November 12, 2010
A Parallel Universe to TV and Movies By MIKE HALE
HAS any art form — or entertainment category or visual medium or whatever you want to call it — grown so large so fast as the online serial, while remaining so consistently outside the mainstream cultural conversation? Quick, name a Web series. We’ll wait.
Did you come up with “lonelygirl15”? Two years after that initial series ended, it’s probably still the best known online serial — not because of its quality, but because of the fuss when it was revealed to be fiction.
If you’re an aficionado, or just have a lot of time on your hands, you may actually be watching better serials, like Felicia Day’s role-playing-game satire, “The Guild,” which recently completed its fourth season, or Lisa Kudrow’s latest deconstruction of 21st-century self-absorption, “Web Therapy,” which just resumed its third. But you’re probably not reading or hearing about them anywhere but online.
And still the Web series get made, hundreds of titles numbering thousands of short episodes: dramas, comedies, Webisodes accompanying television series, cartoons, talk shows, reality shows, newsmagazines, documentaries — a cheaper and quicker parallel universe to television and film.
Beginning this week in Arts & Leisure we will periodically round up some current and recent examples of purpose-made (as opposed to spur-of-the-moment) online video, focusing on original content but also keeping an eye out for hard-to-find television shows and films that have been given a home on the Web. We hope it will serve as both a snapshot of what’s being made and a guide for the casual but interested consumer.
Web Therapy
Ms. Kudrow’s series starring herself as Fiona Wallace, an abrasive and unhelpful online therapist, posted its 46th episode last week, and it’s a good one. The “Web Therapy” viewer sees both sides of Fiona’s iChat conversations; here she discusses her husband’s sexuality with his therapist, played by a hilariously winsome and breathy Meryl Streep. (The stagy reflexive laugh that’s marred some of Ms. Streep’s recent performances in film comedies doesn’t make an appearance.)
“We take the homo out of sexuality,” Ms. Streep purrs, before revealing that Fiona’s husband has responded more positively to a photograph of David Hasselhoff than to one of a naked Fiona. Then she has to pause for a moment because her bra has popped open.
Ms. Streep will reportedly appear in two more episodes while this ministory arc plays out; new episodes are posted on Wednesdays at lstudio.com/web-therapy.
Riese
The Canadian production “Riese” is not a new series; 5 of the 10 episodes appeared last year on KoldCast.tv. What’s interesting about its current run at Syfy.com is that it’s explicitly a tryout for television. Syfy wants to see whether “Riese” can make the same Internet-to-cable move that “Sanctuary” made in 2008. (Ten nine-minute episodes, with commercials, equals a two-hour pilot.) In case the connection wasn’t clear enough, Amanda Tapping, the star of “Sanctuary,” narrates “Riese.”
Less interestingly “Riese” exemplifies the recent resurgence of the steampunk aesthetic, which has journeyed from Western science fiction through Japanese animation and comic books (where it produced wonderful things like “Fullmetal Alchemist” and “Howl’s Moving Castle”) and back into geeky Western popular culture. That mash-up of Victorian and Industrial Revolution visual motifs with science fiction or Tolkien-esque fantasy is represented in “Riese” by the usual goggles and arcane headgear, and a few dirigiblelike sailing ships floating in the air.
Christine Chatelain, a lithe beauty who has also done time on “Sanctuary,” is a bit glum as the title character but still makes a convincing exiled princess-action heroine. “Sanctuary” has made it to a third season on Syfy by being mediocre but mildly addictive, so the bar isn’t set too high for “Riese.” The 7th of the show’s 10 episodes will be posted on Tuesday; new episodes go up Tuesdays and Thursdays at syfy.com/riese.
Kids Reenact
The Babelgum.com original series “Kids Reenact” isn’t exactly satire at a high level, but it doesn’t need to be. Having 6- and 7-year-olds act out mock scenes from shows like “The Hills” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” complete with sighs, head tosses and rolled eyes, is inherently funny.
In the latest episode, “Kids Reenact Project Runway,” a tiny Tim Gunn in a suit and wire-rimmed glasses marches around spouting his namesake’s pet phrases. (“This worries me. Go go go. Follow your vision. Make it work.”) A mini Michael Kors dresses down a bashful designer in terms he can understand: “It looked like Princess Jasmine showed up drunk to Little Mermaid’s birthday party.”
Tales From Beyond the Pale
A project of the cult horror auteur Larry Fessenden (“Wendigo,” “The Last Winter”) and the writer and director Glenn McQuaid (“I Sell the Dead”), “Tales From Beyond the Pale” could be described, uncharitably, as a podcast site. But what Mr. Fessenden and Mr. McQuaid are really trying to do is revive the radio drama in a new setting. Those old enough to remember previous attempts like “CBS Radio Mystery Theater” — as well as fans of shows from “A Prairie Home Companion” to “This American Life” that take their stylistic cues from radio’s glory days — should enjoy these macabre R-rated tales.
Three half-hour dramas are available, including “British and Proud,” a satirical take on Anglophilia, imperialism and sex with the natives, by the filmmaker Simon Rumley (“Red, White & Blue”), and “Is This Seat Taken” by the novelist Sarah Langan, a meet-not-so-cute story set on the Long Island Rail Road. The schedule includes episodes written by Mr. Fessenden and the Eli Roth protégé Paul Solet (“Grace”). The site, talesfrombeyondthepale.com, offers free preview clips, but hearing an entire drama means buying a $1.99 download.
Dark Echo
Once again Showtime is offering a set of animated Webisodes to accompany its serial-killer-drama, “Dexter.” The six two- to three-minute episodes of “Dark Echo” tell a self-contained story, opening with the funeral of Dexter’s adoptive father, Harry.
The storytelling in the Webisodes is carried entirely by the animation and by the internal-monologue narration of Michael C. Hall as Dexter. The narration is the weakest part of the television series and a steady diet of it here is deadening. The compensation: The first three episodes are drawn by the top-flight comics artist Bill Sienkiewicz (“Elektra: Assassin,” “Daredevil: Love and War”).
Salesman/Princess Jellyfish
There are gems to be found among the “Real Housewives” and “Cops” episodes on Hulu.com. Its Criterion Collection channel, begun in February with a group of “Zatoichi” sword-fighting movies, most recently added “Salesman” (1968), the seminal direct-cinema documentary by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin (hulu.com/salesman).
In a completely different vein Hulu is posting episodes of the charming anime series “Princess Jellyfish,” based on an award-winning shojo manga (women’s comic) about a group of socially awkward young women sharing an apartment with a cross-dressing man, more or less simultaneously with their broadcast on Fuji TV in Japan. New episodes have been going up on Thursdays at hulu.com/princess-jellyfish.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 21, 2010
The Watchlist column last Sunday, about the growth of the online serial, referred incorrectly to the history of one such series, “Riese,” currently running on Syfy.com. Only 5 of the 10 episodes appeared last year on KoldCast.tv, not all 10.
Showing posts with label Web. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Web. Show all posts
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Texts Without Context By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
March 21, 2010
Texts Without Context By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.
“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.
THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.
At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.
Even some outspoken cheerleaders of Internet technology have begun to grapple with some of its more vexing side effects. Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
WORRYING ABOUT the public’s growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload, of course, is hardly new. It’s been 25 years since Neil Postman warned in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that trivia and the entertainment values promoted by television were creating distractions that threatened to subvert public discourse, and more than a decade since writers like James Gleick (“Faster”) and David Shenk (“Data Smog”) described a culture addicted to speed, drowning in data and overstimulated to the point where only sensationalism and willful hyperbole grab people’s attention.
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
“Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” the scholar Susan Jacoby writes in “The Age of American Unreason.” “What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”
TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY has bestowed miracles of access and convenience upon millions of people, and it’s also proven to be a vital new means of communication. Twitter has been used by Iranian dissidents; text messaging and social networking Web sites have been used to help coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti; YouTube has been used by professors to teach math and chemistry. But technology is also turning us into a global water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via e-mail, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors and the sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break. And in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse — often at the expense of hard news. “I have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,” the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. “I think it’s driven by people who are” slacking off at work and “surfing the Internet.” He added, “It’s like a country run by ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”
MSNBC’s new program “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which usually focuses on business and politics, has a “While you were working ...” segment in which viewers are asked to send in “some of the strangest and outrageous stories you’ve found on the Internet,” and the most e-mailed lists on popular news sites tend to feature articles about pets, food, celebrities and self-improvement. For instance, at one point on March 11, the top story on The Washington Post’s Web site was “Maintaining a Sex Life,” while the top story on Reddit.com, a user-generated news link site, was “(Funny) Sexy Girl? Do Not Trust Profile Pictures!”
Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.
Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.
Digital culture, he writes in “You Are Not a Gadget,” “is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia,” with rooms of “M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.”
AT THE SAME time the Internet’s nurturing of niche cultures is contributing to what Cass Sunstein calls “cyberbalkanization.” Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.”
“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, he writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities.” He adds that studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.
One result of this nicheification of the world is that consensus and common ground grow ever smaller, civic discourse gets a lot less civil, and pluralism — what Isaiah Berlin called the idea that “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light” from “worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own” — comes to feel increasingly elusive.
As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” Politicians and voters on the right and left not only hold different opinions from one another, but often can’t even agree over a shared set of facts, as clashes over climate change, health care and the Iraq war attest.
THE WEB’S amplification of subjectivity applies to culture as well as politics, fueling a phenomenon that has been gaining hold over America for several decades, with pundits squeezing out reporters on cable news, with authors writing biographies animated by personal and ideological agendas, with tell-all memoirs, talk-show confessionals, self-dramatizing blogs and carefully tended Facebook and MySpace pages becoming almost de rigeur.
As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.
As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”
Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups. Should the writers of television shows listen to fan feedback or a network’s audience testing? Does the desire to get an article on a “most e-mailed” list consciously or unconsciously influence how reporters and editors go about their assignments and approaches to stories? Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?
As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”
For that matter, the very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world. In a recent Newsweek cover story pegged to the Tiger Woods scandal, Neal Gabler, the author of “Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” absurdly asserts that celebrity is “the great new art form of the 21st century.”
Celebrity, Mr. Gabler argues, “competes with — and often supersedes — more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays and TV shows,” and it performs, he says, “in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community.”
However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television, and memoir writing has become a rite of passage for actors, politicians and celebrities of every ilk. At the same time our cultural landscape is brimming over with parodies, homages, variations, pastiches, collages and others forms of “appropriation art” — much of it facilitated by new technology that makes remixing, and cutting-and-pasting easy enough for a child.
It’s no longer just hip-hop sampling that rules in youth culture, but also jukebox musicals like “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” and works like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which features characters drawn from a host of classic adventures. Fan fiction and fan edits are thriving, as are karaoke contests, video games like Guitar Hero, and YouTube mash-ups of music and movie, television and visual images. These recyclings and post-modern experiments run the gamut in quality. Some, like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” are beautifully rendered works of art in their own right. Some, like J. J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” film and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen’s “Emma”) are inspired reinventions of classics. Some fan-made videos are extremely clever and inventive, and some, like a 3-D video version of Picasso’s “Guernica” posted on YouTube, are intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation.
All too often, however, the recycling and cut-and-paste esthetic has resulted in tired imitations; cheap, lazy re-dos; or works of “appropriation” designed to generate controversy like Mr. Shields’s “Reality Hunger.” Lady Gaga is third-generation Madonna; many jukebox or tribute musicals like “Good Vibrations” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” do an embarrassing disservice to the artists who inspired them; and the rote remaking of old television shows into films (from “The Brady Bunch” to “Charlie’s Angels” to “Get Smart”), not to mention the recycling of video games into movies (like “Tomb Raider” and “Resident Evil”) often seem as pointless as they are now predictable.
Writing in a 2005 Wired article that “new technologies redefine us,” William Gibson hailed audience participation and argued that “an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product.” Indeed, he said, “audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.”
To Mr. Lanier, however, the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
March 21, 2010
FURTHER READING
Words, Version 2.0
A bookshelf for further reading:
REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO
By David Shields
219 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET:
A Manifesto
By Jaron Lanier
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS
By Nicholas Carr
288 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95. (Scheduled for release in June.)
TRUE ENOUGH: LEARNING TO LIVE IN A POST-FACT SOCIETY
By Farhad Manjoo
250 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $25.95.
THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
357 pages. Vintage Books. $15.95.
INFOTOPIA: HOW MANY MINDS PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE
By Cass R. Sunstein
273 pages. Oxford University Press. $15.95.
GOING TO EXTREMES: HOW LIKE MINDS UNITE AND DIVIDE
By Cass R. Sunstein
199 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.95.
THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
By Andrew Keen
256 pages. Doubleday. $14.00.
Texts Without Context By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.
“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.
THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.
At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.
Even some outspoken cheerleaders of Internet technology have begun to grapple with some of its more vexing side effects. Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
WORRYING ABOUT the public’s growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload, of course, is hardly new. It’s been 25 years since Neil Postman warned in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that trivia and the entertainment values promoted by television were creating distractions that threatened to subvert public discourse, and more than a decade since writers like James Gleick (“Faster”) and David Shenk (“Data Smog”) described a culture addicted to speed, drowning in data and overstimulated to the point where only sensationalism and willful hyperbole grab people’s attention.
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
“Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” the scholar Susan Jacoby writes in “The Age of American Unreason.” “What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”
TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY has bestowed miracles of access and convenience upon millions of people, and it’s also proven to be a vital new means of communication. Twitter has been used by Iranian dissidents; text messaging and social networking Web sites have been used to help coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti; YouTube has been used by professors to teach math and chemistry. But technology is also turning us into a global water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via e-mail, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors and the sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break. And in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse — often at the expense of hard news. “I have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,” the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. “I think it’s driven by people who are” slacking off at work and “surfing the Internet.” He added, “It’s like a country run by ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”
MSNBC’s new program “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which usually focuses on business and politics, has a “While you were working ...” segment in which viewers are asked to send in “some of the strangest and outrageous stories you’ve found on the Internet,” and the most e-mailed lists on popular news sites tend to feature articles about pets, food, celebrities and self-improvement. For instance, at one point on March 11, the top story on The Washington Post’s Web site was “Maintaining a Sex Life,” while the top story on Reddit.com, a user-generated news link site, was “(Funny) Sexy Girl? Do Not Trust Profile Pictures!”
Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.
Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.
Digital culture, he writes in “You Are Not a Gadget,” “is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia,” with rooms of “M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.”
AT THE SAME time the Internet’s nurturing of niche cultures is contributing to what Cass Sunstein calls “cyberbalkanization.” Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.”
“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, he writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities.” He adds that studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.
One result of this nicheification of the world is that consensus and common ground grow ever smaller, civic discourse gets a lot less civil, and pluralism — what Isaiah Berlin called the idea that “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light” from “worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own” — comes to feel increasingly elusive.
As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” Politicians and voters on the right and left not only hold different opinions from one another, but often can’t even agree over a shared set of facts, as clashes over climate change, health care and the Iraq war attest.
THE WEB’S amplification of subjectivity applies to culture as well as politics, fueling a phenomenon that has been gaining hold over America for several decades, with pundits squeezing out reporters on cable news, with authors writing biographies animated by personal and ideological agendas, with tell-all memoirs, talk-show confessionals, self-dramatizing blogs and carefully tended Facebook and MySpace pages becoming almost de rigeur.
As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.
As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”
Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups. Should the writers of television shows listen to fan feedback or a network’s audience testing? Does the desire to get an article on a “most e-mailed” list consciously or unconsciously influence how reporters and editors go about their assignments and approaches to stories? Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?
As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”
For that matter, the very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world. In a recent Newsweek cover story pegged to the Tiger Woods scandal, Neal Gabler, the author of “Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” absurdly asserts that celebrity is “the great new art form of the 21st century.”
Celebrity, Mr. Gabler argues, “competes with — and often supersedes — more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays and TV shows,” and it performs, he says, “in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community.”
However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television, and memoir writing has become a rite of passage for actors, politicians and celebrities of every ilk. At the same time our cultural landscape is brimming over with parodies, homages, variations, pastiches, collages and others forms of “appropriation art” — much of it facilitated by new technology that makes remixing, and cutting-and-pasting easy enough for a child.
It’s no longer just hip-hop sampling that rules in youth culture, but also jukebox musicals like “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” and works like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which features characters drawn from a host of classic adventures. Fan fiction and fan edits are thriving, as are karaoke contests, video games like Guitar Hero, and YouTube mash-ups of music and movie, television and visual images. These recyclings and post-modern experiments run the gamut in quality. Some, like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” are beautifully rendered works of art in their own right. Some, like J. J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” film and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen’s “Emma”) are inspired reinventions of classics. Some fan-made videos are extremely clever and inventive, and some, like a 3-D video version of Picasso’s “Guernica” posted on YouTube, are intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation.
All too often, however, the recycling and cut-and-paste esthetic has resulted in tired imitations; cheap, lazy re-dos; or works of “appropriation” designed to generate controversy like Mr. Shields’s “Reality Hunger.” Lady Gaga is third-generation Madonna; many jukebox or tribute musicals like “Good Vibrations” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” do an embarrassing disservice to the artists who inspired them; and the rote remaking of old television shows into films (from “The Brady Bunch” to “Charlie’s Angels” to “Get Smart”), not to mention the recycling of video games into movies (like “Tomb Raider” and “Resident Evil”) often seem as pointless as they are now predictable.
Writing in a 2005 Wired article that “new technologies redefine us,” William Gibson hailed audience participation and argued that “an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product.” Indeed, he said, “audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.”
To Mr. Lanier, however, the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
March 21, 2010
FURTHER READING
Words, Version 2.0
A bookshelf for further reading:
REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO
By David Shields
219 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET:
A Manifesto
By Jaron Lanier
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS
By Nicholas Carr
288 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95. (Scheduled for release in June.)
TRUE ENOUGH: LEARNING TO LIVE IN A POST-FACT SOCIETY
By Farhad Manjoo
250 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $25.95.
THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
357 pages. Vintage Books. $15.95.
INFOTOPIA: HOW MANY MINDS PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE
By Cass R. Sunstein
273 pages. Oxford University Press. $15.95.
GOING TO EXTREMES: HOW LIKE MINDS UNITE AND DIVIDE
By Cass R. Sunstein
199 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.95.
THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
By Andrew Keen
256 pages. Doubleday. $14.00.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Hurry, Hurry, Just Hours to Shop By ROY FURCHGOTT
December 24, 2009
Hurry, Hurry, Just Hours to Shop By ROY FURCHGOTT
I admit it. I am a last-minute shopper. And last-minute shoppers pay the price literally and figuratively.
Literally, because when we rush to the nearest mall we often have to pay a premium to buy that ... well, I don't know what — I'm not done shopping.
Figuratively, we pay with anxiety, racing against the clock to find a suitable gift, not to mention having to compete with other sharp-elbowed last-minute shoppers.
Fortunately, technology can make shopping go as smoothly as a sleigh over new snow. Software add-ons, online ways to find gift ideas, mobile apps that hunt down a deal — there is digital help that even a Grinch could love.
Using these tools and following my strategy won't necessarily get you the perfect gift or the best deal, but it should make sure no stockings go empty. Here's how to make your last-minute shopping quick and easy.
PICKING OUT A GIFT Maybe the hardest part of last-minute shopping is thinking of a good present. You could ask your social network for suggestions, but that tips off everyone that you've been lollygagging and may tip them off to their gifts, too.
Instead, try doing the same thing anonymously through Aardvark, a query service that sends questions to people who have designated themselves as experts in their fields. Ask for a gift for a cyclist, for example, and the question will be sent to gift experts and cycling experts. It pings a few people at a time until you get a suitable answer, so you're not bugging a lot of people. For best results, ask a focused question, like "what is a good gift for a 60-year-old opera lover?"
You can also anonymously see what people suggest on Twitter. I like to use Twitter Search. Enter "Christmas gift list" to see lists people have compiled for golfers, children and others. Be advised that there is also a lot of promotional spam out there. A narrower search, like "tennis Christmas gift" gets better suggestions. A site called the Christmas It List culls comments from 50 sites to determine the 25 hottest products. Or check its Twitter site to see day-by-day changes, which show a larger selection.
FINDING THE RIGHT DEAL With some ideas, you can hit the Web, but rather than laboriously check each product at several stores, let Web browser add-ons search out deals and discounts for you.
I like to use the Firefox browser with the add-on Invisible Hand. It works in the background on Firefox and Google Chrome (Internet Explorer is coming, the company says), automatically checking prices at about 50 online stores as you shop. A subtle alert in the toolbar tells you if it finds a lower price than the one you have found yourself.
Another tool for smoothing online shopping is Billeo, which works on Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers when using the search engines Yahoo, Google and Bing. Billeo shows an icon next to a search entry if Visa, American Express, Bank of America or Chase offers a reward for the purchase, or if the retailer is offering a discount. Billeo said it tracked offers from 720 retailers, like Target, Macy's, Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart.
Billeo also streamlines one big online shopping headache, filling out forms at checkout. Fill out Billeo's form once and it should auto-fill most checkouts you'll encounter, as long as the forms are fairly standard and are not Flash-based.
