning potential which seems immediately attractive and appealing.
• Shy students lacking confidence may feel more engaged in online interactions than they would feel in person. The students, for whom to address or face the situations where peer pressure and social challenges is a problem rather than a benefit, can be most benefited from online learning.
• As Byron Henderson from the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada notes:

“The power of lifelong learning for higher education resides in its ability to tie a life to the traditions of scholarship and the richness of great institutions bound by great histories of thought. Online learning is not just a way to deliver courses. It is a way to tie the student and graduate scholar (now in a job) to the ongoing community of scholars in which the student found his/her way as an academic.”

Online education opportunity also offers co-curricular components in its own way:

• E-learning allows students to develop and maintain meaningful relationships with online classmates and people of similar interests through online clubs and cohorts. Certain co-curricular activities like producing a college newspaper or a university magazine or taking part into a reading club or chess congregation translate very well to the e-learning environment.
• Online learners can have a boarder array of interactive opportunities with people from an even wider range of cultures and nationalities than their counterparts on brick-and-mortar campuses.

Senior or employed learners might have been early adopters of online education due to the flexibility they require in achieving ultimate career goals. These students might have little or no interest in acquiring ‘full’ college/university experience.

However, there is enough strength of students who prefer e-learning as it gains wider visibility, acceptance, sophistication and less financial requirements. These students are always in search of those e-learning courses which not only provide complete college class experience, but also accommodate an adequate range of social and co-curricular components.

For these students a hybrid higher education experience may be the best approach, offering the best of both worlds by combining e-learning characteristics with acceptable level of face –to-face interactions. A team that led a hybrid English nonfiction prose class in British Columbia, Canada described that compared with the traditional approach, “collaborative Web-based learning may be more likely to result in the pluralist, and diversified kind of course we aimed for.”

Extreme learning is a very new and innovative concept that explains how education happens in causal informal environments as well as how formal learning stretches itself beyond the confinements of schools, colleges and universities to more extreme learning environments. Extreme learning stretches prospects and perspectives about when, where, how, why, for whom and with whom learning takes place. It tracts scientific discoveries taking place in the Indian Ocean, blog posting during polar expeditions, or learning a new language from someone camping on faraway forests. Some educationists have distinguished informal learning from extreme learning in a very subtle way. Informal learning is a self- paced, self-motivated and self-directed phenomenon that can happen at any time, at any place and at any pace one wishes, and could be in the form of school homework, college assignment, family life, leisure activities, or pleasure pursuits. The more such free and open academic resources enhance themselves, the more learning becomes increasingly personalized and catered to particular learning priorities or learner preferences. Online teachers aided by ICT are now better equipped to personalise the learning experiences for online students.  The extreme learning includes both physical and cyber learning, and also embraces the idea how people learn or teach with the help of new technology in unusual ways; for example, from aircrafts, hovercrafts, mountain summits, deep valleys, islands, icebergs, monuments, museums, conferences, cafes, bookstores or nursing homes. It certainly accommodates learning from interactions among online communities, virtual worlds, webinars, webcam experiences, mobile devices, text messaging, tracking the blog and podcasts postings, open educational resources and OpenCourseWare (OCW), open universities, and free virtual courses. The following 10 different technologies have commenced transforming education across academic sectors and age levels expanding education to countless millions of people. A simple mnemonic, “WE-ALL-LEARN,” captures those ten trends.

Ten Openers: (WE-ALL-LEARN)

1. Web Searching in the World of e-Books
2. E-Learning and Blended Learning
3. Availability of Open Source and Free Software
4. Leveraged Resources and Open Course Ware
5. Learning Object Repositories and Portals
6. Learner Participation in Open Information Communities
7. Electronic Collaboration
8. Alternate Reality Learning
9. Real-Time Mobility and Portability
10. Networks of Personalized Learning

However, one undeniable fact cannot be overlooked that not all people everywhere in the world have an easy access to online learning. In remote rural areas, the barriers of distance and constraints of accessing online academic resources are still unconquerable. Unfortunately, innumerable people still live in an offline world. A few of them try to compensate the lack of home-based broadband with mobile devices. But still, hosts of people rely upon antiquated dialup technology, and for them slow speeds and reliability problems create unreachable obstacles. In many schools in rural world, computer and internet infrastructures are minimal or non-existent. For thousands of school or college going students, e-learning opportunity is still ironically confined to the four walls of their academic institutes.

