Pflaump@wiredbrain.com http://www.wiredbrain.net/documents/ RE: Synergy Applies to most tasks, work, learning and doing. http://www.tci.com/Press/070996.html http://www.tci.com/Whats_Next/Internet_Services/home.html http://nytsyn.com/live/Latest_columns/013_011397_102230_15171.html Teaching Via Internet Is Starting To Catch On (1/13) By SCOTT ANDERSON c.1997 Midland Daily News MIDLAND, Mich. - Nadine Burke gets ready for work like any other college professor. She pulls together her lesson plans, gives her lecture to students, reviews their comments and grades homework assignments. But unlike most of her colleagues, Burke sometimes teaches in her pajamas and slippers. She's one of a growing number of cyber-profs doing most of their teaching via the Internet. Burke, an associate professor of English for Delta College (http://alpha.delta.edu/ ), taught English composition on-line last semester. This semester she plans to teach that course along with an on-line American literature course. Burke teaches most of her classes from home, and convenience, both for students and professors, is a major appeal of the virtual classroom. ``Students can do their homework and send it over at 3 in the morning, and when I check my e-mail at 9 a.m. it's there,'' Burke said. Students who can't go to campus find the Internet to be a valuable tool, Burke said. Her students have included a lawyer who wanted to brush up his English skills from home, a woman with a newborn baby and a student 75 miles away. ``I'm reaching a different market than you would get on campus,'' she said. ``When I think back to when I had children, I would have loved to have taught on the Internet when I was on maternity leave.'' Burke and other professors using the Internet don't advocate doing away with the traditional classroom. The Internet is just another tool, said educators. ``There are a lot of professors using the Internet to supplement courses. I wish others would start doing it -- I need some companionship,'' Burke quipped. Central Michigan University (http://www.cmich.edu/ ) offered a few on-line courses last semester. During winter semester, the university offered 10 courses via the Internet in a wide variety of disciplines, including religion and statistics. All the courses are part of CMU's College of Extended Learning. The university hopes to offer a complete four-year on-line degree by fall. Michigan State University (http://www.msu.edu/ ) also offers classes on-line in areas such as nursing, social work, telecommunications and agriculture. Diane Boehm, director of the writing program at Saginaw Valley State University (http://tardis.svsu.edu/ ), has been using the Internet to help teach her students for almost 10 years. Her class, ENG 290: Writing and Cyberspace, is taught in a traditional classroom, but focuses exclusively on using the new medium. ``I want students to come away with an understanding of how electronic media is changing the way we write and the way we communicate with each other,'' she said. Reluctance to Internet education doesn't come from students, but from academia, according to Burke. Teaching on-line is something professors are going to have to get used to, she said. ``I am hearing a lot of people (who are) very concerned about it,'' Burke said. ``And I think they should be concerned. They think of it as the old correspondence course ... and that's not what this is. It's so much more than that.'' One criticism educators have raised involves verification that students are actually doing the work. Burke said she takes steps to ensure students are turning in their own work. She takes a writing sample at the beginning of the semester and compares it with the kind of writing students submit on-line. But with class participation 25 percent of their grades, it would be more difficult for students to cheat than to do the work, according to Burke. ``You get to know your students in your Internet course the same way you do in your classroom,'' she said. ``But if a student's going to cheat, (he or she is) going to cheat.'' NYT-01-13-97 1020EST< More News |Keyword Search |Hot Topics |Discussion Groups |Bill Gates |Home Online students fare better By Jane Black January 17, 1997, 6:30 p.m. PT A surprising new study at the California State University at Northridge shows that students learning in a virtual classroom tested 20 percent better across the board than their counterparts who learned in a traditional classroom. In his applied statistics class last year, Jerald Schutte, a professor at Northridge, randomly selected half of his students to be taught through traditional in-class lectures and pen-and-paper homework assignments while the rest learned through text posted online, email and newsgroups, real-time chat with their classmates, and electronic homework assignments. The students in the virtual class were given two in-class lectures to explain the technology they would be using and then came to class again only for the midterm and the final exam. There were no statistically significant differences between the sex, age, computer experience, or attitude toward the subject material of the two groups. Both were given identical tests that they took under the same conditions. The groundbreaking study, obtained by CNET this evening, provides the first quantitative data to be collected on virtual education--a field that until now has largely subsisted on anecdotal data, despite huge amounts of money that universities are spending to establish themselves as leaders in online education. Schutte said the unexpected results of the research can be explained by the online collaboration created in the virtual classroom. "The students formed peer groups online as compensation for not having time in class to talk," he said. "I believe that as much of the results can be explained by collaboration as the technology." In traditional educational theory, a professor is thought of as the mediator, the figure who encourages collaboration. Most people believe that this is the only way to learn, he said. "But in fact there is a very subtle thing going on here. A classroom can be inhibiting, intimidating. [In the classroom,] you think you are the only person who doesn't know the answer, so you don't talk. The very way classrooms are set up, with everyone facing forward, deters interaction." In fact, according to the study, students in the virtual class spent about 50 percent more time working with each other than the people in the traditional classroom. And while the report acknowledges that the inability to talk to the professor was the cause of this interaction, the results show that the collaboration "manifests itself in better test score" as students formed study groups to "pick up the slack of not having a real classroom." Other educational studies have discovered similar benefits to online student collaboration. "It is an effort to engage," said Jeff Stanzler, who directs a University of Michigan program that encourages high school students to share their poetry online. "Students need to have a certain mindset. This different than regular lessons and schools. They are encouraged to respond and work together and put those demands a little more front and center than they can in a classroom." Online teaching won't solve all educational problems, however. Although the results of his study support much of the hype su rrounding its future, Schutte points out that virtual learning may have its limits. "You must distinguish between the form and the content," he said. Virtual learning "may only be useful in the abstract, only for certain kinds of classes," he added. For subjects where real-time interpersonal communication is required, such as philosophy and ethics, computer-mediated communications such as videoconferencing and supplemental online texts may be the answer. This semester, Schutte plans further study with a sociology methods class. In an effort to discover whether the high levels of collaboration were a result of the particular group of students in the virtual class or the virtual experience itself, he will try single-subject replications. That means that students will learn some modules in the classroom and some online. Schutte will test them after each module to see if performance levels are different. Copies of the SYNERGY JOURNAL sent by request: synergy8@JUNO.COM Peter E. Pflaum Ph.D. , Headmaster GLOBAL_VILLAGE_SCHOOLHOUSE 225 Robinson Road, New Smyrna Beach, FL 32169-2176 (904) 428-1355 pflaump IRC webforum.research.digital.com join #synergybunch http://www.altavista.forum.digital.com/ Directory Floor 503 http://www.wiredbrain.net/documents/ Pflaump@wiredbrain.com @wiredbrain.com