Need something quick — and cheap — for the office Secret Santa exchange? I like the Web site CouponMap.com. It shows available coupons in your immediate area (the results are shown on a map), so you can print the coupon, run right out and get a discount gift. I've looked at dozens of coupon sites, and find them to be pretty inaccurate, but CouponMap did well. It even found an extra hidden discount on a gift certificate to a local crab house, reducing the price of a $25 gift certificate to $7.50.
The Web site RetailMeNot.com also maps coupon deals for nearby businesses, a total of 40,000 stores nationally, it says. The site then asks users to rate the effectiveness of the various offers, helping to weed out expired deals.
COMPARING ON THE GO If inspiration has not struck and you find yourself milling around the mall, there are still some excellent comparison-shopping tools to use on the spot.
RedLaser, a bar code-scanning app that recognizes the product you are looking at and then goes online to find other prices, has proved to be a huge hit on the iPhone App Store.
Part of its brilliance is you don't have to take a picture of the bar code, you just frame the code with the camera and it quickly and automatically scans and returns results. When you know the Web price, you can decide if it's worth paying extra to have the gift right away — think of it as an optional late fee.
In the past I've relied mostly on the ShopSavvy app for Android, which is now also available for the iPhone. Although the bar code reader can be a bit finicky, it returns not only online pricing but also prices at nearby stores. It gives you an option of calling the store or getting directions.
Bar code scanners do have a weakness. They work best for products that are distributed nationally to a variety of stores, items like books, CDs, DVDs and electronics. They don't work as well on items exclusive to a single chain — those products may have a proprietary code. They tend not to work well on items like clothing and groceries, either.
Some of these weaknesses may be overcome by Google Goggles for Android phones. Using the camera, it conducts a visual search. It can scan writing as well as bar codes, so it can search results based on the writing on a toy's box, a logo or a label. Sometimes that returns a result when a bar code doesn't work. But it's a last-ditch effort: the app is still a work in progress, and doesn't always produce a useful result.
It may not be in the best holiday spirit, but when you're pressed for time in the gift-giving season, you really can phone it in.
Digital Help for Last-Minute Shoppers - NYTimes.com (26 December 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/technology/personaltech/24basics.html?sq=Just%20Hours%20to%20Shop&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/tuy1v
Hurry, Hurry, Just Hours to Shop By ROY FURCHGOTT
I admit it. I am a last-minute shopper. And last-minute shoppers pay the price literally and figuratively.
Literally, because when we rush to the nearest mall we often have to pay a premium to buy that ... well, I don't know what — I'm not done shopping.
Figuratively, we pay with anxiety, racing against the clock to find a suitable gift, not to mention having to compete with other sharp-elbowed last-minute shoppers.
Fortunately, technology can make shopping go as smoothly as a sleigh over new snow. Software add-ons, online ways to find gift ideas, mobile apps that hunt down a deal — there is digital help that even a Grinch could love.
Using these tools and following my strategy won't necessarily get you the perfect gift or the best deal, but it should make sure no stockings go empty. Here's how to make your last-minute shopping quick and easy.
PICKING OUT A GIFT Maybe the hardest part of last-minute shopping is thinking of a good present. You could ask your social network for suggestions, but that tips off everyone that you've been lollygagging and may tip them off to their gifts, too.
Instead, try doing the same thing anonymously through Aardvark, a query service that sends questions to people who have designated themselves as experts in their fields. Ask for a gift for a cyclist, for example, and the question will be sent to gift experts and cycling experts. It pings a few people at a time until you get a suitable answer, so you're not bugging a lot of people. For best results, ask a focused question, like "what is a good gift for a 60-year-old opera lover?"
You can also anonymously see what people suggest on Twitter. I like to use Twitter Search. Enter "Christmas gift list" to see lists people have compiled for golfers, children and others. Be advised that there is also a lot of promotional spam out there. A narrower search, like "tennis Christmas gift" gets better suggestions. A site called the Christmas It List culls comments from 50 sites to determine the 25 hottest products. Or check its Twitter site to see day-by-day changes, which show a larger selection.
FINDING THE RIGHT DEAL With some ideas, you can hit the Web, but rather than laboriously check each product at several stores, let Web browser add-ons search out deals and discounts for you.
I like to use the Firefox browser with the add-on Invisible Hand. It works in the background on Firefox and Google Chrome (Internet Explorer is coming, the company says), automatically checking prices at about 50 online stores as you shop. A subtle alert in the toolbar tells you if it finds a lower price than the one you have found yourself.
Another tool for smoothing online shopping is Billeo, which works on Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers when using the search engines Yahoo, Google and Bing. Billeo shows an icon next to a search entry if Visa, American Express, Bank of America or Chase offers a reward for the purchase, or if the retailer is offering a discount. Billeo said it tracked offers from 720 retailers, like Target, Macy's, Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart.
Billeo also streamlines one big online shopping headache, filling out forms at checkout. Fill out Billeo's form once and it should auto-fill most checkouts you'll encounter, as long as the forms are fairly standard and are not Flash-based.
Need something quick — and cheap — for the office Secret Santa exchange? I like the Web site CouponMap.com. It shows available coupons in your immediate area (the results are shown on a map), so you can print the coupon, run right out and get a discount gift. I've looked at dozens of coupon sites, and find them to be pretty inaccurate, but CouponMap did well. It even found an extra hidden discount on a gift certificate to a local crab house, reducing the price of a $25 gift certificate to $7.50.
The Web site RetailMeNot.com also maps coupon deals for nearby businesses, a total of 40,000 stores nationally, it says. The site then asks users to rate the effectiveness of the various offers, helping to weed out expired deals.
COMPARING ON THE GO If inspiration has not struck and you find yourself milling around the mall, there are still some excellent comparison-shopping tools to use on the spot.
RedLaser, a bar code-scanning app that recognizes the product you are looking at and then goes online to find other prices, has proved to be a huge hit on the iPhone App Store.
Part of its brilliance is you don't have to take a picture of the bar code, you just frame the code with the camera and it quickly and automatically scans and returns results. When you know the Web price, you can decide if it's worth paying extra to have the gift right away — think of it as an optional late fee.
In the past I've relied mostly on the ShopSavvy app for Android, which is now also available for the iPhone. Although the bar code reader can be a bit finicky, it returns not only online pricing but also prices at nearby stores. It gives you an option of calling the store or getting directions.
Bar code scanners do have a weakness. They work best for products that are distributed nationally to a variety of stores, items like books, CDs, DVDs and electronics. They don't work as well on items exclusive to a single chain — those products may have a proprietary code. They tend not to work well on items like clothing and groceries, either.
Some of these weaknesses may be overcome by Google Goggles for Android phones. Using the camera, it conducts a visual search. It can scan writing as well as bar codes, so it can search results based on the writing on a toy's box, a logo or a label. Sometimes that returns a result when a bar code doesn't work. But it's a last-ditch effort: the app is still a work in progress, and doesn't always produce a useful result.
It may not be in the best holiday spirit, but when you're pressed for time in the gift-giving season, you really can phone it in.
Digital Help for Last-Minute Shoppers - NYTimes.com (26 December 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/24/technology/personaltech/24basics.html?sq=Just%20Hours%20to%20Shop&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/tuy1v
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
August 26, 2009
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.
Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.
Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.
Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.
“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”
Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”
The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.
Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.
Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.
Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.
Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.
Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.
“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”
Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”
The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.
Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.
Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Adding Layers of Skills to a Science Background By STEVE LOHR
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
August 20, 2009
Adding Layers of Skills to a Science Background By STEVE LOHR
In good times or bad, the pace of technological change never seems to let up. This relentless engine of innovation, economists agree, is the wellspring of the nation’s long-run prosperity. But it presents a daunting challenge to science and technology professionals who are trying to stay ahead, seeking a career that is unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.
The sour economy has only intensified those pressures. So colleges across the country are reporting a surge in applications since last fall, up as much as 50 percent, for continuing education programs intended for people with science and engineering backgrounds. The offerings, in classroom settings and online, range from short courses of a few days to graduate degree programs that span years.
Some students want refresher courses, educators say, but most are trying to broaden their appeal by adding business and communications skills or by learning how to apply their technical talents in promising fields like renewable energy, transportation and health care.
“Technical expertise by itself is not sufficient, and that is more true now than it has ever been,” said Bhaskar Pant, executive director of professional programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s school of engineering.
The technology workers most in demand in the future, according to James E. Spohrer, a researcher and director of university programs for I.B.M., will be “T-shaped people.” Such people, Mr. Spohrer explains, possess a deep knowledge in one technical discipline topped off by a wide portfolio of skills, from project management to industry expertise, that makes them more valuable to employers.
Katherine Heningburg, 28, an electrical engineer at General Dynamics in Scottsdale, Ariz., wants to become one of those broadly skilled technologists. Ms. Heningburg, who designs computer circuits for communications systems, is taking online courses from Arizona State University to earn both a master’s degree in engineering and an M.B.A.
The added skills, she said, should prepare her to lead project teams, a step into management. “My goal is to bridge the gap between the business and technical side,” Ms. Heningburg said. “And this will give me the ammunition I need to be marketable within my company, in my industry and beyond.”
In many schools, hybrid courses that apply computing to business problems are increasingly popular among continuing education students. These blended courses are in new academic niches like knowledge services, data analytics and services science, which combines technology with business processes. These hybrid disciplines apply computing to businesses as diverse as online advertising and food distribution.
“All the business knowledge and data analytics is further up the economic ladder than pure technology alone,” said Ram Akella, a professor of information systems and technology management at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “That work is not going to go offshore.”
Sometimes, a return to school is a smart way to restart a science career. That was the motivation for Mark Spencer, 53, when last fall he began M.I.T.’s Career Re-engineering Program.
Mr. Spencer has a Ph.D. in chemistry and for more than a decade was a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., specializing in atmospheric chemistry and climate modeling. But in 1995, Mr. Spencer, an avid amateur photographer, decided to pursue a long-held desire to try another career. He moved back to his home state, Massachusetts, and set up a photography studio.
MR. Spencer did well for years, as both the owner of a small business and as a photographer, winning a string of professional awards. Yet, he explained, the intellectual stimulation of photography waned over time, and the deep recession reduced sales of his business by 40 percent.
So Mr. Spencer immersed himself in courses at M.I.T. two days a week last fall and, as part of the program, started an internship this year at a technology and research firm, Agiltron. One division of the company does contract work for the government, and shortly after he arrived Mr. Spencer was asked to help prepare a contract proposal on deadline. He was hired the next day, well before the M.I.T program was over.
“I didn’t get my full money’s worth,” he joked.
Mr. Spencer said he found the M.I.T. course work useful and stimulating. But like others, Mr. Spencer also pointed to the networking benefits of rejoining a university community and the value of the program as a sign to employers that you are motivated and willing to make an entrepreneurial investment in yourself.
“If my résumé started by saying I had run a photography studio for the last 15 years, there’s no way I would have gotten in the door,” Mr. Spencer said. “Having that M.I.T program at the top of the résumé really was crucial.”
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August 20, 2009
Adding Layers of Skills to a Science Background By STEVE LOHR
In good times or bad, the pace of technological change never seems to let up. This relentless engine of innovation, economists agree, is the wellspring of the nation’s long-run prosperity. But it presents a daunting challenge to science and technology professionals who are trying to stay ahead, seeking a career that is unlikely to become outsourced, automated or obsolete.
The sour economy has only intensified those pressures. So colleges across the country are reporting a surge in applications since last fall, up as much as 50 percent, for continuing education programs intended for people with science and engineering backgrounds. The offerings, in classroom settings and online, range from short courses of a few days to graduate degree programs that span years.
Some students want refresher courses, educators say, but most are trying to broaden their appeal by adding business and communications skills or by learning how to apply their technical talents in promising fields like renewable energy, transportation and health care.
“Technical expertise by itself is not sufficient, and that is more true now than it has ever been,” said Bhaskar Pant, executive director of professional programs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s school of engineering.
The technology workers most in demand in the future, according to James E. Spohrer, a researcher and director of university programs for I.B.M., will be “T-shaped people.” Such people, Mr. Spohrer explains, possess a deep knowledge in one technical discipline topped off by a wide portfolio of skills, from project management to industry expertise, that makes them more valuable to employers.
Katherine Heningburg, 28, an electrical engineer at General Dynamics in Scottsdale, Ariz., wants to become one of those broadly skilled technologists. Ms. Heningburg, who designs computer circuits for communications systems, is taking online courses from Arizona State University to earn both a master’s degree in engineering and an M.B.A.
The added skills, she said, should prepare her to lead project teams, a step into management. “My goal is to bridge the gap between the business and technical side,” Ms. Heningburg said. “And this will give me the ammunition I need to be marketable within my company, in my industry and beyond.”
In many schools, hybrid courses that apply computing to business problems are increasingly popular among continuing education students. These blended courses are in new academic niches like knowledge services, data analytics and services science, which combines technology with business processes. These hybrid disciplines apply computing to businesses as diverse as online advertising and food distribution.
“All the business knowledge and data analytics is further up the economic ladder than pure technology alone,” said Ram Akella, a professor of information systems and technology management at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “That work is not going to go offshore.”
Sometimes, a return to school is a smart way to restart a science career. That was the motivation for Mark Spencer, 53, when last fall he began M.I.T.’s Career Re-engineering Program.
Mr. Spencer has a Ph.D. in chemistry and for more than a decade was a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., specializing in atmospheric chemistry and climate modeling. But in 1995, Mr. Spencer, an avid amateur photographer, decided to pursue a long-held desire to try another career. He moved back to his home state, Massachusetts, and set up a photography studio.
MR. Spencer did well for years, as both the owner of a small business and as a photographer, winning a string of professional awards. Yet, he explained, the intellectual stimulation of photography waned over time, and the deep recession reduced sales of his business by 40 percent.
So Mr. Spencer immersed himself in courses at M.I.T. two days a week last fall and, as part of the program, started an internship this year at a technology and research firm, Agiltron. One division of the company does contract work for the government, and shortly after he arrived Mr. Spencer was asked to help prepare a contract proposal on deadline. He was hired the next day, well before the M.I.T program was over.
“I didn’t get my full money’s worth,” he joked.
Mr. Spencer said he found the M.I.T. course work useful and stimulating. But like others, Mr. Spencer also pointed to the networking benefits of rejoining a university community and the value of the program as a sign to employers that you are motivated and willing to make an entrepreneurial investment in yourself.
“If my résumé started by saying I had run a photography studio for the last 15 years, there’s no way I would have gotten in the door,” Mr. Spencer said. “Having that M.I.T program at the top of the résumé really was crucial.”
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Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom By Steve Lohr
August 19, 2009, 1:08 pm
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom By Steve Lohr
Update | 11:08 p.m. Read an article by Steve Lohr on keeping abreast of innovation in the Continuing Education special section.
A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
Noah Berger for The New York Times Tyler Kennedy, 9, searches the Web at home in California.
The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.
This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.
Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.
The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
“We are at an inflection point in online education,” said Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program.
The biggest near-term growth, Mr. Regier predicts, will be in continuing education programs. Today, Arizona State has 5,000 students in its continuing education programs, both through in-person classes and online. In three to five years, he estimates, that number could triple, with nearly all the growth coming online.
But Mr. Regier also thinks online education will continue to make further inroads in transforming college campuses as well. Universities — and many K-12 schools — now widely use online learning management systems, like Blackboard or the open-source Moodle. But that is mostly for posting assignments, reading lists, and class schedules and hosting some Web discussion boards.
Mr. Regier sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said. For example, it will be assumed that college students know the basics of calculus, and the classroom time will focus on applying the math to real-world problems — perhaps in exploring the physics of climate change or modeling trends in stock prices, he said.
“The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways,” Mr. Regier said. “People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”
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FEEDBACK FROM READERS...CONTAINS INTERESTING LINKS
1 2 3 ... 5 Next »
1. August 19, 2009
1:48 pm
Link
For K-12, online classes may translate to more face-to-face instruction. We pulled our son out of a useless junior high, let him play guitar and video games at home all day, and used an online charter school to teach him ourselves at night. The online curriuculum was definitely superior to what the local school offered, and the 1:1 instruction was very efficient. After one semester, he’s ahead of all his old classmates, rather than failing, and he’s enjoying life. Most people probably can’t arrange their lives to do this, but it sure can work when it works.
— Buzz
2. August 19, 2009
1:56 pm
Link
If you resonate with the studies conclusions, consider that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Imagine what we’ll begin to see when the generation that’s been “bathed in bits” begins building learning communities?
Imagine a mash-up of stumbleupon (randomizing), plus freerice.com (rewards/incentives), plus websites only slightly tweaked to deliver the core content required by states’ NCLB-mandated standards. The most successful (digital) charter school in history.
And, to take it a step further, now layer in the ability to be the personality that you want to be while learning, but still retain a social element through your digital self: http://guengerich.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/talk-to-the-digital-hand/
Great to see the validation from SRI.
— live in Austin
3. August 19, 2009
2:01 pm
Link
Learning is an independent activity Mr. Reiger to the contrary… We all decide what we want to learn — 1st decision and then for different people there are different ways to learn things… The computer which can repreat things forever — and is very patient is a good method for that reason… It can also talk to us and put up something for us to read concurrently — this is where much teaching falls down — on the visual component..A few things do need hands on practice.. say dissection but having had lots of trouble with the instruction from the human instructor on the dissection of the baby pig - I now wonder how I would have done with computer directions to guide me…. sort of like operating long distance via video hookups which are now done…..
Of course, it’s incredibly cheap to provide online education — we could be lawyers for 100$ — which is exactly why this technology is NOT being appropriately exploited except by for profits… pathetic…
and thank heavesn for Wikipedia. — there are some good people out there.
— Hetty Greene
4. August 19, 2009
2:10 pm
Link
One problem with saying that students in online classes do slightly better than students in traditional classes goes back to the old comparing apples and oranges thing. Online classes have their own assessments that may not parallel traditional assessments. The very technology tends to skew what can and cannot be assessed. Was there any standardization in the compared assessments, I wonder?
— Helen Hoffman
5. August 19, 2009
2:15 pm
Link
I’m halfway through an online master’s program with SJSU’s SLIS. It’s incredibly individualist, timely, and convenient. While the difference between an instructor that can effectively utilize the technology and also bridge the gap of disconnect between students and one who cannot is literally the difference between day and night, I think that the future of education is not as “scary” as it used to be.
p.s. I assure you Hetty, that it costs much more than you think to run these types of programs well.
— Dana
6. August 19, 2009
2:44 pm
Link
I wonder to what degree the comparisons are skewed because online learners tend to have more access to technology etc in general. There could be a real effect, but dubious about the magnitude.
— JD
7. August 19, 2009
2:49 pm
Link
Isn’t it a self-selecting group that would want to learn online? Could this be a reason why those taking online courses do better? There’s a certain drive and motivation necessary to force yourself to learn something you don’t have to.
— KV
8. August 19, 2009
2:57 pm
Link
Perhaps by giving business, civics, math and the sciences over to online learning, truly significant time in the classroom can be given over to the arts and humanities.
— Duro
9. August 19, 2009
3:00 pm
Link
Fascinating. When it came to college instruction, did the study consider whether older learners did better than traditional college students?
In my experience, on-line learning can work with motivated adults who already possess the BA or BS and take on-line classes to get a credential or a salary boost at work.
Traditional-age college students need the classroom interaction. For that matter, college-level learning is NOT an individual experience. It’s totally dependent upon dialogue and discussion. Otherwise, we might as well say that all we ever need to know we can get by gazing at our navels.
I’m very disturbed by Hetty Greene’s comment. Wikipedia may provide answers, but a college education is designed to help people ask questions and to analyze. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it does not teach analytical or critical thinking. If you don’t want those things, don’t go to college. And if you want a good lawyer, you best make sure he or she does not see the world in terms of answers and quick facts rather than in terms of questions and analysis.
College students, especially those aged 18-24, need to be challenged by the professor and fellow students in person, because they are far too sheltered and naive to seek challenges to what they already think to be true. Those over the age of 24 are not much better, but if they’ve already gone to college they know to ask questions. Young people, now raised in Hetty Greene’s world in which answers and not questions are touted as the end all and be all, are especially in need of the critical thinking skills that a college education provides.
For that matter, most of my on-line students failed their courses and the university knew they’d fail. On-line courses are cash cows *designed* to take advantage of irresponsible, parent-shielded child-adults who, while by no means dumb, are too lazy to drop courses in which they lose interest. Students in my classroom rarely fail because they stop attending class. Students on-line, however, quickly lose interest and are so enamored of their new independence that they forget to drop the course. The F stays on their record and the university gets the cash.
— sara
10. August 19, 2009
3:13 pm
Link
I have personally been the student in a variety of settings, including online, traditional college, foreign universities, community college, etc. What I have found is 1 year later, my retention rate of the material I learned is about the same, irrespective of the delivery method.
That said, I found the online learning drudgery. No live interaction with students & teachers, no debates, etc. No camaraderie, no life-long friendships formed, etc. Not good for extroverts. Living on campus with fellow students is more valuable, and leaves greater impressions, than what you learn in the classroom, particularly 30 years later. So for young people, I definitely recommend the college campus experience, living away from home starting at 18. What you learn about life & getting along with other people will never be reproduced online.