To equalize virtual education opportunity, these divides must be bridged promptly and efficiently. Historical evidences have established one fact that disparities in educational opportunity mean disparities in economic and qualitative life opportunity. For students, e-learning is a solution to receive maximum out of school and university experience, expand academic horizons, inaugurate an avenue of a new career field of their preference and obtain the best possible chance to achieve milestones of their dream. For adults, online education offers a great chance to earn a desirable degree, improve professional credentials, gain knowledge, skills and wisdom, and explore unknown career paths.

In spite of all the above mentioned obstacles and impediments, once learners and academicians comprehend the superior strength of online education, all concerns, misconceptions and ignorance would disappear. The academicians, researchers, employers, employees and all segments of mankind such as pre K -12, colleges, universities, research centers, government, military, telehealth, home schooling, old age homes, orphanages, prisons have all commenced the inevitable process of embracing the explosion of quality online opportunities. As a new United States Distance Learning Association corporate CEO member commented, “Today we have the capability and capacity through broadband applications to deliver online classes in multiple learning styles using diversified learning strategies which result in upwards of ninety five percent cognitive achievement and overall student and teacher satisfaction.” Indeed, technology has the power to be a true equalizing force in education so that all students have access to the same treasure of knowledge and reservoir of resources; no matter where they live, whatever would be their priority and preferences and of whichever age group they belong to.

Academicians, experts, policy makers and executors should share the responsibility, by working in concert, to accelerate online education success:

• Academicians and educational policy makers should march ahead with hand in hand for development and implementation of virtual curriculum and the digital content to support it. Evaluation of effectiveness of different approaches to online learning is quite necessary to educate parents, students, teachers, researchers and all others involved in academia about the advantages of e-learning.
• Educational policymakers at every level should review and revise, if necessary, accreditation rules, teacher licensing requirements and copyright laws that limit the online access to educational content and the use of digital technologies in the classroom.
• To motivate late adopters to embarrass online education through broadband connectivity, it is mandatory for public policymakers to redouble efforts to let the rural gentry enjoy online learning opportunity through broadband connectivity and to take substantial academic initiatives for encouraging the digital literacy.
• As suggested by many scholars, technology policymakers should invest maximum efforts to create a universal broadband support fund and to enable the deployment and adoption of broadband in high-cost areas. They should create policies to reduce connectivity costs, and avoid or eliminate those policies that makes harder for underprivileged learners and marginalized individuals to fully adopt ICT through broadband.

Tertiary education is becoming expensive and industrialized. The internet has created the open market demand and competition for learning, and will generate grass root changes to reincarnate the complete educational production system. Technology doesn’t drive the industrialization of higher education, but demand does. The miraculous phenomenon of interacting, sharing and working online creates similar expectations (demand) in education. These demands are overtly overwhelming, and cannot be fulfilled by assumptions and execution of conventional classroom learning facilities. Students alone make major share of 20% of the world’s population; educational budgets amount to almost 10% of the GBP in the Western world. The internet is regenerating and reformatting fundamental perceptions and perspectives of where education would be delivered, its time of delivery, and the bond between recipients and deliverers. It is truly said that the skills, qualifications, production expertise, creation methods, and financial strength of online delivery are expanding surprisingly leading to a projected $700 billion industry in less than four years. E-learning products and services are delivered anytime and anyplace; are learner specific and built according to the recipients’ preferences. Without the scaffolding support of academicians, it is impossible to metamorphose education. In the decentralized, peer-to-peer, collaborative, and distributed environment of the Internet, higher education comes with three major areas of strength: strength in community building; strength in alliance building; and strength in specialization. A number of corporations, organizations, academic institutes and government agencies are working on ways to design and deliver online education in the form of components that will be less expensive to produce and deliver, more easily modified and reused, and will allow custom, learner determined content.

It is a proven fact, that online interactive learning can be as meaningful, interesting and productive as four walls classroom teaching. The medium does not determine the outcome; rather, the quality of interaction depends on how the medium is used. Moreover, modern state-of-the-art technology allows instructors to tailor education to requirements, preferences and priorities of the individual learners in a way that might not have been possible till today in a conventional classroom.     

Bibliography

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