Hitting the wall
The sermon at church this morning was about how building walls can separate us from God and from each other...well timed to address this assignment:
"Using the terms you reviewed in the Exploration, evaluate ways that blended/online learning can remove barriers that prevent some students from learning in a traditional "brick and mortar" classroom. You may also choose to evaluate ways that online/blended learning could create barriers. Provide examples from your personal experience if applicable."
(By the way, this blog was started as part of a course assignment for an online course about teaching online.)
I'll start with a conclusion statement: No education initiative, program, or practice will produce the same outcome in all students. Online learning, especially in a blended form, has the potential to make great changes in the way students learn and teachers teach. But there will be no one-size-fits-all approach. What I will identify as a barrier removed for some students will represent a new challenge for others.
Today's students are digital natives, a term which has little meaning until you hand a SmartPhone to a 3 year old and watch him navigate with less intervention than it takes to show your grandmother how to turn it on in the first place. However, students are necessarily digitally literate. They understand how to immediately access information, but have the same challenges with organizing, evaluating, and using that information as when students spent a week at a library pulling facts from books. My school is presently not 1:1, but we have plans to move that direction within the next few years. In fact, at this point our technology policy has not kept up with the times. Students are supposed to have their cell phones powered off during school hours...violations, including the phone simply making a sound, can result in a three hour "Friday School" up to suspension (for repeat offenders). To ask these digital natives to disconnect from 7:45 to 2:45 is a huge barrier to learning. They know how to use the tools, they are engaged by technology, but for the most part, we do not capitalize on teaching them in they way they are most used to learning.
Another barrier that online learning can impact is the area of seat time. My son is eight and has loved learning his whole life, but spent most of the first three years in school complaining about the fact that he had to be at school for SEVEN hours. He is a very fast learner and found much of the time spent reteaching and repetitively practicing to be wasted time. How many of our students feel that way? We know that not all students learn at the same pace, but in traditional classrooms, it is very difficult to differentiate the pacing of the material. Online learning provides that opportunity. In some models, students who learn quickly, can simply complete the course material in a short amount of time, while those who need more instruction can take more time. Or, students could all continue to pace through the course material at the same rate, but some students could spend time with remediation and others with enrichment.
Online learning does introduce some barriers like access to and availability of working technology. I have at least one student a day who shows up without a pencil or who has challenges finding the materials necessary for an out-of-class project. So in a sense, this barrier is not really new, but it is definitely more costly!
And now for the real conclusion statement: Online learning IS coming...in fact students are learning far more online than by any other means, whether that is facilitated by schools or not. (I would hardly argue that what they are learning is always worthwhile, though). If we as an education system do not move to meet students where they are, then we will lose students. They may physically take up space in our rooms, but they will not be engaged mentally.
"Using the terms you reviewed in the Exploration, evaluate ways that blended/online learning can remove barriers that prevent some students from learning in a traditional "brick and mortar" classroom. You may also choose to evaluate ways that online/blended learning could create barriers. Provide examples from your personal experience if applicable."
(By the way, this blog was started as part of a course assignment for an online course about teaching online.)
I'll start with a conclusion statement: No education initiative, program, or practice will produce the same outcome in all students. Online learning, especially in a blended form, has the potential to make great changes in the way students learn and teachers teach. But there will be no one-size-fits-all approach. What I will identify as a barrier removed for some students will represent a new challenge for others.
Today's students are digital natives, a term which has little meaning until you hand a SmartPhone to a 3 year old and watch him navigate with less intervention than it takes to show your grandmother how to turn it on in the first place. However, students are necessarily digitally literate. They understand how to immediately access information, but have the same challenges with organizing, evaluating, and using that information as when students spent a week at a library pulling facts from books. My school is presently not 1:1, but we have plans to move that direction within the next few years. In fact, at this point our technology policy has not kept up with the times. Students are supposed to have their cell phones powered off during school hours...violations, including the phone simply making a sound, can result in a three hour "Friday School" up to suspension (for repeat offenders). To ask these digital natives to disconnect from 7:45 to 2:45 is a huge barrier to learning. They know how to use the tools, they are engaged by technology, but for the most part, we do not capitalize on teaching them in they way they are most used to learning.
Another barrier that online learning can impact is the area of seat time. My son is eight and has loved learning his whole life, but spent most of the first three years in school complaining about the fact that he had to be at school for SEVEN hours. He is a very fast learner and found much of the time spent reteaching and repetitively practicing to be wasted time. How many of our students feel that way? We know that not all students learn at the same pace, but in traditional classrooms, it is very difficult to differentiate the pacing of the material. Online learning provides that opportunity. In some models, students who learn quickly, can simply complete the course material in a short amount of time, while those who need more instruction can take more time. Or, students could all continue to pace through the course material at the same rate, but some students could spend time with remediation and others with enrichment.
Online learning does introduce some barriers like access to and availability of working technology. I have at least one student a day who shows up without a pencil or who has challenges finding the materials necessary for an out-of-class project. So in a sense, this barrier is not really new, but it is definitely more costly!
And now for the real conclusion statement: Online learning IS coming...in fact students are learning far more online than by any other means, whether that is facilitated by schools or not. (I would hardly argue that what they are learning is always worthwhile, though). If we as an education system do not move to meet students where they are, then we will lose students. They may physically take up space in our rooms, but they will not be engaged mentally.