On the plus side, driving to class after work to listen to a bored adjunct for 90 minutes, then driving home is a waste of time. I could read that material myself in 20 minutes in the comfort of my home AND get a higher score on the test. You can move at your own speed and don’t waste time doing stuff that’s redundant. You can do assignments at 2 a.m. if you want - it’s your schedule. In these regards, online learning is superior. Much better for working stiffs trying to get ahead.
The subject matter is also important. Much easier to learn computer programming online than brain surgery. Anything involving people, like physical therapy, needs a large “live” component. OTH, accounting can likely be done easily online.
Bottom line is the motivated learner or student can do well in a variety of settings. As #3 pointed out, it’s cheaper to do online. Just record the professor’s lecture one time, and you’re done, even if s/he dies.
It’s also good for people who live in Timbuktu. You can still have access to the famous professor from home, something that was impossible before.
— JS17
11. August 19, 2009
3:29 pm
Link
From this overview that has been presented, it would appear that the research has discovered a correlation rather than a causation in their results.
More bluntly, people taking online courses are a self selected group of people who want to learn. In a regular college environment, that just isn’t there - there are plenty of deadbeats who get weeded out, or people who realize that this isn’t for them, or people who were pushed into college by mom and dad and just aren’t too terribly bright.
Comparison of test scores doesn’t validate the results that Ms. Means and her team has drawn from their research. Their results are interesting, but the essential point still stands; they’ll need more data on the students themselves to draw any form of conclusion about the real efficacy of online teaching.
— Jim
12. August 19, 2009
3:31 pm
Link
Just throwing online tools at people does not mean they will engage in meaningful learning. And many course management systems — Blackboard is the notorious biggest offender — are closed, proprietary, and their online media are decades behind the curve.
With some money from MacArthur Foundation, I worked with developers and with my own students to develop a combination of tools and techniques:
http://socialmediaclassroom.com and http://socialmediaclassroom/com/host/vircom
It’s free and open source software and all the curricular materials are free for others to use.
— Howard Rheingold
13. August 19, 2009
3:34 pm
Link
Re, from the article: “The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms.”
Yes, I strongly agree. As a teacher, I want students to have individualized learning experiences, especially students who are already 2-3 years behind.
Right now in Florida we actually have a state law that says students who have already been retained “2 or more years” in public schools are required to be in an “alternative placement” — but no one bothered to fund any alternative placement settings for those students already left back 2 or more years who are not eligible for special ed because they do not score low enough to qualify.
What these kids need is an online alternative placement classroom; one like the online classrooms now being used in NYC over the summer to teach math as recently profiled in the NY Times.
By offering students an online alternative, in school, the school still gets the money to educate the student, and the student has a chance for an individual online experience that may even enable the student to catch up.
And, the student could still attend music, art and PE classes with their actual age peers, which is not what happens now.
Now, what happens is you can be a 4th grade teacher, and get a very tall, very physically large 13 year old male student who should be in 7th grade, but is still stuck in
4th grade.
This is not a good situation for that student, or for the other students who are actually only 10 years old.
And the larger student does not like taking 4th grade art, music and PE three years in a row either.
So, I am looking forward to more online learning in schools, especially for situations like the above. This would really be a tremendous help to all students and teachers.
— florida voter
14. August 19, 2009
3:36 pm
Link
While enrolled in a mixed media course, where lectures were delivered online through Blackboard with weekly discussion/quiz sessions in a classroom, we quickly found that the best way for many of us to watch the lectures was, in fact, together. This gave everyone a chance to ask questions in the middle of the lecture, and have a possible answer. However, having the ability to go straight to lectures during review helped in studying for finals, or doing homework. Nonetheless, given the complex content of the course, I feel that at least some human interaction was necessary for conceptual comprehension.
Though there are some days I wish all professors came with a fast-forward button…
— KD
15. August 19, 2009
3:41 pm
Link
On the contrary, Buzz, I think most people can rearrange their lives to allow their kids the best education. There’s no law, biological or otherwise, that says kids can only learn between 9 and 3 or between September and June. Teenagers in particular are more awake in the afternoon and evening than they are at 7am. Why not allow them to adjust their educational schedule to fit their circadian rhythm by implementing more asynchronous learning?
— The Princess Mom
16. August 19, 2009
3:52 pm
Link
Being in a doctorate program at Boston University, I can certainly attest to the rigor and depth of the educational experience. I have degrees and certification from several prominent institutions (Kenyon College, University of Colorado - Boulder, University of TN - Knoxville, University of Memphis), and would put my on-line experience at BU against any of my excellent live classroom experiences. Being able to continue to work while attending graduate school has been a major plus. I am able to remain in my house, no travel time, and can archive lectures and classes.
On the down side, one misses the informal exchanges of student-to-student and student to faculty personal contacts.
— Charles Tighe
17. August 19, 2009
4:07 pm
Link
I agree with the last paragraph completely. I have studied in online only, classroom only, and an online/classroom hybrid. While I learned a lot from all of them, logic in online classes and political science and all the drama that entails in classroom classes, I did like the hybrids. Sharing thoughts online and then meeting in person.
— Walter G
18. August 19, 2009
4:20 pm
Link
I completed an accredited online graduate course in the Humanities at the age is 83! Independent study is the way we all learn, and through the graded discussions and a good professor, it is the only way of the future for working people who cannot travel for their studies, and saves the enormous expense of dormitory life.
It is truly astounding that schools do not offer more online courses..
— Elaine
19. August 19, 2009
4:27 pm
Link
You may want to take a look at this interview on K-12 math teaching online: http://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/08/12/teaching-k-12-math-online-reasoning-mind-ceo-alex-khachatryan-part-1/
— Sramana Mitra
20. August 19, 2009
4:30 pm
Link
I’ve never participated in on-line distance learning; but I wouldn’t have guessed these results. However, Jim (11) makes a good point. Test results are not really a good proxy for testing all-around ‘learning.’
JS17 seems to have more varied experiences than I have; and seems to capture several facets of the argument. I think certain subjects and basic disciplines could be taught on-line; but others wouldn’t lend themselves to it. Hetty Green thinks one could become a lawyer for $100. Good luck with that. How is one going to participate in a Socratic dialogue amongst ones peers? Maybe when videoconferencing improves and becomes cheaper.
— Larry
21. August 19, 2009
4:37 pm
Link
I wonder if what could also be happening, with regards to college students participating in online courses, is that those people voluntarily taking these courses are self-selected to be students with more tenacity and self-discipline than students who would not be able to make that commitment. Just a thought. I could be way off-base here.
— Zachary Elwood
22. August 19, 2009
4:56 pm
Link
@ duro, “Perhaps by giving business, civics, math and the sciences over to online learning, truly significant time in the classroom can be given over to the arts and humanities.”
Math *is* a humanity. It is not a science. It is an art in itself, not a tool, although it can be used as a tool, much as the English language can be used as a tool though it is not *merely* a tool.
And the best way to learn it is through wide ranging mathematical conversation with an actual mathematician, as opposed to “problem sets”. Unfortunately there is little to no math (proofs, methods of proof etc), and next to no mathematicians, below university level in this country so most people are not exposed to this fact.. Perhaps an inherent flaw of forced “education”.
As to the original article, I suspect again that, because correllation is not equal to causation, there is quite a bit of self-selection in the study. Whether this be true or not, however, the lower cost of online instruction will drive increased use of online education systems in the future.
— steve in W MA
23. August 19, 2009
5:03 pm
Link
The key is that online eSchools allow students to have instant access to iconic media, i.e. photographs, film/video clips,
animation clips, virtual field trips, QTVRs, sound clips to help convey information and concepts. Much better for teachers to SHOW & TELL rather than to just TELLl information to students like our ancestors did in the Bronze Age…and assume the students know what you’re talking/telling about.
Why do most kids HATE SCHOOL? Because they have to
sit in their seats for six hours a day listening to a teacher
chalkTALK to them in an attempt to convey information.
— Larry Loganbill
24. August 19, 2009
5:08 pm
Link
The curriculum currently being taught in American schools
was designed in 1892 by the president of Harvard and
“The Committee of Ten”. Essentially aren’t we preparing our
students for the early 1900s?
What do the wingnuts at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook,
YouTube, Toyota etc. say we should be teaching our kids to prepare them for the workplace of 2015-2050? Or should we teach them to farm using electric tractors and combines?
— Larry Loganbill
25. August 19, 2009
5:12 pm
Link
Let the students stay at home and enroll in a good internet
online eSchool. And provide free “brick & mortar” preschools for all 3 and 4 year-olds who live below the poverty line.
Middle class kids enter school with four times the world knowledge and vocabulary of the kids who live below the
poverty line.
— Larry Loganbill
From 26 to 50 of 108 Comments
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »
26. August 19, 2009
5:19 pm
Link
There is a revolution coming in education. Already a student can have a live interaction with a teacher over the internet-even if the teacher is on the other side of the world. Materials, handouts and books can also all be sent over the internet. There is simply no reason why a student and a teacher have to be in the same room together.
American collrge campuses are basically a type of camp for young adults. They go there and learn to live without their parents, lose their virginity and party. This has nothing to do with learning.
— John C
27. August 19, 2009
5:19 pm
Link
The SRI report, in its totality, is significant and probably prophetic, in line with the continuing work of the Alfred Sloan Foundation. I have the privilege of working closely with a variety of LMS and courseware and the future is MUCH more exciting and promising than even the SRI and similar reports suggest. For high school courseware, just take a look at http://www.4tnoxrox.com and you will see what I mean. For university business programs, take a look at
http://www.vlcglobal.com. The introduction of 3D Virtual Reality to education and corporate training is truly revolutionary. There is hope both for reduced costs and improved quality for today’s tech-savvy learners.
— John P. Cragin, Ph.D.
28. August 19, 2009
5:40 pm
Link
As someone who has done both, I can say: it’s not that online learning is so great, it’s that the US classroom as it exists right now is that bad.
— Farnsworth
29. August 19, 2009
6:05 pm
Link
Having taken online and classroom college courses, I agree that the best online students are highly diciplined and self motivated, with a knack for gaining information through reading and writing. There’s plenty of oportunity for discussion. It just takes place in writing over a series of days instead of via the spoken word in a series of minutes.
In contrast, as Sara mentioned, there are plenty of students for whom online doesn’t work. While this might be due in part to age and lack of discipline, it might also be due to a difference in learning styles. If you hate reading & writing you aren’t going to do well with online content no matter your age or motivation.
I am now working on an MBA in the classroom and would probably be able finish the degree faster if I had an online option. The hour drive to campus makes it a lot harder juggle full time work and family along with the classroom time. Online learning gave me the flexibility to fit school into my schedule, rather than me fitting my life into the school’s arbitrary schedule of classes.
— vivaELvino
30. August 19, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
I had a lot of experience with a computer assisted instruction system called FIS, as a student, author, and curriculum coordinator . This study is pure crap.
— JB
31. August 19, 2009
6:54 pm
Link
The future of education is online period. Whether it is in the classroom or distance learning the use of online content that has been peer-reviewed and validated by experts in the respective fields should be available to everyone. The only way to work through this new, new economy is to have the most highly educated work force ever in time. The only way to do this is to have open access to the newest information on a daily basis. The concept of the five year textbook is gone - dead - period. information is changing at a rapid pace and the more information available the better. This is the essence of online education. I have been an academic for 23 years, I am tenured, I get up every morning at 5:00 and read my research from credible sources. I then put my notes together for that days lessons and bring to class the most current information possible. That is what these students are going into debt for! Critical thinking is imperative but it must be blended with new theories in order for it to be effective. If we are still thinking about old theories then the critical thinking is useless. New components must be added to the equation which lead to greater questions and different thought patterns.
I do not believe that face to face is dead but there is iChat to iChat. It does work.
the problem is the expense. Now with opens source LMSs becoming accepted by schools the future of online is here to stay.
the problem is how to monetize this new paradigm. Should a professor be paid the same amount for 300 students as they are for 20? It is a lot more work to review 300 papers then it is to review 20. Same as any other field. A lot of questions need to be answered. But one that has clearly been answered is that it i a new, new very “flat” world. Get over it and get with it.
— Patrick Aievoli
32. August 19, 2009
7:30 pm
Link
The key word here is ‘community.’ The online courses must be used to network, not isolate. Otherwise, we can go ahead and rework sociocultural learning theory’s most basic points.
— nick
33. August 19, 2009
8:20 pm
Link
While I think online courses can be useful, I think it’s important to consider that there may be other sources of the discrepancy in achievement. Many online courses use online assessments to measure achievement. In high school, I took several math finals for my then-boyfriend so that he could pass his online college math classes. With online exams, there is no way to ensure that the person taking the exam is the person enrolled in the course, or that prohibited materials are not being used.
I don’t think closed-book exams assessing rote memorization are useful measures of learning. But since these are the most common tools used to assess achievement, I think it’s worth considering how the experience of taking one of these exams may differ between the two contexts.
(And yes, as a TA at a large university, I know that there are students who have other people take their exams for them in-person, particularly in large classes. But at least in this situation, I have the opportunity to notice a face that I have never seen before and ask for ID.)
— Laura
34. August 19, 2009
8:52 pm
Link
It is not really a wonder that online teaching is more effective than brick and mortar schools. It provides solutions to problems that are only created and compounded by packing kids together with little supervision.
School grounds are like little islands in which kids adapt much like the kids in “Lord of the Flies.” Teachers are increasing unable to discipline students, much less teach. Students are unable to concentrate and think critically.
Yet when I put a computer in front of my daughter she can talk for hours, listen for hours, and even read books for hours. I have to pry her away. I dream of the day when brick and mortar colleges disappear and with them the drunken idiocy of our higher learning institutions.
— Soren
35. August 19, 2009
9:22 pm
Link
A plug for Sara #10. Partly there’s the problem with “student-aged” students. And, as Patrick #31 suggests along with Sara, there will be deep problems as long as schools see on-line courses as for profit, and not for educational success (as our health care system rewards procedures, not health).
But more basically, in a good classroom, one has a situation both ancient and new: telling a tale around the campfire. This is important (when the teacher’s good).
It’s not primarily about conveying information or data, but it is a great way to show how to assess data and to build it up into a picture that makes sense.
“Students learn in different ways” — fine, but also students need to improve on areas of weakness — an ability to concentrate over time on developing a coherent picture is an important skill.
The different venues will probably work differently for different fields. E.g., Patrick # 31 — not all fields change quite so rapidly; and in many places, the analysis learned on not-quite-the-moment’s data will be quite portable.
Discussion classes about literature can work wonderfully in person, in part because the communication is not just letters on the screen, but all the human ways of communicating — tone, eyes, affect, &c. — and immediate reaction — even the reaction while one is speaking.
“When the teacher’s good” — I’ve seen that instructors in some science courses are often not going on to be teachers, and they resent the time they teach, and it results in poor learning, esp. for those with less aptitude. That’s a shame; if on-line can put them out of business, fine by me!
There are some important aspects of learning that a good classroom (either lecture or seminar) can do singularly well.
— Arthur
36. August 19, 2009
10:13 pm
Link
I teach high school English in Kansas and direct a computer-based program for adults who are seeking a high school diploma.
This research flies in the face of everything I believe, but I don’t feel as though my one experience can trump this exhaustive finding. If I had not read it, I would not have believed it.
One factor that I believe might help online is the speed of learning versus the predictable and often slow learning that takes place at the one speed of the teacher. If this were removed, then it is true that students could learn much more quickly.
At age 49, I feel as though I would need to be re-educated to learn how to assist through on-line methodology. I am just a few years from retirement, and I wonder if it would be worth going back to relearn how to assist using this method.
— Kilgatron
37. August 19, 2009
10:20 pm
Link
One of the biggest misconceptions about online learning is that it is a cheap option. The standard model of large university lectures is not the best way to learn material - we know that. It is, however, much cheaper than the better versions, both in human resources and infrastructure. There’s a reason schools with very small class size and personalized attention are expensive.
To do internet based learning well takes resources. You still have to design the curriculum, set exams and assignments, and evaluate the result (computer evaluated exams like multiple choice are one of the worst ways of testing comprehension, particularly for advanced subjects). You still need a trained expert to answer questions. I’ve found answering a question in a fashion suitable for email takes about four time longer than answering the same question in person. And you need to add computer resources, and the personnel to maintain them, program them and handle security.
I’ve also heard the argument that kids could study at home on the internet before. The problem with that is that you can’t leave children unattended all day, so someone has to stay with them while they study at home. For that, we need a full time stay at home parent or the parents are going to have to pay for supervision, a la daycare.
— Jennifer
38. August 19, 2009
10:38 pm
Link
We at http://www.nixty.com are creating a hybrid platform that supports traditional K-12 and higher education, but also provides space for informal learning communities to develop. Mr. Reiger is absolutely right in indicating that peer learning will expand beyond the classroom and be integral to learning and development in the future. It has to be. We simply do not have enough educators to meet demand. The trick lies in developing tools that facilitate this kind of context.
If you are interested in helping us create this platform, then please sign up to help us beta test NIXTY.
— Glen
39. August 19, 2009
10:51 pm
Link
Finally education is adopting the most important principle of most business- differentiate your product for each market segment. I have been advocating this and is potential in education through education technology since 1970.
The problem is not the technology but the status quo protectors who control both k12 and higher education. They fight every attempt at individualized, self paced learning, even when the data shows its productivity improvement.
A big part of the problem is that most educators, especially K12, both also higher education, are technology avoiders. It will take a lot of public pressure to implement educational technology as a productivity or transformational strategy.
I am a Professor of Business and Economics who has served on State Board of Education and on the State Board for Community Colleges.
— Ed Lyell
40. August 19, 2009
11:10 pm
Link
I think that a lot of people are missing the point here.
From the tables presented on pages 44-46 of the report it is clear that although the authors do include some studies concerned with K-12 and undergraduate level performance off- and on-line, many of the studies dealt more specifically with student performance in short courses, vocational courses, courses intended as professional enhancement, and course sub-units.
Studies included in the meta-analysis include results showing that physicians who took an online course in opioid and benzodiazepine prescribing skills showed better results than those who took a traditional course, that web-based instructional modalities were effective as part of a larger programing course, and that online tutorials for teaching hypothesis testing concepts showed positive results, among others.
While such results are interesting, they do not support the idea that online courses are in any way superior (or even equal) to traditional, face-to-face, primary or secondary education.
A list of the studies included is available on page 44 of the report; I hope people will refer to it (or perhaps even the report in its entirety) before drawing any conclusions.
— E.R. Land
41. August 20, 2009
12:49 am
Link
It was BF Skinner, building on the technology and experience of even earlier pioneers of self-paced, individualized learning, who realized nearly fifty years ago what he termed the “impossibility” of transmitting the optimal amount of information to each student in the traditional classroom. I’ve taught online since 1996 and I think that the nine-point difference in achievement stated in the report quantifies what I detect as the difference between my classroom students and my online ones. Online work compels, sooner or later, active processing by students: add to this the usually greater self-motivation of those who choose online instruction and there isn’t much wonder in that slight though significant difference. On the other hand, I can’t sit down with an online student on the tailgate and figure things out in conversation. At present, the first-year college students I encounter each fall, most of whom I know would benefit far more from the structure of the online course vs. the usually overcrowded classroom course, overwhelmingly choose to stay with the classroom course rather than take the course online. I believe they make this choice because they haven’t had enough experience with both methods to make an informed choice. My hope is that, within 10 years, to see 25% of my incoming intro psych students opt for the online version. I’m patient–I’ve waited 15 years to see online work get as many approving comments as it has in this set tonight. I think it will take at least until all the college instructors of my generation retire until the full potential of online education will be realized.
Dave D (55 years young–25 years in the teaching biz)
— Dave D
42. August 20, 2009
1:47 am
Link
I agree with that. The new generation kids mostly interested in online education. if the online education website teaching games or animation based lessons, kids will love that. it give fun experience to the kids.
— Jonam
43. August 20, 2009
2:35 am
Link
Why wouldn’t online courses be more INTERESTING thus
more effective for conveying information. The students
has access to photographs, film/video and animation clips,
virtual reality field trips QTVRs and sound clips to help convey the information and concepts instead of a teacher just standing and TELLING about the information. SHOW & TELL not just TELL.
— Larry Loganbill
44. August 20, 2009
3:03 am
Link
Well for me, online training is a no no. No interaction from the teacher, no response from other students, no ideas from other students. It’s different. Try working on the computer for atleast 2 hours, isn’t it boring? A child needs to be at school where he can play with other kids, interact with other kids for self development also.
Karen Davis
san diego computer repair
— Karen Davis
45. August 20, 2009
6:12 am
Link
This sounds like a study that hypothetically showed that people taking classes near Harvard did better, and using it to claim that there was something about the geography of Harvard that made students excel.
Obviously, there are brighter students near Harvard, so they would tend to do well. And computer-oriented students probably tend to be brighter — it’s like, nerdsville!
