Online learning has lots of potential, but the teacher-student relationship can’t possibly work over the Internet, right? That’s what Dan Willingham used to think too.

11 Comments »

It’s good to know there is a promising side to online learning as it pertains to relationship. With technology like Skype, etc. the disadvantages might recede even more. Hope to see some research in this area.

Comment by Susan Ebbers — December 7, 2009 @ 5:20 pm
Willingham seems to describe a situation of one-on-one tutoring. Given that, it’s easy to imagine a good teacher-student relation developing. But it’s hard to see that that has much to say about situations with normal teacher-student ratios.

Comment by Brian Rude — December 7, 2009 @ 6:50 pm
Distance learning is coming soon, just how soon depends on your LEA. The Florida Virtual School currently offers over 200,000 courses to Florida residents PreK-20. Do a search on Julie Young and/or the Florida Virtual School to find out more.

The only down side I’ve discovered is the importance/relevance of peer relationships especially at the elementary and middle school levels. Kids those ages absolutely need to get along with each other and that’s difficult to do if they’re getting their schooling on the web.

Comment by Paul Hoss — December 7, 2009 @ 7:21 pm
Brian: some of the teachers I talked to were teaching 30 kids or more. Their interactions were mostly one on one, but not 6 hours per day, obviously.
Paul: I didn’t ask the teachers about this angle, but most homeschooling parents I know argue it’s no big deal; their kids socialize with other kids in lots of other venues.

Comment by Dan Willingham — December 8, 2009 @ 5:08 am
Dan,

That’s a good point. As long as the parents of these kids realize how important the socialization piece is and has them participate in a variety of extracurricular activities, most kids would probably be fine.

Comment by Paul Hoss — December 8, 2009 @ 6:28 pm
I’m still thinking about the potential of online instruction to compete with, or even supercede, traditional face-to-face instruction, as some seem to expect. I realize Dan’s post was about social and relationship issues involved with distance education, but the observations made certainly relate to the grandiose claims made by those who are enthusiastic about online education in general, those who relish the idea that the schools of the past will be replaced by something new and wonderful and very technological in the near future.

The examples given by Dan seem much more labor intensive than normal practices in face-to-face teaching. Whether an online teacher is with a student six hours a day, or only fifteen minutes a day, if the interaction is one-to-one, it is labor intensive. If technology is going to overtake conventional practices on a large scale, shouldn’t it be expected it to reduce, drastically reduce, the labor input for a given educational output?

For special situations technology offers a lot of promise, and we’ll probably see it a lot in the future. Students in small high schools who want to take specialized courses that their school can’t offer would be a good example. Indeed, I think we see a lot of that now. In special situations an increase in labor intensiveness may be a small price to pay for the benefits.

But can online instruction somehow increase productivity in regular schooling? It can if a computer can take the place of a human being. That’s quite a different situation than described in Dan’s examples. I’m about to learn a little about that. I am scheduled next semester to teach one section of our regular college algebra in a new format. In this course the face-to-face time will be cut in half, though we must cover the same, or even more, material. We will use a commercial computer educational program. Students will log on to their account on a computer, take a diagnostic test or two, and then work throughout the semester on problems presented by the program. They will progress through a sequence of topics that will constitute a college algebra curriculum. When a student gets a problem correct, he or she moves on. But when the problem is not correct, the computer branches. It presents an explanation, perhaps even an analysis of the student’s work, and then another problem to try. Only when the student is successful in two or more successive trials will he or she be allowed to move on to the next type of problem.

This brings to my mind something out of the sixties, teaching machines. They were going to replace the school as we knew it, according to proponents of the idea. In a few years most children would learn most everything on teaching machines. The teacher in front of a class was just so old fashioned. Or so went the hype.

The heart and soul of the teaching machine was the simple idea of branching. The teaching machine was primarily a program, not on a computer, but in some sort of text form. A student would respond to prompts, and depending on the response would be directed to the next question, or would branch back, or out, or somewhere, to either explanation, or another prompt, or something. With this system the student got feedback tailored to his or her responses. All that was required to produce such a program was programmers (writers) who could anticipate all the ways that students can go wrong and write out branches that would remedy all these problems. All that was required of students was effort and a willingness to follow the program.