So I don’t believe that the Internet is somehow a better learning environment. On the other hand, it is certainly cheaper. For that reason, online education should be encouraged; it allows wide access to educational resources. But it isn’t inherently superior.
— Gene Venable
46. August 20, 2009
6:44 am
Link
As a former online student and a current online instructor, I will say that online learning is not for everyone. If you are a person who is easily distracted, not organized and definetly not organized - online learning is not for you.
However, one can feel just as part of a classroom online as one does in a traditional setting. If you have a good instructor who is truly involved then the experience is just as equal to sitting in the classroom face to face. The level of the student’s involvement also makes a huge difference. If a student is willing to dive into discussions, add extra to the topic, etc. they will experience an equal level of education as those sitting in the classroom.
I do believe that the study should have specified if those researched had specific reasons for taking online course though. If distance to the nearest college was an issue and online provided not having to drive, then that is one thing. You could easily compare online to traditional. However, if the reason for online was more to do with social issues, such as anxiety, then you can not easily compare the two.
all in all, though, I am excited to see that online learning is getting some rave reviews and legitimate research. While it will never replace the traditional classroom, it is a wonderful option!
— Bethany
47. August 20, 2009
6:45 am
Link
I believe there are certain subject areas which tend to lend themselves better to online instruction and social media. For example, we here at http://www.italki.com believe that foreign language instruction is a particularly good fit. Studies have shown that interaction with native speakers improve fluency, comprehension and accuracy when learning a new language. The internet makes it possible for someone to find a native speaker to learn and practice with no matter where they live or what language they’re studying. Online learning in this case is expanding human interaction rather than limiting it.
— Eric
48. August 20, 2009
7:16 am
Link
K-12 learners today have generally been immersed in an expansive and ceaseless information stream since birth. This immersion produces transformations in information processing responsiveness and receptivity (see Strommen, E.F., Constructivism, Technology, and the Future of Classroom Learning, Children’s Television Workshop, Bruce Lincoln, Bank Street College of Education, 1992 http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/livetext/docs/construct.html) and the technologies do have an expanding impact on student motivation to learn. Currently available technologies are serious tools that affect the lives of students with immediacy and with great potential for both good and harm. Thus, a pivotal component for learning with technology tools is that an educated person uses these systems and processes in an informed, ethical, and responsible way. This component of education is not referred to at all in the above article and it should be considered essential to learners. Scholarship is not only the application of learning tools to “do something meaningful and useful,” but also recognizing ethical, responsible use, and knowing how to make things of significance with those tools. Ethics and responsibility are centered in the affective domain and they should be addressed at the core of any educational model that relies on embedded information technologies. Education also needs to foster the development of skills and attitudes that address the social and ethical issues intrinsic to the technological advancements of our society.
— Barry Grant
49. August 20, 2009
8:01 am
Link
I teach at a small two-year college that offers a variety of online courses. We that teach the on-campus versions of the classes have noticed declining enrollment in some of the harder science courses, due to increasing online enrollment.
In talking to many people about this, the general consensus is that students like the online, because it is so much easier to cheat and get better grades.
.
While I have no doubt there are some solid online courses out there, I think a teacher can’t be replaced. Otherwise, I could read a text book and be a doctor!
.
Most of the studies of online learning ignore the cheating factor and I have heard people rationalize saying that looking up the info just shows that students know where to look. They know where to find answers, but that doesn’t mean they learn the material. I agree with those saying that it doesn’t teach thinking skills or how to evaluate the answers they do find for accuracy.
.
Bottom line: Online is not equal to classroom learning in many cases.
— Face-to-Face Teacher
50. August 20, 2009
9:04 am
Link
the sad part of both studies is that students fell into the 50th percentile. Why aren’t we addressing that?
— Luise armstrong
From 51 to 75 of 108 Comments
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »
51. August 20, 2009
10:04 am
Link
In response to Arthur and others I too have setup an online educational technology website that can be customized for any school at no cost and generate revenue for those schools. It is totally free, we host, you admin through our employee - so no cost again. It is user generated content and has daily updated news, music, video, sports,research, etc.
Many schools are spending tremendous amounts on LMSs and student portals we offer it for free and share in the eight streams of revenue with each school. Please review the Website and see what I am talking about.
http://www.theCampusCenter.com
— Patrick Aievoli
52. August 20, 2009
10:18 am
Link
OF course, someone has vetted SRI International and they are completely free from influence by the online education industry.
— HT
53. August 20, 2009
10:45 am
Link
Interesting read. Often, a traditional classroom is hindered by the fact that it must move at the pace of the weakest student. You can imagine the issues of having a large foreign language class - some of mine in high school and university have had more than 20 students! And if the instructor does NOT to slow down and allow each student to understand the material… confused students don’t have the chance to catch up later.
Online education, at least in the language-learning field, has the advantage of helping each person by moving at their own speed. With technology advancing and people finding more ways to socialize (and learn) on the internet, there will be better ways for students to supplement their learning… by learning local slang and idioms with native speakers, for example.
— Crystal
54. August 20, 2009
11:09 am
Link
KV makes a good point: online studies require self-motivation and self-discipline in order for the course to work. Did the study take into account the self-selection factor? That is, students who don’t have the motivation to do well are often advised, at the college level, not to enroll in online courses, or they try one and find out it is not for them. If the study were to take a random sample of students, enrolled one group in online courses and one in traditional classrooms, I suspect that we would see different statistical results. RB
— Richard Baskin
55. August 20, 2009
11:37 am
Link
This is a classic case of falsely taking correlation for causality. As I know from my experience teaching online and in person, online students are more motivated on average. You would have to be more motivated to sign up for online classes because they offer less than in-person classes. As the student who wrote above said, they are drudgery. The people who take them do so because they are forced to by their schedules and they really want to learn. Contrast this to in person classes where a percentage of the students usually comes because their parents convinced them to, or they think it’s easier than finding a job, or it’s what you’re supposed to do at their age, etc. Of course the highly motivated students learn more–but this is despite the handicaps of the medium, not because of them.
— professor
56. August 20, 2009
11:55 am
Link
So kids learn better online but they waste a boat load of time online…. quite a catch 22. Here’s what I’m referring to: http://kiwicommons.com/2009/06/what-exactly-are-kids-doing-online/
— Ashley
57. August 20, 2009
12:01 pm
Link
What comes to my mind when reading this article is that computer usage among kids, teenagers and adults has become so commonplace that they are more used to using a computer than personal interaction. Are we really given any background on the students themselves?
Furthermore, I think there are certain subjects that just cannot be supported by online learning alone, i.e. lab sciences.
I agree with the fact that learning in a community is such an important influence. Obviously, there are more nurturing environments to benefit from than others. However, among younger kids, personal interaction and the ability to understand different points of viewed must be realized in a classroom setting and not as text on a computer screen.
I do not doubt that online learning has positive qualities, but as more and more people enroll because of tuition hikes, it is a concern for the communication skills of the next generation, especially those that are essential to suceed after one’s education.
— Richard
58. August 20, 2009
12:13 pm
Link
I have 3 children enrolled in an online charter school in grades 7, 4, and 2 who have never attended a traditional brick and mortar school. They excel in online learning, and are learning incredible life skills such as time management. They are all required to take standardized state tests; and score advanced in nearly all sections. Two of my students are working a full grade level ahead in math. This is such a fantastic education option that, while only fits a small percentage of the population’s schedule abilities, works!
We attend a parent co-op group for science, art, and music, as well as many field trips. This provides them with more projects as well as social opportunities.
We are able to adjust our schedule to optimize time with dad. He works on Saturdays, so in the winter, we ski on Wednesday, and study on Saturday. What a good motivator to get homework done!
Three cheers for online education!!!
— Jennifer
59. August 20, 2009
12:15 pm
Link
Much can be learned from glancing at the report. For example:
“Despite what appears to be strong support for online
learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is
superior as a medium, In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the
online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was
the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included
additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that
produced the observed learning advantages.”
Also:
“A systematic search of the research literature from 1994 through
2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies comparing the
learning effects of online versus face-to-face instruction for K–12 students that provide
sufficient data to compute an effect size.”
Finally:
“In addition, although the types of research designs used by the studies in the meta-analysis were
strong (i.e., experimental or controlled quasi-experimental), many of the studies suffered from
weaknesses such as small sample sizes; failure to report retention rates for students in the
conditions being contrasted; and, in many cases, potential bias stemming from the authors’ dual
roles as experimenters and instructors. ”
It is not clear that self-selection has been well-controlled in this work. I will just mention that of the more than 1,000 studies reviewed, only 51 passed muster to get into the authors’ meta-analysis. Good for them for having such standards–even though problems remain, as they recognize. This is a sad comment on the quality of the original work, just 5% of the published studies making it through the filter.
— Dataman
60. August 20, 2009
12:18 pm
Link
If adults spend so much of their “work” in socio-tech environments, why wouldn’t children also find the unique benefits?
But I can’t help to wonder if this marks a point in our history when the school as we know it ends. As the 20th Century models finally starting to reach the 21st Century….
I mean really it is almost 2010.
— R. Harris
61. August 20, 2009
12:27 pm
Link
With Web Based Virtual Classrooms like WiZiQ, online learning is now an excellent, if not, preferred choice for many. Universities like UCSD (University of California San Diego) are using these web based VCs to aid in tutoring and online collaboration.
— Mark
62. August 20, 2009
12:30 pm
Link
@Richard Baskin:
If you click through to the report, you will see that the study is a meta-analysis and only considered studies that used random-assignment or quasi-experimental designs which, if done right, should take care of the self-selection problem.
— WF
63. August 20, 2009
1:27 pm
Link
Yes, you can throw technology at people and it is no assurance they will learn. But I know if you throw a really horrible instructor at a student in a traditional learning environment it is a guaranteed failure probably for more than just that one class too.
I think it’s time we quit throwing money blindly at education and begin holding the institutions and even the unions accountable for the failures of our systems. If it takes something like online instruction from at least average instructors to shake things up then I’m all for it!
— PA
64. August 20, 2009
2:20 pm
Link
I did a complete online sociology course in college. I decided to make it a sociology experiment. I did nothing. Never logged on. Never communicated in forums. Never read the materials. Purposely cheated on the exams. And so on. I got an “A” in the class. Then I asked as many of my classmates as I could about the experience, and learned we all did the same thing, and all of us got an “A.” At my University, there was a procedure for challenging grades. The handbook did not say it had to be a bad grade. So I challenged the “A” that I received. I informed the Dean of the college, and the Provost of the University, about what happened. I was disciplined for exposing the professor and the fraud of online education. The “A” remained on my transcript.
10 years later, I still think online courses are a fraud.
— MC
65. August 20, 2009
2:29 pm
Link
Reading the comments I note several points:
First, online education is not less expensive than face-to-face. Online is more labor intensive than face-to-face, hence online courses tend to serve small numbers of students. Most of the studies examined in this meta-study concerned 25 students or less.
Furthermore, the network and server infrastructure supporting online ducation is extremely expensive. Programs like Blackboard and WebCT require banks of fast servers and dedicated systems programmers together with 24/7 tech support. Students require home computers and a robust as well as reliable connection to the Internet.
Third, online courses not only self-select stronger students, they also self-select stronger instructors. In fact, a reader might draw the conclusion that active learning is more efficient than passive learning, and that active web-based learning systems are as effective as face-to-face active pedagogies. Since most instructors who work online employ significant active learning techniques (asynchronous discussion, role playing, goup writing projects) and most face-to-face instructors lecture, the results of this study of studies are not surprising.
— Marc Cooper
66. August 20, 2009
2:39 pm
Link
From my experience, I have received FAR MORE from online classes then I had when I was sitting in a classroom. I did part of my undergrad in the classroom with the rest of it online. Now, I’m working on an MBA from the University of Wisconsin completely online, which still required me to meet a satisfactory GMAT test score (same as classroom requirement) just to enroll.
Someone mention that you don’t get the analytical thinking online. On the contrary, I write nothing but analytical papers and have to use the same reasoning via the discussion boards. I’m guessing those that are oppose to it have either never taken a real class online or have some stake (such as those on the government dole) in why they don’t want online education to succeed…perhaps it threatens their job security for being lazy ???
— danny
67. August 20, 2009
2:42 pm
Link
Here is the “purpose” of SRI International, taken directly from their website:
Our founding purpose (since 1946): SRI, a nonprofit corporation, is committed to discovery and to the application of science and technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace. SRI has a broad charter that encourages us to make a difference in the world through basic and applied research, research services, technology development, and commercialization of our innovations.
Does anyone else see a potential conflict of interest?
— Dave Flatley
68. August 20, 2009
3:56 pm
Link
With 18 plus years as an educational instructor, I have one concern that has not been mentioned. With online education, students have a plethora of resources at their disposal during tests or while writing essays/ etc. It’s all open book. In the classroom, if the activity is closed book, all they have to rely on is themselves.
So is this 9 point gain truly a measure of what students learned and remember, or is it a measure of how well they can use resources to complete a task?
— Lisa
69. August 20, 2009
4:04 pm
Link
Important quote from the abstract of the study:
“This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se.”
The majority of the studies included in the meta-analysis looked at situations in which students met face-to-face but received additional instruction time online. These students often received more total instruction time than did the students who received only face-to-face instruction. This is an important point that the blog should have highlighted.
I believe that online instruction has tremendous potential and my experience teaching live online has been wonderful. The most effective instruction addresses topics through multiple angles and modalities. Teaching online allows me to highlight information and processes in new ways. In many ways it allows for more participation and teacher interaction than the live classroom does. Face-to-face classrooms can feel to students like a public speaking event and that can be intimidating. Hybrid instruction is likely to prove most effective in many cases . Students get the best of many worlds.
— Kim Crowley
70. August 20, 2009
4:16 pm
Link
Luise,
Percentiles don’t measure overall learning; they indicate how well people did compared to others. No matter how well students do, half of the group will always be above the 50%ile and half of the group will be below the 50%ile by definition.
The percentiles in this study (as reported in the original document, not this blog) indicate that those who received (usually) additional online instruction landed on average, a little higher within the overall group compared to students who did not have access to online instruction. We don’t know whether that had anything to do with the additional instruction. Perhaps those students had more access to other supportive resources in life in general.
— Kim Crowley
71. August 20, 2009
4:51 pm
Link
I am the CEO of a company that provides web-based ethics training for universitiy classes (EthicsGame.com). Over the past year we have reached about 3,000 students in a variety of settings. We are just beginning data analysis and our preliminary research shows that the on-line students who completed our one hour module did considerably better than those who completed the module in an on-the-ground setting. We were surprised because we had expected the reverse. Clearly we have some more work to do in the analysis. However, I can attest to the fact that our experience seems to match that which is reported above.
— Catharyn Baird
72. August 20, 2009
4:58 pm
Link
I wish the press reports on this report were as modest in their claims as the report itself. And that the authors had been more cautious when talking to the press, which likes a sensational headline.
The research is far too weak to draw the conclusion that teachers can be replaced with online instruction.To their credit, the authors admit this up front:
“The most unexpected finding was that an extensive initial search of the published literature from 1996 through 2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies that both compared the learning effectiveness of online and face-to-face instruction for K–12 students and provided sufficient data for inclusion in a meta-analysis.”
What were the limitations in the existing research that led the authors to this gloomy conclusion (which did not come across in the press reports)?
I) Internal validity
Out of 1000+ studies the authors reviewed, 33 were randomized trials, and 13 were comparison-control with decent controls. The RCTs did show pretty big positive effects (0.2 SD), however, and we know that research is not democratic. So, what’s the problem?
..which leads us to…
II) External Validity
a) Just one of the 33 randomized trials (and four of the 13 comparison-control studies) took place in a K-12 school. The rest were in colleges or training programs for medical professionals.
b) None of the (five) K-12 studies compared face-to-face instruction with online learning, which is the comparison the we all have in mind when we read the media reports. Rather, the studies compared 1) face-to-face instruction with 2) face-to-face-instruction PLUS online learning. No teachers were taken out of the equation for the treatment or control group.
The bottom line (which did not come across in the press reports…) is that this research tells us nothing about whether online learning and face-to-face instruction in K-12 are substitutes in the learning process. It does provide us some evidence, however, that they are complements.
— Susan Dynarski, University of Michigan
73. August 20, 2009
5:07 pm
Link
From the executive summary of the original study (a meta-analysis):
“An important issue to keep in mind in reviewing these findings is that many studies did not attempt to
equate (a) all the curriculum materials, (b) aspects of pedagogy and (c) learning time in the treatment
and control conditions. Indeed, some authors asserted that it would be impossible to havedone so. Hence, the observed advantage for online learning in general, and blendedlearning conditions in particular, is not necessarily rooted in the media used per se and may reflect differences in content, pedagogy and learning time.”
My opinion: When online learning works well, it’s because an instructor/designer has used the tools to encourage intimate interaction with the learning materials. Interaction beats ego-based lectures hands down. When online instruction fails to engage, it’s usually because a technology expert has simply broken a droning lecture into tediously small components and dropped the pieces onto rows and rows of ticky-tacky, sleep-inducing slides.
— Kim Crowley
74. August 20, 2009
5:16 pm
Link
I’d like to see the full study and what other conclusions were drawn besides what was published here.
A few other things I suspect contribute to this “increased achievement:”
1) Student engagement. It’s harder to tune out a self-directed computer program than it is a teacher, particularly if the teacher isn’t very good at gaining and maintaining students’ attention
2) Less disruption. Many of our classrooms are noisy, undisciplined, and unproductive. Where is it easier for a child to focus: in a classroom where others are continually distrubing the learning environment or in a room by yourself where you have nothing else going on but “learning?”
This is not a “ha, THIS is the answer” type of conclusion. The biggest complaint employers have today about the young people that they hire is that they lack the interpersonal skills - the LIFESKILLS — they need to succeed in business. That means social interaction, communication skills, etc. Online classes will NOT be able to teach that or expose kids to the real world.
Our kids are already spending too much time watching TV, playing videos, networking and surfing the ‘net. While tech is a good thing, it is NOT the only thing and it’s serving to decrease their interpersonal skills. Just like the current “Kindle in Every Backpack” moment the DLC is pushing, you can’t — and shouldn’t — turn everything into a tech problem. There’s more to education than just merely academics. We shouldn’t lose sight of that as we look to better ways to deliver that education to our youth.
— CorinneGregory
75. August 20, 2009
5:16 pm
Link
From a social constructivist point of view, I have problems with a curriculum based entirely on Internet instruction. Students benefit from constructing their own meaning from the world with guidance from instructors and collaboration with peers. While collaboration is somewhat possible with chat rooms, the venue is more artificial than sitting side by side with another student and working through a math problem or science experiment using hands-on materials.
Many online courses that I have seen isolate the student and compel him or her to work alone. The primary mode of delivering instruction is telling basic knowledge which requires lower level thinking skills and may develop procedural knowledge rather than conceptual understanding.
On a positive note, Internet instruction allows access to the incredible wealth of online information in a lively and interesting display. A motivated student can extend his/her learning on a particular topic beyond what is available in a typical classroom. Certainly the benefits of individualizing instruction and the vastness of content available will lead to more Internet instruction both in an out of the classroom.
A combination of classroom and Internet instruction may be appropriate in the future. Consideration needs to be given to the age and maturity of the students. Younger children probably need more classroom time and older children and adults may require less face to face time.
I
— Susan Whited
From 76 to 100 of 108 Comments
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76. August 20, 2009
5:23 pm
Link
The only trouble with “virtual.,” “asynchronous” learning is the issue of student questioning — and listening to other students ask questions simultaneously (in real time).
This Q&A, Call-and-Response style is the way some of us (dinosaurs, Digital Immigrants) learn best. It is the one major drawback to on-line education, as I see it.
Sincerely,
— Gus Patukas
77. August 20, 2009
5:37 pm
Link
The headline of the article is deceptive. From what I’ve been shown here, this study was no experiment, so no cause/effect conclusion can be made. It’s possible that there’s a difference in the kind of person who takes an online class and one who takes a brick-and-mortar one.
That said, I think there is real value in online education. As a math teacher myself, I’m sure there are many aspects to our curriculum that could be taught via computers just as if not more effectively than through my organization of activities, lecture, and discussion.
I think where online work is best is in facts and skills. Where in-person work is best is in the transformation of one’s approach to the material. An online course, even with moderated discussion, is not as fruitful in developing a statistician’s approach to data.
But I don’t have an experiment to back this up.
All this said, I worry that too much online learning will further erode our species’ ability to listen and pay attention to others for any length of time. Soon we’ll be texting each other from 5 feet away, “How you doin’?” No matter the educational efficiency, in-person contact has benefits all its own.
— David Ellinger
78. August 20, 2009
6:40 pm
Link
Many young people, while “wired” with i-pods and cell phones and laptops, seem to lack basic social skills and responsiveness to other people in person. And not just young people. There’s a diminishment of courtesy and kindness in general; but it’s more pronounced in the young, who at times seem literally blind to those around them.
While it would be an oversimplificaiton to lay this failure of social-skill teaching completely on screen-based technologies, I believe that the isolation involved in them, and a concurrent temptation to solipcism are certainly one cause of the problem.
If we teach young people facts and processes of fact-acquisition and leave out the warmth and mutual contact of human interaction, we will lose a vital part of real education for life.
— jb, ok
79. August 20, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
One other point: The technological revolution that was touted as a means to greatly increase students’ learning and skills has not so far produced students who have superior skills in knowledge, communication, or analysis. As a teacher of over twenty years, I have seen a general decline in vocabulary, awareness of facts, and critical thinking, instead.
The answer may not lie in more technology, but in parents and teachers who personally instill a love of learning–by loving learning themselves, right in front of the young.
— jb, ok
80. August 20, 2009
8:04 pm
Link
How do we know that what is being measured is a change in the over all environment in which the students live? How do we know that we are seeing improvements that fail to take in the possibility of a sinking baseline for what constitutes learning? What I’m driving at is that the period in which the studies covered is against the backdrop of a growing dependency on wired communication. Trying to reach students today with blackboards and face-to-face group discussions may be hampered by such students’ lack of situational awareness outside a digital context. Do we know that traditional learning is actually less effective or simply that it is easier not to swim against the current in today’s environment?
— Anthony Davis
81. August 20, 2009
8:26 pm
Link
I do not trust the study. There are numerous reasons why people take online courses, and these, not the online courses, could be the cause for the statistical difference. The people who take online courses are generally the people who are more interested in learning. Online courses are often voluntary whereas school is required for everyone. The kids who do not care about school or learning are unlikely to bother taking an online course. The people who want to learn will generally do better on tests, and are more likely to attempt extra, learning.
— Eliot
82. August 20, 2009
8:49 pm
Link
I work for the online campus at a career college in Kansas City, MO called Pinnacle Career Institute. What I have come to find, is that most of our students are people who have tried traditional college and it didn’t work out; never tried college and would like to; and or people who financially never could, but now that they work….can. Our students are in online classrooms and can in fact share with each other and talk and message back and forth. They post pictures of themselves and they can and do learn together. We have an online graduation where friends and family all over the world can log on to see their diploma and a personalized message written by them regarding their graduation. These students do in fact make friends and build relationships all online. In these types of classrooms the student is much more in control of their pace of learning wether that be faster or slower then the average student. At our school, we have seen enormous growth and expect to see even more expansion over the next few years. To me, it does not really matter which is a better education online or classroom, what matters is that there are different options for different people and that some doors may be open with online learning for someone that wouldn’t otherwise have the means to receive a higher education.
— Valerie Kindall
83. August 20, 2009
10:13 pm
Link
I have been taking online courses for a long time, and I’ve tried them at about six or seven universities. I absolutely do not agree that online education beats traditional classroom.
One thing, very often the curriculum doesn’t cover as much stuff. When I took business law online at UT,they only covered like ten chapters, when I know the on-campus course covered more. Same for my business writing course at another U.
Second: the grading is a LOT easier. I’m amazed how I manage to get A after A even though in business law, I never got an A in an assignment or exam. Reason: it was curved.
Yes, there’re many motivated students who can learn on their own, and they take online courses for that reason. But I know many of my online classmates took online courses just to get the course requirement over with asap.
Just to show you how easy it is to cheat online : look at this online academic fraud story:
‘Gross academic fraud’ at UTB-TSC rocked Office of Distance Education
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/articles/online-100590-utb-employees.html
— PLan
84. August 20, 2009
11:32 pm
Link
“Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.”
To conclude that “on line learning beats the classroom”, presumably for all students, based on a study weighted thusly is to assume that children learn the same way as adults and have the same motivations, desires, and ability to attend. They don’t.
Television was measured as an instructional media after WW II and also found to be more effective than classroom instruction - until the novelty wore off.
— Tom Hill
85. August 21, 2009
2:31 am
Link
This article does not mention the question of grading leniency which could easily account for the 9 point difference. in my college experience, most students take online classes between semesters where a 4 month session is condensed into 5 weeks or so. i was told flat-out by a professor during a winter intersession class that he will not assign any time consuming projects that also need to be graded because there simply isn’t enough time.
i had a horrible experience with a 300 level online history class where the professor expected everyone to do all of the work in that 5 week time frame. after the first week several students realized that it would be impossible to do the assigned reading so we asked about that fact. the professor told us she wouldn’t hold us to the dates but neglected to mention that the final day of class was non-negotiable. the system locked me out at midnight on the last friday and then she refused to acknowledge her statement about the dates - i offered to email all of my work to her in word documents and she didn’t even reply to me. my impression was that she simply didn’t feel like being a teacher since she didn’t have to look me in the eye. she got paid the same either way and technically wasn’t breaking any rules.
i can see that professors might make the classes more lenient once they become experienced with the time frames. the intersession professor that i had in a real classroom cut down the workload by a large amount.
how does that factor into the statistic?
— jake
86. August 21, 2009
7:33 am
Link
Hmmmm…. I’m skeptical. Granted I’m a 20+ year veteran high school teacher, so may be biased, but I’m also the tech-coordinator and a Google Certified Teacher, so I’m convinced of the power of technology to transform education. And it needs transformation. I’m just not sure an online environment is the panacea, especially for teens who thrive on social interaction.
Students in online courses already tend to be intrinsically motivated. Moreover, as the study focused predominantly higher education, the more non-academically oriented students were already removed from the equation.
I developed an online component for my film studies class last semester–all handouts were online, I posted videos to the site for students to watch, along with an online discussion group. Kids–juniors and seniors–whined constantly. “Can’t you just email it to us?” “Why can’t we just write and turn it in?”
There’s a conventional wisdom myth out there that this is the tech savvy generation. Not so. This is the social networking generation, but they’re clueless about how to use technology in a thoughtful, academic way.
It would be interested to see a similar study that focused solely on K-12 education.
— Jeri Hurd
87. August 21, 2009
7:51 am
Link
I have a 15 year old grandaughter who just finished High School and is presently at ABAC , a local community college. She is taking 16 credit hours this semiester and loving it. She was homeschooled in the 7th and 8th grade and then enrolled in the Ashworth University High School distance learning program. She did not have to deal with all the problems of a public school and could learn at ther own pace. I taught in the public school system for 18 years but I would recommend this type learning to anyone that wanted to succed. Thank you.
— Lutrelle Greene
88. August 21, 2009
9:21 am
Link
Here is an article about long-term research on Online instruction. The actual study is at http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
— June Rosenberg
89. August 21, 2009
12:40 pm
Link
I agree with the apples and oranges comment. As a lifelong educator, I would submit that the goals of online education and the goals of face-to-face education often overlap, but they are essentially not the same. The populations cited as learning “more” online are indeed populations whose goals more closely align with what online courses have to offer.
The question that we who grew up without online learning need to answer concerning those who are growing up possibly overexposed to it is this: what are they missing? In general, today’s K-12 students spend an inordinate amount of time living and learning in a virtual world. I feel sorry for them, and I think we owe them more than that.
— Jill Thorne
90. August 21, 2009
4:40 pm
Link
As an online instructor, I have two comments:
1. I was forced to pay a lot more attention to pedagogy - how would I convey this information, invite the student to learn, maintain the student’s attention - than I had in recent years, when I began constructing online courses. This also helped improve my face-to-face teaching, but I think my online courses are better done.
2. Online college students don’t last long enough in an online course to get a grade if they are unprepared in reading, writing, and computer skills, or if they lack motivation and self-discipline to complete the coursework. The bottom of the grade distribution usually drops the course in an online class.
— Carol
91. August 21, 2009
6:41 pm
Link
My online students may have in fact learned three times as much as in a regular classroom, but they have put in three times as much effort in the first place! If I dedicated as much time to teaching face to face as I do to teaching online, I’d simply be doing not much else but teaching twenty students for the duration of that one class. No one wants to talk about how labor-intensive online teaching can be. It’s a matter of both the student’s and the teacher’s motivation, self-selection, independent (and collaborative) thinking abilities and creativity, and dedication to the topic at hand. However, as much as I have succeeded in both teaching and learning online, I would NEVER want a student in social work to sit in his or her high-end suburban home to wonderfully learn all there is to know about life in the Projects without having ever set foot into the lives of their future caseload. Unless online learning is combined with real-life empathy and experience with the full engagement of all “real” senses we are in great danger unless we are preparing the student for a simulated isolated and fully sanitized and controlled life in a space capsule heading for Mars. As well, that self-selection leaves out of our studies all the students who drop out because they don’t have the discipline and initial knowledge to cope with the issues always apparent in a learning environment.
— Dineh Davis
92. August 22, 2009
1:34 am
Link
“on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.”
Modest?
I could be wrong, but doesn’t that mean about EIGHTEEN PERCENT BETTER? In many schools, that’s the difference between an A and a C.
— Smadaf
93. August 22, 2009
10:52 am
Link
We sell an online business collaboration tool and while we don’t actively market to schools we were surprised to find how many have incorporated our product into their teaching techniques. The most innovative are not just broadcasting the instructor to a passive audience but engaging the students with individualized live and recorded audio, video and graphics. A good example is Paso a Paso, which employs instructors in Argentina to teach Spanish to people in Japan. Using video the students can see hand gestures and facial expressions better than they could from the back of a classroom, the teacher can correct pronunciation, and a rich set of visual materials at appropriate places in the lesson.
http://vsee.com/blog/?p=223
— Christopher Herot
94. August 22, 2009
2:25 pm
Link
Yes, it seems like the “traditional” classroom model actually deprives our now wired students of their connectedness. As more and more students have the internet on hand held devices, does it make sense for teachers to force them disconnect and listen to us, or can we find better ways to blend the world our students live in with what we’re doing in the classroom? I think we can and we have to.
http://howtobeateacher.blogspot.com/
— Rob Ross
95. August 22, 2009
8:50 pm
Link
“Driving to class after work to listen to a bored adjunct for 90 minutes, then driving home is a waste of time.” I agree.
17 years ago I went back to the University of South Florida with the idea of taking some pre-med classes.
I drove an hour and sat through a week of listening to a grad student from India attempt to teach a subject in English, his thick nearly unintelligible Hindi accent impeding most of the learning on my part.
One lecture had 200+ students, again not an ideal learning situation.
Still another class was taught by an American female grad student who used the captive audience to try out her wannabe comic routine. She said we were a tough room. Then I drove another hour to get home.
Nearly a decade later I picked up a degree in computer network engineering, taught mostly by teachers reading PowerPoint slides and on the computer learning in week long cram sessions. This was before similar material was available on the internet.
With the exception of classes taught by one outstanding technical math and digital electronics instructor, I could have done most of the work by myself when I am less distracted.
This happens to be around 2:00 am, but the info was not available at that time. In fact, you could not even get into the computer lab except during limited daytime hours. Apparently they were worried about someone stealing the expensive ram chips.
I listened to the in class programming lectures but had difficulty keeping my focus. This time the instructor passed around a bag of candy and just bullshitted about everything but programming during that evening class. So a month into the class I switched to another campus with a more serious teacher and basically started over.
Finally I found a solution. Just listen in class, don’t take notes. At home, late at night or early in the morning, get an overview of the problem while sitting at the computer. Go to the couch, lay down and formulate a solution in my head. Go back to the computer and fill out the answer as required.
I still think my best thinking is done lying on my back with my eyes shut.
— Larry Vaughn
96. August 23, 2009
12:02 am
Link
Could it be that students are scoring higher on easier tests? Nope that is just crazy talk. The online courses and face-to-face courses give the same tests right? Nope.
Also, where are students more likely to engage in academic dishonesty: in front of a teacher or in front of a computer screen? Yep, you know the answer.
— Brandon
97. August 23, 2009
12:56 pm
Link
Online learning is streamline and is specific for a determined, motivative learner. I agree with several comments provided: It is self selected; It is convenient; an abundance of resources via media is always available; lastly, I believe that in order for an online student to be “truly” successful (able to apply the learning to real-life), the student needs to be self-disciplined and focused on their goals (whatever they are). Though that may sound like a description for any traditional learner, it’s really not!
Online learning fit the lifestyle of a “mature” learner and adult. A learner who has experienced enough life to sacrafice the traditional “social circle;” and, someone who knows exactly what they need to advance to the next level for their life or career, but find it too challenging due to work, family, or other time consuming events. Perhaps, k-12 students are not truly ready to sacrafice their youth and social interaction for that experience. K-12 students still have a lot to learn from each other, which will eventually help them to develop who they will become as an adult. That said, because education is the process of learning, it’s probably a good thing to introduce, and initiate k-12 students to this phenomenon now (an online class every semester), to prepare them for when their lives (eventually) become consumed with adult or “mature” life.
cdw
— Chris Washington
98. August 23, 2009
4:22 pm
Link
The journalist who wrote this article should have done better homework. Reading the review essay, a half-dozen of the studies referred to in the review essay, and the abstracts for twenty-some more of the studies, I see that the SRI authors do not sustain their early division between purely online and blended learning. According to the SRI review essay itself, purely online courses remain statistically no better than face-to-face courses; however, blended learning courses, which enhance face-to-face instruction with online elements, are statistically somewhat better than purely face-to-face courses.
Other features of the review essay need to be
pointed out. First, the advantages of online learning were clearer among students in technical fields who were studying to pass examinations as part of technical training; the SRI authors even point out that one such advantage was that students got to take and retake examinations in most of the studies they cited.
Second, the advantages of online learning were clearest when the online learning provided a diversion (in the sense of divergence rather than distraction) from face-to-face instruction; for example, clear advantages were shown in the many studies that tested the use of online tutorials for a single unit in an otherwise face-to-face course, using the rest of the face-to-face course as the control. Such diversions–that is, those that break a routine for students and of which students are aware–can be explained in part by the Hawthorne effect, as one of the authors of a study summarized in the SRI study pointed out.
Third, in some of the studies summarized by the SRI review essay, investigators broke the course or module into separate elements. For example, in one study, nursing students who took online tutorials in a respiratory assistance module, with the opportunity for taking and retaking practice exams, did better on a standard exam than face-to-face students who had no practice exams; however, there was no difference between groups in the practical work of inserting a temporary, artificial airway.
Finally, SRI International is not a disinterested researcher in matters of online instruction. It was founded to advance technological innovations; furthermore, although SRI itself is a non-profit entity for tax purposes, it has continuing financial relationships with its many for-profit subsidiaries, all of which are technology companies. How does a non-profit have a for-profit subsidiary, such as the Sarnoff Corporation? Maybe a tax lawyer can explain that one. The journalist sure didn’t.
— Kevin
99. August 24, 2009
1:10 am
Link
I’m actively taking online courses and find this type of learning more productive than my classroom experience for many courses. However, I see advantages to face-to-face education when lab work is a critical part of the course (chemistry, etc).
Another factor lacking from online education is the face to face social experience. My BS and MS were completed in face to face classrooms. The face to face networking adds a difficult to measure factor. The old saying is true, it isn’t always what you know, but who you know. I’m not sold that remote, online “friends” are equal to people you went out having a happy with after a rough exam.
However, as an adult learner with a family and a great career, I can’t beat the online system. I feel that I learn more because I can pause lectures when I am having trouble comprehending a topic in a lecture and use Google to quickly find supporting information and get a grasp on the topic before moving forward. In my undergrad and masters programs I would write down topics I didn’t fully understand, but I rarely went back to study them.
Overall, my personal view is that online is a good alternative/supplement for masters and some doctorate degrees. But, the experiences of post-high school college is much more than simply learning.
— Jason
100. August 24, 2009
11:46 am
Link
A good deal of the importance of traditional education is not about the rote memorization of facts, or absorbing and being able to repeat knowledge. Critical thinking and interaction with peers is a vital social skill which is learned in a classroom setting over time.
With the growing rates of children with autism, asperger’s, and other socially limiting conditions, I have to wonder how much might be attributed to a lack of early creative play, and a growing focus on non-creative, goal based education.
A child’s brain does not work like an adult’s. Education ought to reflect this fact.
— Molly Malone
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »
From 101 to 108 of 108 Comments
« Previous 1 ... 3 4 5
101. August 24, 2009
3:04 pm
Link
It’s alarming and depressing how many commenters in this thread are totally unaware of what constitutes great online education–and how much it has changed (for the better) with the advent of online social media tools.
These folks need to do some serious online research. Posting uninformed opinions based on personal assumptions (and even personal experience in teaching online without creating extensive interactivity) is…not cool.
— Liz Dorland
102. August 24, 2009
3:26 pm
Link
I think it is great that people can learn online in the comfort of their homes. I believe many people learn better because of lack of distractions such as class clowns etc. Being in a room full of other students may be intimidating to the person afraid of asking a “dumb” question.
I also see a problem. The problem would be for those who cannot afford a computer. There are alot of people that will not be able to take advantage of online courses. Online course only work for those who can log on and those that can afford them.
— O
103. August 24, 2009
3:29 pm
Link
My son took four online courses this summer while home from college working in an internship. The classes were a joke! The testing was even a bigger farce. I was amazed a person could get an entire degree with nothing but this level of online instruction and testing.
— Chuck
104. August 24, 2009
4:13 pm
Link
— sara wrote
“I’m very disturbed by Hetty Greene’s comment. Wikipedia may provide answers, but a college education is designed to help people ask questions and to analyze. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it does not teach analytical or critical thinking.”
Thank goodness you’re not teaching my children You clearly missed the point of Hetty Greene’s comment. Her mentioning Wikipedia was not as on-line education, but rather that it is NOT solely for profit as the content provided is contributed by users free of charge. She contends much of college on-line learning is driven by profit, NOT educational reasons.
— Robert
105. August 24, 2009
4:19 pm
Link
Amidst the debate of the finer points of the meta-analysis and anecdotal evidence supporting/against online education, I offer this as a way of critically assessing headlines like “…online education beats…”:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
— student
106. August 24, 2009
8:14 pm
Link
Duh…
— Dr. Michael K. Clifford
107. August 25, 2009
5:43 am
Link
Many people who take online courses are already mature adults. They are motivated and already bring a lot of life experience to the course. I totally agree with JS17 that a great deal of education and learning comes outside the classroom at a college and inside the classroom while interacting with other students and professors. To have a junior high student staying at home and not developing social skills scares me. Fitting into society and having social skills is a huge part of future employment.
— lindyf
108. August 25, 2009
10:31 am
Link
If the quantitative measures of effectiveness were themselves taken online (or on a computer), as I suspect, then the study is flawed because online learning will translate to better online test results. I couldn’t gather from the article whether the testing was computer-based or not.
— duh
Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom By Steve Lohr
Update | 11:08 p.m. Read an article by Steve Lohr on keeping abreast of innovation in the Continuing Education special section.
A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
Noah Berger for The New York Times Tyler Kennedy, 9, searches the Web at home in California.
The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.
“The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.
This hardly means that we’ll be saying good-bye to classrooms. But the report does suggest that online education could be set to expand sharply over the next few years, as evidence mounts of its value.
Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.
The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
“We are at an inflection point in online education,” said Philip R. Regier, the dean of Arizona State University’s Online and Extended Campus program.
The biggest near-term growth, Mr. Regier predicts, will be in continuing education programs. Today, Arizona State has 5,000 students in its continuing education programs, both through in-person classes and online. In three to five years, he estimates, that number could triple, with nearly all the growth coming online.
But Mr. Regier also thinks online education will continue to make further inroads in transforming college campuses as well. Universities — and many K-12 schools — now widely use online learning management systems, like Blackboard or the open-source Moodle. But that is mostly for posting assignments, reading lists, and class schedules and hosting some Web discussion boards.
Mr. Regier sees things evolving fairly rapidly, accelerated by the increasing use of social networking technology. More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said. For example, it will be assumed that college students know the basics of calculus, and the classroom time will focus on applying the math to real-world problems — perhaps in exploring the physics of climate change or modeling trends in stock prices, he said.
“The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways,” Mr. Regier said. “People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”
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1. August 19, 2009
1:48 pm
Link
For K-12, online classes may translate to more face-to-face instruction. We pulled our son out of a useless junior high, let him play guitar and video games at home all day, and used an online charter school to teach him ourselves at night. The online curriuculum was definitely superior to what the local school offered, and the 1:1 instruction was very efficient. After one semester, he’s ahead of all his old classmates, rather than failing, and he’s enjoying life. Most people probably can’t arrange their lives to do this, but it sure can work when it works.
— Buzz
2. August 19, 2009
1:56 pm
Link
If you resonate with the studies conclusions, consider that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Imagine what we’ll begin to see when the generation that’s been “bathed in bits” begins building learning communities?
Imagine a mash-up of stumbleupon (randomizing), plus freerice.com (rewards/incentives), plus websites only slightly tweaked to deliver the core content required by states’ NCLB-mandated standards. The most successful (digital) charter school in history.
And, to take it a step further, now layer in the ability to be the personality that you want to be while learning, but still retain a social element through your digital self: http://guengerich.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/talk-to-the-digital-hand/
Great to see the validation from SRI.
— live in Austin
3. August 19, 2009
2:01 pm
Link
Learning is an independent activity Mr. Reiger to the contrary… We all decide what we want to learn — 1st decision and then for different people there are different ways to learn things… The computer which can repreat things forever — and is very patient is a good method for that reason… It can also talk to us and put up something for us to read concurrently — this is where much teaching falls down — on the visual component..A few things do need hands on practice.. say dissection but having had lots of trouble with the instruction from the human instructor on the dissection of the baby pig - I now wonder how I would have done with computer directions to guide me…. sort of like operating long distance via video hookups which are now done…..