I had no personal experience with teaching machines, though I did acquire a “programmed text” or two. I spent a little time with a programmed text in trigonometry, and it didn’t seem too appealing or effective. But of course I knew trigonometry at the time, and so could not judge it as a learner would.

In spite of all the hype teaching machines did not become the wave of the future, not in the sixties, nor the seventies, nor today. So is the computer based system we are going to use something that goes substantially beyond the teaching machines remembered now, if at all, only as a fad? Or is it just more bells and whistles and glitz added on to make a failed idea more attractive? I wouldn’t pretend to know.

There is the possibility that writers can indeed write in enough branches in a program to deal with all the ways that students can go wrong. Maybe being computer based, rather than text based, offers advantages that I’m not aware of. The old programmed texts, or teaching machines, could not possibly have enough branches to deal with the seemingly infinite number of ways that students can go wrong. Will this be better? I’ll certainly go into my special course next semester with an open mind. I want the learning program that we have agreed to use to succeed. If it succeeds I will produce a lot more learning with a lot less effort than I ever have before. So how are we judge success?

I think success, in the course I will “teach” next spring, must be in comparison to a regular textbook. The computer program will have to be better for students than a textbook. We could just set up a course with half the normal face-to-face time and tell the students it’s up to them learn from the text book. We’ll use what class time we have for tests, for help in some topics, and so on, but the bulk of the learning must be done independently by the students, from the text book, or from whatever help the students can find. Some students are capable of learning from a textbook with no class time whatsoever. Indeed a lot of my students in my regular classes have poor attendance yet pass the course. They must have some ability to dig the material out of the text on their own. Occasionally I will have a student who shows up regularly for tests, disappears at all other times, and does well. But if we are to judge by history, by the simple observation than schools continue much as they always have, I think it is a fair conclusion that most students need the traditional face-to-face-with-a-teacher class time. Thus if we expect more than a small minority of students to succeed with this new format we need something more than just a text book to hand them. We do have something more, the learning program I described. I hope it works. I’ll know more in about five months (providing we get enough enrollment to proceed as planned).

Comment by Brian Rude — December 9, 2009 @ 9:23 am
Paul, as a part of a homeschooling family and an observer of others, I see children using their time very differently than children in school. They can do their studies efficiently and have more time for other things, including playing with others whether in structured activities or spontaneously. Their sociability is not age segregated. I find that homeschooled children interact with me, an old lady of 68, very differently than schooled children.

It is valuable especially for for teenagers who want to exert some independence to have influences in their lives other than age-mates who are as ignorant as they.

It may help you wrap your mind around this if you consider that human beings were learning to get along with each other – or not – long before schools were invented. Sociability and socialization do not depend on schools.

Comment by Homeschooling Granny — December 9, 2009 @ 9:32 am
Homeschooling Granny, your comments bring a few thoughts to mind. My experience with homeschooled kids is limited. A decade or so ago I was attempting to make a career giving private music lessons, mostly guitar. In that time I had perhaps a half dozen homeschooled kids. My general impression was that they could focus their efforts better than most kids. I reasoned that that is one very beneficial result of having a lot of individual adult attention. I didn’t give much thought to the socialization of these kids, but several of them were known by my high school daughter, so that gave me just a bit of a different perspective. My impression was that they had nothing wrong with their socialization.

But now another thought comes to mind. In my first year of teaching I was impressed by one of our students, a junior in high school at that time. As I observed him over the course of that year and the next I realized that he was entirely capable, and entirely comfortable, interacting with people of any age. That’s a bit of a rarity among high school kids, I thought. Most kids are not that skilled or comfortable in dealing with all ages. (I was certainly not in my youth.) There is one other student who gave me this impression. I was not teaching at the time I knew her, at least not in a school. She was a friend of my daughter’s, and for a while took guitar lessons from me. I had enough occasions to see her interacting with adults to conclude that she was another one of those rare kids who are perfectly capable and willing to interact with people of all ages. That is a very beneficial trait. What accounts for it?

These two students were not homeschooled. My conclusion has always been that their social skill and willingness to interact with all ages must be primarily a result of their innate temperaments. But perhaps the parenting they received had something to do with it. So perhaps homeschooling might foster this trait. So maybe we are wrong in wondering about the socialization of homeschooled kids. Maybe we should be more concerned about the socialization of regularly schooled kids. I believe that has been mentioned before.