Of course, it’s incredibly cheap to provide online education — we could be lawyers for 100$ — which is exactly why this technology is NOT being appropriately exploited except by for profits… pathetic…
and thank heavesn for Wikipedia. — there are some good people out there.
— Hetty Greene
4. August 19, 2009
2:10 pm
Link
One problem with saying that students in online classes do slightly better than students in traditional classes goes back to the old comparing apples and oranges thing. Online classes have their own assessments that may not parallel traditional assessments. The very technology tends to skew what can and cannot be assessed. Was there any standardization in the compared assessments, I wonder?
— Helen Hoffman
5. August 19, 2009
2:15 pm
Link
I’m halfway through an online master’s program with SJSU’s SLIS. It’s incredibly individualist, timely, and convenient. While the difference between an instructor that can effectively utilize the technology and also bridge the gap of disconnect between students and one who cannot is literally the difference between day and night, I think that the future of education is not as “scary” as it used to be.
p.s. I assure you Hetty, that it costs much more than you think to run these types of programs well.
— Dana
6. August 19, 2009
2:44 pm
Link
I wonder to what degree the comparisons are skewed because online learners tend to have more access to technology etc in general. There could be a real effect, but dubious about the magnitude.
— JD
7. August 19, 2009
2:49 pm
Link
Isn’t it a self-selecting group that would want to learn online? Could this be a reason why those taking online courses do better? There’s a certain drive and motivation necessary to force yourself to learn something you don’t have to.
— KV
8. August 19, 2009
2:57 pm
Link
Perhaps by giving business, civics, math and the sciences over to online learning, truly significant time in the classroom can be given over to the arts and humanities.
— Duro
9. August 19, 2009
3:00 pm
Link
Fascinating. When it came to college instruction, did the study consider whether older learners did better than traditional college students?
In my experience, on-line learning can work with motivated adults who already possess the BA or BS and take on-line classes to get a credential or a salary boost at work.
Traditional-age college students need the classroom interaction. For that matter, college-level learning is NOT an individual experience. It’s totally dependent upon dialogue and discussion. Otherwise, we might as well say that all we ever need to know we can get by gazing at our navels.
I’m very disturbed by Hetty Greene’s comment. Wikipedia may provide answers, but a college education is designed to help people ask questions and to analyze. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it does not teach analytical or critical thinking. If you don’t want those things, don’t go to college. And if you want a good lawyer, you best make sure he or she does not see the world in terms of answers and quick facts rather than in terms of questions and analysis.
College students, especially those aged 18-24, need to be challenged by the professor and fellow students in person, because they are far too sheltered and naive to seek challenges to what they already think to be true. Those over the age of 24 are not much better, but if they’ve already gone to college they know to ask questions. Young people, now raised in Hetty Greene’s world in which answers and not questions are touted as the end all and be all, are especially in need of the critical thinking skills that a college education provides.
For that matter, most of my on-line students failed their courses and the university knew they’d fail. On-line courses are cash cows *designed* to take advantage of irresponsible, parent-shielded child-adults who, while by no means dumb, are too lazy to drop courses in which they lose interest. Students in my classroom rarely fail because they stop attending class. Students on-line, however, quickly lose interest and are so enamored of their new independence that they forget to drop the course. The F stays on their record and the university gets the cash.
— sara
10. August 19, 2009
3:13 pm
Link
I have personally been the student in a variety of settings, including online, traditional college, foreign universities, community college, etc. What I have found is 1 year later, my retention rate of the material I learned is about the same, irrespective of the delivery method.
That said, I found the online learning drudgery. No live interaction with students & teachers, no debates, etc. No camaraderie, no life-long friendships formed, etc. Not good for extroverts. Living on campus with fellow students is more valuable, and leaves greater impressions, than what you learn in the classroom, particularly 30 years later. So for young people, I definitely recommend the college campus experience, living away from home starting at 18. What you learn about life & getting along with other people will never be reproduced online.
On the plus side, driving to class after work to listen to a bored adjunct for 90 minutes, then driving home is a waste of time. I could read that material myself in 20 minutes in the comfort of my home AND get a higher score on the test. You can move at your own speed and don’t waste time doing stuff that’s redundant. You can do assignments at 2 a.m. if you want - it’s your schedule. In these regards, online learning is superior. Much better for working stiffs trying to get ahead.
The subject matter is also important. Much easier to learn computer programming online than brain surgery. Anything involving people, like physical therapy, needs a large “live” component. OTH, accounting can likely be done easily online.
Bottom line is the motivated learner or student can do well in a variety of settings. As #3 pointed out, it’s cheaper to do online. Just record the professor’s lecture one time, and you’re done, even if s/he dies.
It’s also good for people who live in Timbuktu. You can still have access to the famous professor from home, something that was impossible before.
— JS17
11. August 19, 2009
3:29 pm
Link
From this overview that has been presented, it would appear that the research has discovered a correlation rather than a causation in their results.
More bluntly, people taking online courses are a self selected group of people who want to learn. In a regular college environment, that just isn’t there - there are plenty of deadbeats who get weeded out, or people who realize that this isn’t for them, or people who were pushed into college by mom and dad and just aren’t too terribly bright.
Comparison of test scores doesn’t validate the results that Ms. Means and her team has drawn from their research. Their results are interesting, but the essential point still stands; they’ll need more data on the students themselves to draw any form of conclusion about the real efficacy of online teaching.
— Jim
12. August 19, 2009
3:31 pm
Link
Just throwing online tools at people does not mean they will engage in meaningful learning. And many course management systems — Blackboard is the notorious biggest offender — are closed, proprietary, and their online media are decades behind the curve.
With some money from MacArthur Foundation, I worked with developers and with my own students to develop a combination of tools and techniques:
http://socialmediaclassroom.com and http://socialmediaclassroom/com/host/vircom
It’s free and open source software and all the curricular materials are free for others to use.
— Howard Rheingold
13. August 19, 2009
3:34 pm
Link
Re, from the article: “The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms.”
Yes, I strongly agree. As a teacher, I want students to have individualized learning experiences, especially students who are already 2-3 years behind.
Right now in Florida we actually have a state law that says students who have already been retained “2 or more years” in public schools are required to be in an “alternative placement” — but no one bothered to fund any alternative placement settings for those students already left back 2 or more years who are not eligible for special ed because they do not score low enough to qualify.
What these kids need is an online alternative placement classroom; one like the online classrooms now being used in NYC over the summer to teach math as recently profiled in the NY Times.
By offering students an online alternative, in school, the school still gets the money to educate the student, and the student has a chance for an individual online experience that may even enable the student to catch up.
And, the student could still attend music, art and PE classes with their actual age peers, which is not what happens now.
Now, what happens is you can be a 4th grade teacher, and get a very tall, very physically large 13 year old male student who should be in 7th grade, but is still stuck in
4th grade.
This is not a good situation for that student, or for the other students who are actually only 10 years old.
And the larger student does not like taking 4th grade art, music and PE three years in a row either.
So, I am looking forward to more online learning in schools, especially for situations like the above. This would really be a tremendous help to all students and teachers.
— florida voter
14. August 19, 2009
3:36 pm
Link
While enrolled in a mixed media course, where lectures were delivered online through Blackboard with weekly discussion/quiz sessions in a classroom, we quickly found that the best way for many of us to watch the lectures was, in fact, together. This gave everyone a chance to ask questions in the middle of the lecture, and have a possible answer. However, having the ability to go straight to lectures during review helped in studying for finals, or doing homework. Nonetheless, given the complex content of the course, I feel that at least some human interaction was necessary for conceptual comprehension.
Though there are some days I wish all professors came with a fast-forward button…
— KD
15. August 19, 2009
3:41 pm
Link
On the contrary, Buzz, I think most people can rearrange their lives to allow their kids the best education. There’s no law, biological or otherwise, that says kids can only learn between 9 and 3 or between September and June. Teenagers in particular are more awake in the afternoon and evening than they are at 7am. Why not allow them to adjust their educational schedule to fit their circadian rhythm by implementing more asynchronous learning?
— The Princess Mom
16. August 19, 2009
3:52 pm
Link
Being in a doctorate program at Boston University, I can certainly attest to the rigor and depth of the educational experience. I have degrees and certification from several prominent institutions (Kenyon College, University of Colorado - Boulder, University of TN - Knoxville, University of Memphis), and would put my on-line experience at BU against any of my excellent live classroom experiences. Being able to continue to work while attending graduate school has been a major plus. I am able to remain in my house, no travel time, and can archive lectures and classes.
On the down side, one misses the informal exchanges of student-to-student and student to faculty personal contacts.
— Charles Tighe
17. August 19, 2009
4:07 pm
Link
I agree with the last paragraph completely. I have studied in online only, classroom only, and an online/classroom hybrid. While I learned a lot from all of them, logic in online classes and political science and all the drama that entails in classroom classes, I did like the hybrids. Sharing thoughts online and then meeting in person.
— Walter G
18. August 19, 2009
4:20 pm
Link
I completed an accredited online graduate course in the Humanities at the age is 83! Independent study is the way we all learn, and through the graded discussions and a good professor, it is the only way of the future for working people who cannot travel for their studies, and saves the enormous expense of dormitory life.
It is truly astounding that schools do not offer more online courses..
— Elaine
19. August 19, 2009
4:27 pm
Link
You may want to take a look at this interview on K-12 math teaching online: http://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/08/12/teaching-k-12-math-online-reasoning-mind-ceo-alex-khachatryan-part-1/
— Sramana Mitra
20. August 19, 2009
4:30 pm
Link
I’ve never participated in on-line distance learning; but I wouldn’t have guessed these results. However, Jim (11) makes a good point. Test results are not really a good proxy for testing all-around ‘learning.’
JS17 seems to have more varied experiences than I have; and seems to capture several facets of the argument. I think certain subjects and basic disciplines could be taught on-line; but others wouldn’t lend themselves to it. Hetty Green thinks one could become a lawyer for $100. Good luck with that. How is one going to participate in a Socratic dialogue amongst ones peers? Maybe when videoconferencing improves and becomes cheaper.
— Larry
21. August 19, 2009
4:37 pm
Link
I wonder if what could also be happening, with regards to college students participating in online courses, is that those people voluntarily taking these courses are self-selected to be students with more tenacity and self-discipline than students who would not be able to make that commitment. Just a thought. I could be way off-base here.
— Zachary Elwood
22. August 19, 2009
4:56 pm
Link
@ duro, “Perhaps by giving business, civics, math and the sciences over to online learning, truly significant time in the classroom can be given over to the arts and humanities.”
Math *is* a humanity. It is not a science. It is an art in itself, not a tool, although it can be used as a tool, much as the English language can be used as a tool though it is not *merely* a tool.
And the best way to learn it is through wide ranging mathematical conversation with an actual mathematician, as opposed to “problem sets”. Unfortunately there is little to no math (proofs, methods of proof etc), and next to no mathematicians, below university level in this country so most people are not exposed to this fact.. Perhaps an inherent flaw of forced “education”.
As to the original article, I suspect again that, because correllation is not equal to causation, there is quite a bit of self-selection in the study. Whether this be true or not, however, the lower cost of online instruction will drive increased use of online education systems in the future.
— steve in W MA
23. August 19, 2009
5:03 pm
Link
The key is that online eSchools allow students to have instant access to iconic media, i.e. photographs, film/video clips,
animation clips, virtual field trips, QTVRs, sound clips to help convey information and concepts. Much better for teachers to SHOW & TELL rather than to just TELLl information to students like our ancestors did in the Bronze Age…and assume the students know what you’re talking/telling about.
Why do most kids HATE SCHOOL? Because they have to
sit in their seats for six hours a day listening to a teacher
chalkTALK to them in an attempt to convey information.
— Larry Loganbill
24. August 19, 2009
5:08 pm
Link
The curriculum currently being taught in American schools
was designed in 1892 by the president of Harvard and
“The Committee of Ten”. Essentially aren’t we preparing our
students for the early 1900s?
What do the wingnuts at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook,
YouTube, Toyota etc. say we should be teaching our kids to prepare them for the workplace of 2015-2050? Or should we teach them to farm using electric tractors and combines?
— Larry Loganbill
25. August 19, 2009
5:12 pm
Link
Let the students stay at home and enroll in a good internet
online eSchool. And provide free “brick & mortar” preschools for all 3 and 4 year-olds who live below the poverty line.
Middle class kids enter school with four times the world knowledge and vocabulary of the kids who live below the
poverty line.
— Larry Loganbill
From 26 to 50 of 108 Comments
« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 Next »
26. August 19, 2009
5:19 pm
Link
There is a revolution coming in education. Already a student can have a live interaction with a teacher over the internet-even if the teacher is on the other side of the world. Materials, handouts and books can also all be sent over the internet. There is simply no reason why a student and a teacher have to be in the same room together.
American collrge campuses are basically a type of camp for young adults. They go there and learn to live without their parents, lose their virginity and party. This has nothing to do with learning.
— John C
27. August 19, 2009
5:19 pm
Link
The SRI report, in its totality, is significant and probably prophetic, in line with the continuing work of the Alfred Sloan Foundation. I have the privilege of working closely with a variety of LMS and courseware and the future is MUCH more exciting and promising than even the SRI and similar reports suggest. For high school courseware, just take a look at http://www.4tnoxrox.com and you will see what I mean. For university business programs, take a look at
http://www.vlcglobal.com. The introduction of 3D Virtual Reality to education and corporate training is truly revolutionary. There is hope both for reduced costs and improved quality for today’s tech-savvy learners.
— John P. Cragin, Ph.D.
28. August 19, 2009
5:40 pm
Link
As someone who has done both, I can say: it’s not that online learning is so great, it’s that the US classroom as it exists right now is that bad.
— Farnsworth
29. August 19, 2009
6:05 pm
Link
Having taken online and classroom college courses, I agree that the best online students are highly diciplined and self motivated, with a knack for gaining information through reading and writing. There’s plenty of oportunity for discussion. It just takes place in writing over a series of days instead of via the spoken word in a series of minutes.
In contrast, as Sara mentioned, there are plenty of students for whom online doesn’t work. While this might be due in part to age and lack of discipline, it might also be due to a difference in learning styles. If you hate reading & writing you aren’t going to do well with online content no matter your age or motivation.
I am now working on an MBA in the classroom and would probably be able finish the degree faster if I had an online option. The hour drive to campus makes it a lot harder juggle full time work and family along with the classroom time. Online learning gave me the flexibility to fit school into my schedule, rather than me fitting my life into the school’s arbitrary schedule of classes.
— vivaELvino
30. August 19, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
I had a lot of experience with a computer assisted instruction system called FIS, as a student, author, and curriculum coordinator . This study is pure crap.
— JB
31. August 19, 2009
6:54 pm
Link
The future of education is online period. Whether it is in the classroom or distance learning the use of online content that has been peer-reviewed and validated by experts in the respective fields should be available to everyone. The only way to work through this new, new economy is to have the most highly educated work force ever in time. The only way to do this is to have open access to the newest information on a daily basis. The concept of the five year textbook is gone - dead - period. information is changing at a rapid pace and the more information available the better. This is the essence of online education. I have been an academic for 23 years, I am tenured, I get up every morning at 5:00 and read my research from credible sources. I then put my notes together for that days lessons and bring to class the most current information possible. That is what these students are going into debt for! Critical thinking is imperative but it must be blended with new theories in order for it to be effective. If we are still thinking about old theories then the critical thinking is useless. New components must be added to the equation which lead to greater questions and different thought patterns.
I do not believe that face to face is dead but there is iChat to iChat. It does work.
the problem is the expense. Now with opens source LMSs becoming accepted by schools the future of online is here to stay.
the problem is how to monetize this new paradigm. Should a professor be paid the same amount for 300 students as they are for 20? It is a lot more work to review 300 papers then it is to review 20. Same as any other field. A lot of questions need to be answered. But one that has clearly been answered is that it i a new, new very “flat” world. Get over it and get with it.
— Patrick Aievoli
32. August 19, 2009
7:30 pm
Link
The key word here is ‘community.’ The online courses must be used to network, not isolate. Otherwise, we can go ahead and rework sociocultural learning theory’s most basic points.
— nick
33. August 19, 2009
8:20 pm
Link
While I think online courses can be useful, I think it’s important to consider that there may be other sources of the discrepancy in achievement. Many online courses use online assessments to measure achievement. In high school, I took several math finals for my then-boyfriend so that he could pass his online college math classes. With online exams, there is no way to ensure that the person taking the exam is the person enrolled in the course, or that prohibited materials are not being used.
I don’t think closed-book exams assessing rote memorization are useful measures of learning. But since these are the most common tools used to assess achievement, I think it’s worth considering how the experience of taking one of these exams may differ between the two contexts.
(And yes, as a TA at a large university, I know that there are students who have other people take their exams for them in-person, particularly in large classes. But at least in this situation, I have the opportunity to notice a face that I have never seen before and ask for ID.)
— Laura
34. August 19, 2009
8:52 pm
Link
It is not really a wonder that online teaching is more effective than brick and mortar schools. It provides solutions to problems that are only created and compounded by packing kids together with little supervision.
School grounds are like little islands in which kids adapt much like the kids in “Lord of the Flies.” Teachers are increasing unable to discipline students, much less teach. Students are unable to concentrate and think critically.
Yet when I put a computer in front of my daughter she can talk for hours, listen for hours, and even read books for hours. I have to pry her away. I dream of the day when brick and mortar colleges disappear and with them the drunken idiocy of our higher learning institutions.
— Soren
35. August 19, 2009
9:22 pm
Link
A plug for Sara #10. Partly there’s the problem with “student-aged” students. And, as Patrick #31 suggests along with Sara, there will be deep problems as long as schools see on-line courses as for profit, and not for educational success (as our health care system rewards procedures, not health).
But more basically, in a good classroom, one has a situation both ancient and new: telling a tale around the campfire. This is important (when the teacher’s good).
It’s not primarily about conveying information or data, but it is a great way to show how to assess data and to build it up into a picture that makes sense.
“Students learn in different ways” — fine, but also students need to improve on areas of weakness — an ability to concentrate over time on developing a coherent picture is an important skill.
The different venues will probably work differently for different fields. E.g., Patrick # 31 — not all fields change quite so rapidly; and in many places, the analysis learned on not-quite-the-moment’s data will be quite portable.
Discussion classes about literature can work wonderfully in person, in part because the communication is not just letters on the screen, but all the human ways of communicating — tone, eyes, affect, &c. — and immediate reaction — even the reaction while one is speaking.
“When the teacher’s good” — I’ve seen that instructors in some science courses are often not going on to be teachers, and they resent the time they teach, and it results in poor learning, esp. for those with less aptitude. That’s a shame; if on-line can put them out of business, fine by me!
There are some important aspects of learning that a good classroom (either lecture or seminar) can do singularly well.
— Arthur
36. August 19, 2009
10:13 pm
Link
I teach high school English in Kansas and direct a computer-based program for adults who are seeking a high school diploma.
This research flies in the face of everything I believe, but I don’t feel as though my one experience can trump this exhaustive finding. If I had not read it, I would not have believed it.
One factor that I believe might help online is the speed of learning versus the predictable and often slow learning that takes place at the one speed of the teacher. If this were removed, then it is true that students could learn much more quickly.
At age 49, I feel as though I would need to be re-educated to learn how to assist through on-line methodology. I am just a few years from retirement, and I wonder if it would be worth going back to relearn how to assist using this method.
— Kilgatron
37. August 19, 2009
10:20 pm
Link
One of the biggest misconceptions about online learning is that it is a cheap option. The standard model of large university lectures is not the best way to learn material - we know that. It is, however, much cheaper than the better versions, both in human resources and infrastructure. There’s a reason schools with very small class size and personalized attention are expensive.
To do internet based learning well takes resources. You still have to design the curriculum, set exams and assignments, and evaluate the result (computer evaluated exams like multiple choice are one of the worst ways of testing comprehension, particularly for advanced subjects). You still need a trained expert to answer questions. I’ve found answering a question in a fashion suitable for email takes about four time longer than answering the same question in person. And you need to add computer resources, and the personnel to maintain them, program them and handle security.
I’ve also heard the argument that kids could study at home on the internet before. The problem with that is that you can’t leave children unattended all day, so someone has to stay with them while they study at home. For that, we need a full time stay at home parent or the parents are going to have to pay for supervision, a la daycare.
— Jennifer
38. August 19, 2009
10:38 pm
Link
We at http://www.nixty.com are creating a hybrid platform that supports traditional K-12 and higher education, but also provides space for informal learning communities to develop. Mr. Reiger is absolutely right in indicating that peer learning will expand beyond the classroom and be integral to learning and development in the future. It has to be. We simply do not have enough educators to meet demand. The trick lies in developing tools that facilitate this kind of context.
If you are interested in helping us create this platform, then please sign up to help us beta test NIXTY.