And you mentioned efficiency, that homeschooled kids do their lessons more efficiently than regularly schooled kids, and thus have more time for other things. I think efficiency is very important, but very much underappreciated by educators in general. You say, “I see children using their time very differently than children in school.” I believe you, but I don’t know quite what you mean. I think I could say the same about the home schooled children I had as guitar students. My way of saying it then, and now, was that they were able to “focus” better than most kids. I’m afraid I can’t pin that down any better, but I think it is important.

The point of all this, at least my point, is not to sing praises of homeschooling, and not to advocate for homeschooling. I think homeschooling will always be suitable for only a small minority of parents. My point is that as educators we are depressingly inept at knowing and understanding our craft. And part of this ineptness is the inability to describe and analyze what we observe. Your observations bring this into relief. Seeing things from an unaccustomed perspective can sometimes show us how little we know.

When you say that homeschooled children use their time very differently (and I presume more efficiently), when I say that two students in particular were able to interact with all ages much better than most kids, or when I say that a few of my guitar students could “focus” much better than others, it would be very desirable if we could follow up on those statements with extensive description and analysis. All we say may be true, but not of much relevance if we can’t explain it.

So Granny, write a book. Expand and develop on what you have observed, so that the rest of us can profit thereby.

And yet another thought comes to mind. In recent years I have come to the conclusion that the factors that make a good teacher are knowledge of subject matter, communication skills, social skills, and knowledge of cultural ways and values. Notably absent from this list is pedagogical training. With the exception of subject matter knowledge parents have all these things about as much as teachers do. So it should be no surprise that homeschooling works, and works well when done by reasonably well educated parents. I think pedagogical training could be very beneficial, but only when we learn a lot more about teaching and learning. I don’t mean more rhetoric and good intentions, I mean comprehensive and insightful investigation of how teaching and learning actually works, what actually happens in actual classrooms (or homes) by real teachers with real students. For my explanation of why that has not happened in ed schools, see “A Personal Indictment Of Ed School” at http://www.brianrude.com/indict-ed.htm . I consider it a very real possibility that the home school crowd could do more to advance pedagogical theory than professional educators have ever done.

Comment by Brian Rude — December 9, 2009 @ 3:48 pm
Thanks, Brian. I doubt that I am the one to write the book but I do believe that homeschoolers (hs) are natural allies of and a resource for reformers. It is unfortunate when reformers buy into the negative stereotypes of hs rather than recognizing that hs do so for the same variety of reasons that people buy a house in one district rather than another or send their children to private schools.

Comment by Homeschooling Granny — December 10, 2009 @ 8:14 am
Much depends on what you are trying to teach. And much depends on the student and the student’s home environment.

Perhaps it works well for the teaching of straightforward skills, or for things that you either understand or don’t, but would it work as well for history, philosophy, or literature, where there is so much to be gained from a class discussion–from hearing things out loud and hearing different ideas about them? And math too–there’s more to it than “getting it” or “not getting it.” There are insights that come out when the teacher is presenting something and students ask questions or offer ideas.

Perhaps online learning works well for motivated students, or those with parents and siblings on hand to keep them going–but what about others?

There’s also a question of privacy. Do all kids (and parents) want a webcam showing them at home? I wouldn’t.

And there’s a question of physical presence. I loved being around my teachers and peers–would it be the same watching them on video? I rely a lot on email, but there is something special about speaking with others in person, and it seems it may become a rarity.

And isn’t there something to be said for showing up: for getting yourself out the door and to school? Granted, it’s inconvenient, but I’m not sure we’ll be much better off if we make everything convenient.

Many claim that online learning works. Works at what, under what conditions, and at what cost?

Comment by Diana Senechal — December 10, 2009 @ 9:15 am
I know students who’ve taken online philosophy classes that had pretty vibrant discussions–they were all ‘in class’ at the same time, and had a program that let them all see each other and the teracher. (This was a HS level class, I think it had 8-10 students?)

Class discussion CAN be important in HS, but it really depends on the mix of the class–some are great, some have one or two students who ‘discuss’ while the rest sit numbly by. A plus of distance learning for discussion classes could be that it brings together interested students w/o the interference of Geography–so you can create a class that WILL have good discussions…

Comment by Deirdre Mundy — December 10, 2009 @ 3:37 pm