— Glen
39. August 19, 2009
10:51 pm
Link
Finally education is adopting the most important principle of most business- differentiate your product for each market segment. I have been advocating this and is potential in education through education technology since 1970.
The problem is not the technology but the status quo protectors who control both k12 and higher education. They fight every attempt at individualized, self paced learning, even when the data shows its productivity improvement.
A big part of the problem is that most educators, especially K12, both also higher education, are technology avoiders. It will take a lot of public pressure to implement educational technology as a productivity or transformational strategy.
I am a Professor of Business and Economics who has served on State Board of Education and on the State Board for Community Colleges.
— Ed Lyell
40. August 19, 2009
11:10 pm
Link
I think that a lot of people are missing the point here.
From the tables presented on pages 44-46 of the report it is clear that although the authors do include some studies concerned with K-12 and undergraduate level performance off- and on-line, many of the studies dealt more specifically with student performance in short courses, vocational courses, courses intended as professional enhancement, and course sub-units.
Studies included in the meta-analysis include results showing that physicians who took an online course in opioid and benzodiazepine prescribing skills showed better results than those who took a traditional course, that web-based instructional modalities were effective as part of a larger programing course, and that online tutorials for teaching hypothesis testing concepts showed positive results, among others.
While such results are interesting, they do not support the idea that online courses are in any way superior (or even equal) to traditional, face-to-face, primary or secondary education.
A list of the studies included is available on page 44 of the report; I hope people will refer to it (or perhaps even the report in its entirety) before drawing any conclusions.
— E.R. Land
41. August 20, 2009
12:49 am
Link
It was BF Skinner, building on the technology and experience of even earlier pioneers of self-paced, individualized learning, who realized nearly fifty years ago what he termed the “impossibility” of transmitting the optimal amount of information to each student in the traditional classroom. I’ve taught online since 1996 and I think that the nine-point difference in achievement stated in the report quantifies what I detect as the difference between my classroom students and my online ones. Online work compels, sooner or later, active processing by students: add to this the usually greater self-motivation of those who choose online instruction and there isn’t much wonder in that slight though significant difference. On the other hand, I can’t sit down with an online student on the tailgate and figure things out in conversation. At present, the first-year college students I encounter each fall, most of whom I know would benefit far more from the structure of the online course vs. the usually overcrowded classroom course, overwhelmingly choose to stay with the classroom course rather than take the course online. I believe they make this choice because they haven’t had enough experience with both methods to make an informed choice. My hope is that, within 10 years, to see 25% of my incoming intro psych students opt for the online version. I’m patient–I’ve waited 15 years to see online work get as many approving comments as it has in this set tonight. I think it will take at least until all the college instructors of my generation retire until the full potential of online education will be realized.
Dave D (55 years young–25 years in the teaching biz)
— Dave D
42. August 20, 2009
1:47 am
Link
I agree with that. The new generation kids mostly interested in online education. if the online education website teaching games or animation based lessons, kids will love that. it give fun experience to the kids.
— Jonam
43. August 20, 2009
2:35 am
Link
Why wouldn’t online courses be more INTERESTING thus
more effective for conveying information. The students
has access to photographs, film/video and animation clips,
virtual reality field trips QTVRs and sound clips to help convey the information and concepts instead of a teacher just standing and TELLING about the information. SHOW & TELL not just TELL.
— Larry Loganbill
44. August 20, 2009
3:03 am
Link
Well for me, online training is a no no. No interaction from the teacher, no response from other students, no ideas from other students. It’s different. Try working on the computer for atleast 2 hours, isn’t it boring? A child needs to be at school where he can play with other kids, interact with other kids for self development also.
Karen Davis
san diego computer repair
— Karen Davis
45. August 20, 2009
6:12 am
Link
This sounds like a study that hypothetically showed that people taking classes near Harvard did better, and using it to claim that there was something about the geography of Harvard that made students excel.
Obviously, there are brighter students near Harvard, so they would tend to do well. And computer-oriented students probably tend to be brighter — it’s like, nerdsville!
So I don’t believe that the Internet is somehow a better learning environment. On the other hand, it is certainly cheaper. For that reason, online education should be encouraged; it allows wide access to educational resources. But it isn’t inherently superior.
— Gene Venable
46. August 20, 2009
6:44 am
Link
As a former online student and a current online instructor, I will say that online learning is not for everyone. If you are a person who is easily distracted, not organized and definetly not organized - online learning is not for you.
However, one can feel just as part of a classroom online as one does in a traditional setting. If you have a good instructor who is truly involved then the experience is just as equal to sitting in the classroom face to face. The level of the student’s involvement also makes a huge difference. If a student is willing to dive into discussions, add extra to the topic, etc. they will experience an equal level of education as those sitting in the classroom.
I do believe that the study should have specified if those researched had specific reasons for taking online course though. If distance to the nearest college was an issue and online provided not having to drive, then that is one thing. You could easily compare online to traditional. However, if the reason for online was more to do with social issues, such as anxiety, then you can not easily compare the two.
all in all, though, I am excited to see that online learning is getting some rave reviews and legitimate research. While it will never replace the traditional classroom, it is a wonderful option!
— Bethany
47. August 20, 2009
6:45 am
Link
I believe there are certain subject areas which tend to lend themselves better to online instruction and social media. For example, we here at http://www.italki.com believe that foreign language instruction is a particularly good fit. Studies have shown that interaction with native speakers improve fluency, comprehension and accuracy when learning a new language. The internet makes it possible for someone to find a native speaker to learn and practice with no matter where they live or what language they’re studying. Online learning in this case is expanding human interaction rather than limiting it.
— Eric
48. August 20, 2009
7:16 am
Link
K-12 learners today have generally been immersed in an expansive and ceaseless information stream since birth. This immersion produces transformations in information processing responsiveness and receptivity (see Strommen, E.F., Constructivism, Technology, and the Future of Classroom Learning, Children’s Television Workshop, Bruce Lincoln, Bank Street College of Education, 1992 http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/k12/livetext/docs/construct.html) and the technologies do have an expanding impact on student motivation to learn. Currently available technologies are serious tools that affect the lives of students with immediacy and with great potential for both good and harm. Thus, a pivotal component for learning with technology tools is that an educated person uses these systems and processes in an informed, ethical, and responsible way. This component of education is not referred to at all in the above article and it should be considered essential to learners. Scholarship is not only the application of learning tools to “do something meaningful and useful,” but also recognizing ethical, responsible use, and knowing how to make things of significance with those tools. Ethics and responsibility are centered in the affective domain and they should be addressed at the core of any educational model that relies on embedded information technologies. Education also needs to foster the development of skills and attitudes that address the social and ethical issues intrinsic to the technological advancements of our society.
— Barry Grant
49. August 20, 2009
8:01 am
Link
I teach at a small two-year college that offers a variety of online courses. We that teach the on-campus versions of the classes have noticed declining enrollment in some of the harder science courses, due to increasing online enrollment.
In talking to many people about this, the general consensus is that students like the online, because it is so much easier to cheat and get better grades.
.
While I have no doubt there are some solid online courses out there, I think a teacher can’t be replaced. Otherwise, I could read a text book and be a doctor!
.
Most of the studies of online learning ignore the cheating factor and I have heard people rationalize saying that looking up the info just shows that students know where to look. They know where to find answers, but that doesn’t mean they learn the material. I agree with those saying that it doesn’t teach thinking skills or how to evaluate the answers they do find for accuracy.
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Bottom line: Online is not equal to classroom learning in many cases.
— Face-to-Face Teacher
50. August 20, 2009
9:04 am
Link
the sad part of both studies is that students fell into the 50th percentile. Why aren’t we addressing that?
— Luise armstrong
From 51 to 75 of 108 Comments
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51. August 20, 2009
10:04 am
Link
In response to Arthur and others I too have setup an online educational technology website that can be customized for any school at no cost and generate revenue for those schools. It is totally free, we host, you admin through our employee - so no cost again. It is user generated content and has daily updated news, music, video, sports,research, etc.
Many schools are spending tremendous amounts on LMSs and student portals we offer it for free and share in the eight streams of revenue with each school. Please review the Website and see what I am talking about.
http://www.theCampusCenter.com
— Patrick Aievoli
52. August 20, 2009
10:18 am
Link
OF course, someone has vetted SRI International and they are completely free from influence by the online education industry.
— HT
53. August 20, 2009
10:45 am
Link
Interesting read. Often, a traditional classroom is hindered by the fact that it must move at the pace of the weakest student. You can imagine the issues of having a large foreign language class - some of mine in high school and university have had more than 20 students! And if the instructor does NOT to slow down and allow each student to understand the material… confused students don’t have the chance to catch up later.
Online education, at least in the language-learning field, has the advantage of helping each person by moving at their own speed. With technology advancing and people finding more ways to socialize (and learn) on the internet, there will be better ways for students to supplement their learning… by learning local slang and idioms with native speakers, for example.
— Crystal
54. August 20, 2009
11:09 am
Link
KV makes a good point: online studies require self-motivation and self-discipline in order for the course to work. Did the study take into account the self-selection factor? That is, students who don’t have the motivation to do well are often advised, at the college level, not to enroll in online courses, or they try one and find out it is not for them. If the study were to take a random sample of students, enrolled one group in online courses and one in traditional classrooms, I suspect that we would see different statistical results. RB
— Richard Baskin
55. August 20, 2009
11:37 am
Link
This is a classic case of falsely taking correlation for causality. As I know from my experience teaching online and in person, online students are more motivated on average. You would have to be more motivated to sign up for online classes because they offer less than in-person classes. As the student who wrote above said, they are drudgery. The people who take them do so because they are forced to by their schedules and they really want to learn. Contrast this to in person classes where a percentage of the students usually comes because their parents convinced them to, or they think it’s easier than finding a job, or it’s what you’re supposed to do at their age, etc. Of course the highly motivated students learn more–but this is despite the handicaps of the medium, not because of them.
— professor
56. August 20, 2009
11:55 am
Link
So kids learn better online but they waste a boat load of time online…. quite a catch 22. Here’s what I’m referring to: http://kiwicommons.com/2009/06/what-exactly-are-kids-doing-online/
— Ashley
57. August 20, 2009
12:01 pm
Link
What comes to my mind when reading this article is that computer usage among kids, teenagers and adults has become so commonplace that they are more used to using a computer than personal interaction. Are we really given any background on the students themselves?
Furthermore, I think there are certain subjects that just cannot be supported by online learning alone, i.e. lab sciences.
I agree with the fact that learning in a community is such an important influence. Obviously, there are more nurturing environments to benefit from than others. However, among younger kids, personal interaction and the ability to understand different points of viewed must be realized in a classroom setting and not as text on a computer screen.
I do not doubt that online learning has positive qualities, but as more and more people enroll because of tuition hikes, it is a concern for the communication skills of the next generation, especially those that are essential to suceed after one’s education.
— Richard
58. August 20, 2009
12:13 pm
Link
I have 3 children enrolled in an online charter school in grades 7, 4, and 2 who have never attended a traditional brick and mortar school. They excel in online learning, and are learning incredible life skills such as time management. They are all required to take standardized state tests; and score advanced in nearly all sections. Two of my students are working a full grade level ahead in math. This is such a fantastic education option that, while only fits a small percentage of the population’s schedule abilities, works!
We attend a parent co-op group for science, art, and music, as well as many field trips. This provides them with more projects as well as social opportunities.
We are able to adjust our schedule to optimize time with dad. He works on Saturdays, so in the winter, we ski on Wednesday, and study on Saturday. What a good motivator to get homework done!
Three cheers for online education!!!
— Jennifer
59. August 20, 2009
12:15 pm
Link
Much can be learned from glancing at the report. For example:
“Despite what appears to be strong support for online
learning applications, the studies in this meta-analysis do not demonstrate that online learning is
superior as a medium, In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the
online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was
the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included
additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that
produced the observed learning advantages.”
Also:
“A systematic search of the research literature from 1994 through
2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies comparing the
learning effects of online versus face-to-face instruction for K–12 students that provide
sufficient data to compute an effect size.”
Finally:
“In addition, although the types of research designs used by the studies in the meta-analysis were
strong (i.e., experimental or controlled quasi-experimental), many of the studies suffered from
weaknesses such as small sample sizes; failure to report retention rates for students in the
conditions being contrasted; and, in many cases, potential bias stemming from the authors’ dual
roles as experimenters and instructors. ”
It is not clear that self-selection has been well-controlled in this work. I will just mention that of the more than 1,000 studies reviewed, only 51 passed muster to get into the authors’ meta-analysis. Good for them for having such standards–even though problems remain, as they recognize. This is a sad comment on the quality of the original work, just 5% of the published studies making it through the filter.
— Dataman
60. August 20, 2009
12:18 pm
Link
If adults spend so much of their “work” in socio-tech environments, why wouldn’t children also find the unique benefits?
But I can’t help to wonder if this marks a point in our history when the school as we know it ends. As the 20th Century models finally starting to reach the 21st Century….
I mean really it is almost 2010.
— R. Harris
61. August 20, 2009
12:27 pm
Link
With Web Based Virtual Classrooms like WiZiQ, online learning is now an excellent, if not, preferred choice for many. Universities like UCSD (University of California San Diego) are using these web based VCs to aid in tutoring and online collaboration.
— Mark
62. August 20, 2009
12:30 pm
Link
@Richard Baskin:
If you click through to the report, you will see that the study is a meta-analysis and only considered studies that used random-assignment or quasi-experimental designs which, if done right, should take care of the self-selection problem.
— WF
63. August 20, 2009
1:27 pm
Link
Yes, you can throw technology at people and it is no assurance they will learn. But I know if you throw a really horrible instructor at a student in a traditional learning environment it is a guaranteed failure probably for more than just that one class too.
I think it’s time we quit throwing money blindly at education and begin holding the institutions and even the unions accountable for the failures of our systems. If it takes something like online instruction from at least average instructors to shake things up then I’m all for it!
— PA
64. August 20, 2009
2:20 pm
Link
I did a complete online sociology course in college. I decided to make it a sociology experiment. I did nothing. Never logged on. Never communicated in forums. Never read the materials. Purposely cheated on the exams. And so on. I got an “A” in the class. Then I asked as many of my classmates as I could about the experience, and learned we all did the same thing, and all of us got an “A.” At my University, there was a procedure for challenging grades. The handbook did not say it had to be a bad grade. So I challenged the “A” that I received. I informed the Dean of the college, and the Provost of the University, about what happened. I was disciplined for exposing the professor and the fraud of online education. The “A” remained on my transcript.
10 years later, I still think online courses are a fraud.
— MC
65. August 20, 2009
2:29 pm
Link
Reading the comments I note several points:
First, online education is not less expensive than face-to-face. Online is more labor intensive than face-to-face, hence online courses tend to serve small numbers of students. Most of the studies examined in this meta-study concerned 25 students or less.
Furthermore, the network and server infrastructure supporting online ducation is extremely expensive. Programs like Blackboard and WebCT require banks of fast servers and dedicated systems programmers together with 24/7 tech support. Students require home computers and a robust as well as reliable connection to the Internet.
Third, online courses not only self-select stronger students, they also self-select stronger instructors. In fact, a reader might draw the conclusion that active learning is more efficient than passive learning, and that active web-based learning systems are as effective as face-to-face active pedagogies. Since most instructors who work online employ significant active learning techniques (asynchronous discussion, role playing, goup writing projects) and most face-to-face instructors lecture, the results of this study of studies are not surprising.
— Marc Cooper
66. August 20, 2009
2:39 pm
Link
From my experience, I have received FAR MORE from online classes then I had when I was sitting in a classroom. I did part of my undergrad in the classroom with the rest of it online. Now, I’m working on an MBA from the University of Wisconsin completely online, which still required me to meet a satisfactory GMAT test score (same as classroom requirement) just to enroll.
Someone mention that you don’t get the analytical thinking online. On the contrary, I write nothing but analytical papers and have to use the same reasoning via the discussion boards. I’m guessing those that are oppose to it have either never taken a real class online or have some stake (such as those on the government dole) in why they don’t want online education to succeed…perhaps it threatens their job security for being lazy ???
— danny
67. August 20, 2009
2:42 pm
Link
Here is the “purpose” of SRI International, taken directly from their website:
Our founding purpose (since 1946): SRI, a nonprofit corporation, is committed to discovery and to the application of science and technology for knowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace. SRI has a broad charter that encourages us to make a difference in the world through basic and applied research, research services, technology development, and commercialization of our innovations.
Does anyone else see a potential conflict of interest?
— Dave Flatley
68. August 20, 2009
3:56 pm
Link
With 18 plus years as an educational instructor, I have one concern that has not been mentioned. With online education, students have a plethora of resources at their disposal during tests or while writing essays/ etc. It’s all open book. In the classroom, if the activity is closed book, all they have to rely on is themselves.
So is this 9 point gain truly a measure of what students learned and remember, or is it a measure of how well they can use resources to complete a task?
— Lisa
69. August 20, 2009
4:04 pm
Link
Important quote from the abstract of the study:
“This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se.”
The majority of the studies included in the meta-analysis looked at situations in which students met face-to-face but received additional instruction time online. These students often received more total instruction time than did the students who received only face-to-face instruction. This is an important point that the blog should have highlighted.
I believe that online instruction has tremendous potential and my experience teaching live online has been wonderful. The most effective instruction addresses topics through multiple angles and modalities. Teaching online allows me to highlight information and processes in new ways. In many ways it allows for more participation and teacher interaction than the live classroom does. Face-to-face classrooms can feel to students like a public speaking event and that can be intimidating. Hybrid instruction is likely to prove most effective in many cases . Students get the best of many worlds.
— Kim Crowley
70. August 20, 2009
4:16 pm
Link
Luise,
Percentiles don’t measure overall learning; they indicate how well people did compared to others. No matter how well students do, half of the group will always be above the 50%ile and half of the group will be below the 50%ile by definition.
The percentiles in this study (as reported in the original document, not this blog) indicate that those who received (usually) additional online instruction landed on average, a little higher within the overall group compared to students who did not have access to online instruction. We don’t know whether that had anything to do with the additional instruction. Perhaps those students had more access to other supportive resources in life in general.
— Kim Crowley
71. August 20, 2009
4:51 pm
Link
I am the CEO of a company that provides web-based ethics training for universitiy classes (EthicsGame.com). Over the past year we have reached about 3,000 students in a variety of settings. We are just beginning data analysis and our preliminary research shows that the on-line students who completed our one hour module did considerably better than those who completed the module in an on-the-ground setting. We were surprised because we had expected the reverse. Clearly we have some more work to do in the analysis. However, I can attest to the fact that our experience seems to match that which is reported above.
— Catharyn Baird
72. August 20, 2009
4:58 pm
Link
I wish the press reports on this report were as modest in their claims as the report itself. And that the authors had been more cautious when talking to the press, which likes a sensational headline.
The research is far too weak to draw the conclusion that teachers can be replaced with online instruction.To their credit, the authors admit this up front:
“The most unexpected finding was that an extensive initial search of the published literature from 1996 through 2006 found no experimental or controlled quasi-experimental studies that both compared the learning effectiveness of online and face-to-face instruction for K–12 students and provided sufficient data for inclusion in a meta-analysis.”
What were the limitations in the existing research that led the authors to this gloomy conclusion (which did not come across in the press reports)?
I) Internal validity
Out of 1000+ studies the authors reviewed, 33 were randomized trials, and 13 were comparison-control with decent controls. The RCTs did show pretty big positive effects (0.2 SD), however, and we know that research is not democratic. So, what’s the problem?
..which leads us to…
II) External Validity
a) Just one of the 33 randomized trials (and four of the 13 comparison-control studies) took place in a K-12 school. The rest were in colleges or training programs for medical professionals.
b) None of the (five) K-12 studies compared face-to-face instruction with online learning, which is the comparison the we all have in mind when we read the media reports. Rather, the studies compared 1) face-to-face instruction with 2) face-to-face-instruction PLUS online learning. No teachers were taken out of the equation for the treatment or control group.
The bottom line (which did not come across in the press reports…) is that this research tells us nothing about whether online learning and face-to-face instruction in K-12 are substitutes in the learning process. It does provide us some evidence, however, that they are complements.
— Susan Dynarski, University of Michigan
73. August 20, 2009
5:07 pm
Link
From the executive summary of the original study (a meta-analysis):
“An important issue to keep in mind in reviewing these findings is that many studies did not attempt to
equate (a) all the curriculum materials, (b) aspects of pedagogy and (c) learning time in the treatment
and control conditions. Indeed, some authors asserted that it would be impossible to havedone so. Hence, the observed advantage for online learning in general, and blendedlearning conditions in particular, is not necessarily rooted in the media used per se and may reflect differences in content, pedagogy and learning time.”
My opinion: When online learning works well, it’s because an instructor/designer has used the tools to encourage intimate interaction with the learning materials. Interaction beats ego-based lectures hands down. When online instruction fails to engage, it’s usually because a technology expert has simply broken a droning lecture into tediously small components and dropped the pieces onto rows and rows of ticky-tacky, sleep-inducing slides.
— Kim Crowley
74. August 20, 2009
5:16 pm
Link
I’d like to see the full study and what other conclusions were drawn besides what was published here.
A few other things I suspect contribute to this “increased achievement:”
1) Student engagement. It’s harder to tune out a self-directed computer program than it is a teacher, particularly if the teacher isn’t very good at gaining and maintaining students’ attention
2) Less disruption. Many of our classrooms are noisy, undisciplined, and unproductive. Where is it easier for a child to focus: in a classroom where others are continually distrubing the learning environment or in a room by yourself where you have nothing else going on but “learning?”
This is not a “ha, THIS is the answer” type of conclusion. The biggest complaint employers have today about the young people that they hire is that they lack the interpersonal skills - the LIFESKILLS — they need to succeed in business. That means social interaction, communication skills, etc. Online classes will NOT be able to teach that or expose kids to the real world.
Our kids are already spending too much time watching TV, playing videos, networking and surfing the ‘net. While tech is a good thing, it is NOT the only thing and it’s serving to decrease their interpersonal skills. Just like the current “Kindle in Every Backpack” moment the DLC is pushing, you can’t — and shouldn’t — turn everything into a tech problem. There’s more to education than just merely academics. We shouldn’t lose sight of that as we look to better ways to deliver that education to our youth.
— CorinneGregory
75. August 20, 2009
5:16 pm
Link
From a social constructivist point of view, I have problems with a curriculum based entirely on Internet instruction. Students benefit from constructing their own meaning from the world with guidance from instructors and collaboration with peers. While collaboration is somewhat possible with chat rooms, the venue is more artificial than sitting side by side with another student and working through a math problem or science experiment using hands-on materials.
Many online courses that I have seen isolate the student and compel him or her to work alone. The primary mode of delivering instruction is telling basic knowledge which requires lower level thinking skills and may develop procedural knowledge rather than conceptual understanding.
On a positive note, Internet instruction allows access to the incredible wealth of online information in a lively and interesting display. A motivated student can extend his/her learning on a particular topic beyond what is available in a typical classroom. Certainly the benefits of individualizing instruction and the vastness of content available will lead to more Internet instruction both in an out of the classroom.
A combination of classroom and Internet instruction may be appropriate in the future. Consideration needs to be given to the age and maturity of the students. Younger children probably need more classroom time and older children and adults may require less face to face time.
I
— Susan Whited
From 76 to 100 of 108 Comments
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76. August 20, 2009
5:23 pm
Link
The only trouble with “virtual.,” “asynchronous” learning is the issue of student questioning — and listening to other students ask questions simultaneously (in real time).
This Q&A, Call-and-Response style is the way some of us (dinosaurs, Digital Immigrants) learn best. It is the one major drawback to on-line education, as I see it.
Sincerely,
— Gus Patukas
77. August 20, 2009
5:37 pm
Link
The headline of the article is deceptive. From what I’ve been shown here, this study was no experiment, so no cause/effect conclusion can be made. It’s possible that there’s a difference in the kind of person who takes an online class and one who takes a brick-and-mortar one.
That said, I think there is real value in online education. As a math teacher myself, I’m sure there are many aspects to our curriculum that could be taught via computers just as if not more effectively than through my organization of activities, lecture, and discussion.
I think where online work is best is in facts and skills. Where in-person work is best is in the transformation of one’s approach to the material. An online course, even with moderated discussion, is not as fruitful in developing a statistician’s approach to data.
But I don’t have an experiment to back this up.
All this said, I worry that too much online learning will further erode our species’ ability to listen and pay attention to others for any length of time. Soon we’ll be texting each other from 5 feet away, “How you doin’?” No matter the educational efficiency, in-person contact has benefits all its own.
— David Ellinger
78. August 20, 2009
6:40 pm
Link
Many young people, while “wired” with i-pods and cell phones and laptops, seem to lack basic social skills and responsiveness to other people in person. And not just young people. There’s a diminishment of courtesy and kindness in general; but it’s more pronounced in the young, who at times seem literally blind to those around them.
While it would be an oversimplificaiton to lay this failure of social-skill teaching completely on screen-based technologies, I believe that the isolation involved in them, and a concurrent temptation to solipcism are certainly one cause of the problem.
If we teach young people facts and processes of fact-acquisition and leave out the warmth and mutual contact of human interaction, we will lose a vital part of real education for life.
— jb, ok
79. August 20, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
One other point: The technological revolution that was touted as a means to greatly increase students’ learning and skills has not so far produced students who have superior skills in knowledge, communication, or analysis. As a teacher of over twenty years, I have seen a general decline in vocabulary, awareness of facts, and critical thinking, instead.
The answer may not lie in more technology, but in parents and teachers who personally instill a love of learning–by loving learning themselves, right in front of the young.
— jb, ok
80. August 20, 2009
8:04 pm
Link
How do we know that what is being measured is a change in the over all environment in which the students live? How do we know that we are seeing improvements that fail to take in the possibility of a sinking baseline for what constitutes learning? What I’m driving at is that the period in which the studies covered is against the backdrop of a growing dependency on wired communication. Trying to reach students today with blackboards and face-to-face group discussions may be hampered by such students’ lack of situational awareness outside a digital context. Do we know that traditional learning is actually less effective or simply that it is easier not to swim against the current in today’s environment?
— Anthony Davis
81. August 20, 2009
8:26 pm
Link
I do not trust the study. There are numerous reasons why people take online courses, and these, not the online courses, could be the cause for the statistical difference. The people who take online courses are generally the people who are more interested in learning. Online courses are often voluntary whereas school is required for everyone. The kids who do not care about school or learning are unlikely to bother taking an online course. The people who want to learn will generally do better on tests, and are more likely to attempt extra, learning.
— Eliot
82. August 20, 2009
8:49 pm
Link
I work for the online campus at a career college in Kansas City, MO called Pinnacle Career Institute. What I have come to find, is that most of our students are people who have tried traditional college and it didn’t work out; never tried college and would like to; and or people who financially never could, but now that they work….can. Our students are in online classrooms and can in fact share with each other and talk and message back and forth. They post pictures of themselves and they can and do learn together. We have an online graduation where friends and family all over the world can log on to see their diploma and a personalized message written by them regarding their graduation. These students do in fact make friends and build relationships all online. In these types of classrooms the student is much more in control of their pace of learning wether that be faster or slower then the average student. At our school, we have seen enormous growth and expect to see even more expansion over the next few years. To me, it does not really matter which is a better education online or classroom, what matters is that there are different options for different people and that some doors may be open with online learning for someone that wouldn’t otherwise have the means to receive a higher education.
— Valerie Kindall
83. August 20, 2009
10:13 pm
Link
I have been taking online courses for a long time, and I’ve tried them at about six or seven universities. I absolutely do not agree that online education beats traditional classroom.
One thing, very often the curriculum doesn’t cover as much stuff. When I took business law online at UT,they only covered like ten chapters, when I know the on-campus course covered more. Same for my business writing course at another U.
Second: the grading is a LOT easier. I’m amazed how I manage to get A after A even though in business law, I never got an A in an assignment or exam. Reason: it was curved.
Yes, there’re many motivated students who can learn on their own, and they take online courses for that reason. But I know many of my online classmates took online courses just to get the course requirement over with asap.
Just to show you how easy it is to cheat online : look at this online academic fraud story:
‘Gross academic fraud’ at UTB-TSC rocked Office of Distance Education
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/articles/online-100590-utb-employees.html
— PLan
84. August 20, 2009
11:32 pm
Link
“Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.”
To conclude that “on line learning beats the classroom”, presumably for all students, based on a study weighted thusly is to assume that children learn the same way as adults and have the same motivations, desires, and ability to attend. They don’t.
Television was measured as an instructional media after WW II and also found to be more effective than classroom instruction - until the novelty wore off.
— Tom Hill
85. August 21, 2009
2:31 am
Link
This article does not mention the question of grading leniency which could easily account for the 9 point difference. in my college experience, most students take online classes between semesters where a 4 month session is condensed into 5 weeks or so. i was told flat-out by a professor during a winter intersession class that he will not assign any time consuming projects that also need to be graded because there simply isn’t enough time.
i had a horrible experience with a 300 level online history class where the professor expected everyone to do all of the work in that 5 week time frame. after the first week several students realized that it would be impossible to do the assigned reading so we asked about that fact. the professor told us she wouldn’t hold us to the dates but neglected to mention that the final day of class was non-negotiable. the system locked me out at midnight on the last friday and then she refused to acknowledge her statement about the dates - i offered to email all of my work to her in word documents and she didn’t even reply to me. my impression was that she simply didn’t feel like being a teacher since she didn’t have to look me in the eye. she got paid the same either way and technically wasn’t breaking any rules.
i can see that professors might make the classes more lenient once they become experienced with the time frames. the intersession professor that i had in a real classroom cut down the workload by a large amount.
how does that factor into the statistic?
— jake
86. August 21, 2009
7:33 am
Link
Hmmmm…. I’m skeptical. Granted I’m a 20+ year veteran high school teacher, so may be biased, but I’m also the tech-coordinator and a Google Certified Teacher, so I’m convinced of the power of technology to transform education. And it needs transformation. I’m just not sure an online environment is the panacea, especially for teens who thrive on social interaction.
Students in online courses already tend to be intrinsically motivated. Moreover, as the study focused predominantly higher education, the more non-academically oriented students were already removed from the equation.
I developed an online component for my film studies class last semester–all handouts were online, I posted videos to the site for students to watch, along with an online discussion group. Kids–juniors and seniors–whined constantly. “Can’t you just email it to us?” “Why can’t we just write and turn it in?”
There’s a conventional wisdom myth out there that this is the tech savvy generation. Not so. This is the social networking generation, but they’re clueless about how to use technology in a thoughtful, academic way.
It would be interested to see a similar study that focused solely on K-12 education.
— Jeri Hurd
87. August 21, 2009
7:51 am
Link
I have a 15 year old grandaughter who just finished High School and is presently at ABAC , a local community college. She is taking 16 credit hours this semiester and loving it. She was homeschooled in the 7th and 8th grade and then enrolled in the Ashworth University High School distance learning program. She did not have to deal with all the problems of a public school and could learn at ther own pace. I taught in the public school system for 18 years but I would recommend this type learning to anyone that wanted to succed. Thank you.
— Lutrelle Greene
88. August 21, 2009
9:21 am
Link
Here is an article about long-term research on Online instruction. The actual study is at http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf
— June Rosenberg
89. August 21, 2009
12:40 pm
Link
I agree with the apples and oranges comment. As a lifelong educator, I would submit that the goals of online education and the goals of face-to-face education often overlap, but they are essentially not the same. The populations cited as learning “more” online are indeed populations whose goals more closely align with what online courses have to offer.
The question that we who grew up without online learning need to answer concerning those who are growing up possibly overexposed to it is this: what are they missing? In general, today’s K-12 students spend an inordinate amount of time living and learning in a virtual world. I feel sorry for them, and I think we owe them more than that.
— Jill Thorne
90. August 21, 2009
4:40 pm
Link
As an online instructor, I have two comments:
1. I was forced to pay a lot more attention to pedagogy - how would I convey this information, invite the student to learn, maintain the student’s attention - than I had in recent years, when I began constructing online courses. This also helped improve my face-to-face teaching, but I think my online courses are better done.
2. Online college students don’t last long enough in an online course to get a grade if they are unprepared in reading, writing, and computer skills, or if they lack motivation and self-discipline to complete the coursework. The bottom of the grade distribution usually drops the course in an online class.
— Carol
91. August 21, 2009
6:41 pm
Link
My online students may have in fact learned three times as much as in a regular classroom, but they have put in three times as much effort in the first place! If I dedicated as much time to teaching face to face as I do to teaching online, I’d simply be doing not much else but teaching twenty students for the duration of that one class. No one wants to talk about how labor-intensive online teaching can be. It’s a matter of both the student’s and the teacher’s motivation, self-selection, independent (and collaborative) thinking abilities and creativity, and dedication to the topic at hand. However, as much as I have succeeded in both teaching and learning online, I would NEVER want a student in social work to sit in his or her high-end suburban home to wonderfully learn all there is to know about life in the Projects without having ever set foot into the lives of their future caseload. Unless online learning is combined with real-life empathy and experience with the full engagement of all “real” senses we are in great danger unless we are preparing the student for a simulated isolated and fully sanitized and controlled life in a space capsule heading for Mars. As well, that self-selection leaves out of our studies all the students who drop out because they don’t have the discipline and initial knowledge to cope with the issues always apparent in a learning environment.
— Dineh Davis
92. August 22, 2009
1:34 am
Link
“on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.”
Modest?
I could be wrong, but doesn’t that mean about EIGHTEEN PERCENT BETTER? In many schools, that’s the difference between an A and a C.
— Smadaf
93. August 22, 2009
10:52 am
Link
We sell an online business collaboration tool and while we don’t actively market to schools we were surprised to find how many have incorporated our product into their teaching techniques. The most innovative are not just broadcasting the instructor to a passive audience but engaging the students with individualized live and recorded audio, video and graphics. A good example is Paso a Paso, which employs instructors in Argentina to teach Spanish to people in Japan. Using video the students can see hand gestures and facial expressions better than they could from the back of a classroom, the teacher can correct pronunciation, and a rich set of visual materials at appropriate places in the lesson.
http://vsee.com/blog/?p=223
— Christopher Herot
94. August 22, 2009
2:25 pm
Link
Yes, it seems like the “traditional” classroom model actually deprives our now wired students of their connectedness. As more and more students have the internet on hand held devices, does it make sense for teachers to force them disconnect and listen to us, or can we find better ways to blend the world our students live in with what we’re doing in the classroom? I think we can and we have to.
http://howtobeateacher.blogspot.com/
— Rob Ross
95. August 22, 2009
8:50 pm
Link
“Driving to class after work to listen to a bored adjunct for 90 minutes, then driving home is a waste of time.” I agree.
17 years ago I went back to the University of South Florida with the idea of taking some pre-med classes.
I drove an hour and sat through a week of listening to a grad student from India attempt to teach a subject in English, his thick nearly unintelligible Hindi accent impeding most of the learning on my part.
One lecture had 200+ students, again not an ideal learning situation.
Still another class was taught by an American female grad student who used the captive audience to try out her wannabe comic routine. She said we were a tough room. Then I drove another hour to get home.
Nearly a decade later I picked up a degree in computer network engineering, taught mostly by teachers reading PowerPoint slides and on the computer learning in week long cram sessions. This was before similar material was available on the internet.
With the exception of classes taught by one outstanding technical math and digital electronics instructor, I could have done most of the work by myself when I am less distracted.
This happens to be around 2:00 am, but the info was not available at that time. In fact, you could not even get into the computer lab except during limited daytime hours. Apparently they were worried about someone stealing the expensive ram chips.
I listened to the in class programming lectures but had difficulty keeping my focus. This time the instructor passed around a bag of candy and just bullshitted about everything but programming during that evening class. So a month into the class I switched to another campus with a more serious teacher and basically started over.
Finally I found a solution. Just listen in class, don’t take notes. At home, late at night or early in the morning, get an overview of the problem while sitting at the computer. Go to the couch, lay down and formulate a solution in my head. Go back to the computer and fill out the answer as required.
I still think my best thinking is done lying on my back with my eyes shut.
— Larry Vaughn
96. August 23, 2009
12:02 am
Link
Could it be that students are scoring higher on easier tests? Nope that is just crazy talk. The online courses and face-to-face courses give the same tests right? Nope.
Also, where are students more likely to engage in academic dishonesty: in front of a teacher or in front of a computer screen? Yep, you know the answer.
— Brandon
97. August 23, 2009
12:56 pm
Link
Online learning is streamline and is specific for a determined, motivative learner. I agree with several comments provided: It is self selected; It is convenient; an abundance of resources via media is always available; lastly, I believe that in order for an online student to be “truly” successful (able to apply the learning to real-life), the student needs to be self-disciplined and focused on their goals (whatever they are). Though that may sound like a description for any traditional learner, it’s really not!
Online learning fit the lifestyle of a “mature” learner and adult. A learner who has experienced enough life to sacrafice the traditional “social circle;” and, someone who knows exactly what they need to advance to the next level for their life or career, but find it too challenging due to work, family, or other time consuming events. Perhaps, k-12 students are not truly ready to sacrafice their youth and social interaction for that experience. K-12 students still have a lot to learn from each other, which will eventually help them to develop who they will become as an adult. That said, because education is the process of learning, it’s probably a good thing to introduce, and initiate k-12 students to this phenomenon now (an online class every semester), to prepare them for when their lives (eventually) become consumed with adult or “mature” life.
cdw
— Chris Washington
98. August 23, 2009
4:22 pm
Link
The journalist who wrote this article should have done better homework. Reading the review essay, a half-dozen of the studies referred to in the review essay, and the abstracts for twenty-some more of the studies, I see that the SRI authors do not sustain their early division between purely online and blended learning. According to the SRI review essay itself, purely online courses remain statistically no better than face-to-face courses; however, blended learning courses, which enhance face-to-face instruction with online elements, are statistically somewhat better than purely face-to-face courses.
Other features of the review essay need to be
pointed out. First, the advantages of online learning were clearer among students in technical fields who were studying to pass examinations as part of technical training; the SRI authors even point out that one such advantage was that students got to take and retake examinations in most of the studies they cited.
Second, the advantages of online learning were clearest when the online learning provided a diversion (in the sense of divergence rather than distraction) from face-to-face instruction; for example, clear advantages were shown in the many studies that tested the use of online tutorials for a single unit in an otherwise face-to-face course, using the rest of the face-to-face course as the control. Such diversions–that is, those that break a routine for students and of which students are aware–can be explained in part by the Hawthorne effect, as one of the authors of a study summarized in the SRI study pointed out.
Third, in some of the studies summarized by the SRI review essay, investigators broke the course or module into separate elements. For example, in one study, nursing students who took online tutorials in a respiratory assistance module, with the opportunity for taking and retaking practice exams, did better on a standard exam than face-to-face students who had no practice exams; however, there was no difference between groups in the practical work of inserting a temporary, artificial airway.
Finally, SRI International is not a disinterested researcher in matters of online instruction. It was founded to advance technological innovations; furthermore, although SRI itself is a non-profit entity for tax purposes, it has continuing financial relationships with its many for-profit subsidiaries, all of which are technology companies. How does a non-profit have a for-profit subsidiary, such as the Sarnoff Corporation? Maybe a tax lawyer can explain that one. The journalist sure didn’t.
— Kevin
99. August 24, 2009
1:10 am
Link
I’m actively taking online courses and find this type of learning more productive than my classroom experience for many courses. However, I see advantages to face-to-face education when lab work is a critical part of the course (chemistry, etc).
Another factor lacking from online education is the face to face social experience. My BS and MS were completed in face to face classrooms. The face to face networking adds a difficult to measure factor. The old saying is true, it isn’t always what you know, but who you know. I’m not sold that remote, online “friends” are equal to people you went out having a happy with after a rough exam.
However, as an adult learner with a family and a great career, I can’t beat the online system. I feel that I learn more because I can pause lectures when I am having trouble comprehending a topic in a lecture and use Google to quickly find supporting information and get a grasp on the topic before moving forward. In my undergrad and masters programs I would write down topics I didn’t fully understand, but I rarely went back to study them.
Overall, my personal view is that online is a good alternative/supplement for masters and some doctorate degrees. But, the experiences of post-high school college is much more than simply learning.
— Jason
100. August 24, 2009
11:46 am
Link
A good deal of the importance of traditional education is not about the rote memorization of facts, or absorbing and being able to repeat knowledge. Critical thinking and interaction with peers is a vital social skill which is learned in a classroom setting over time.
With the growing rates of children with autism, asperger’s, and other socially limiting conditions, I have to wonder how much might be attributed to a lack of early creative play, and a growing focus on non-creative, goal based education.
A child’s brain does not work like an adult’s. Education ought to reflect this fact.
— Molly Malone
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From 101 to 108 of 108 Comments
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101. August 24, 2009
3:04 pm
Link
It’s alarming and depressing how many commenters in this thread are totally unaware of what constitutes great online education–and how much it has changed (for the better) with the advent of online social media tools.
These folks need to do some serious online research. Posting uninformed opinions based on personal assumptions (and even personal experience in teaching online without creating extensive interactivity) is…not cool.
— Liz Dorland
102. August 24, 2009
3:26 pm
Link
I think it is great that people can learn online in the comfort of their homes. I believe many people learn better because of lack of distractions such as class clowns etc. Being in a room full of other students may be intimidating to the person afraid of asking a “dumb” question.
I also see a problem. The problem would be for those who cannot afford a computer. There are alot of people that will not be able to take advantage of online courses. Online course only work for those who can log on and those that can afford them.
— O
103. August 24, 2009
3:29 pm
Link
My son took four online courses this summer while home from college working in an internship. The classes were a joke! The testing was even a bigger farce. I was amazed a person could get an entire degree with nothing but this level of online instruction and testing.
— Chuck
104. August 24, 2009
4:13 pm
Link
— sara wrote
“I’m very disturbed by Hetty Greene’s comment. Wikipedia may provide answers, but a college education is designed to help people ask questions and to analyze. The internet is a wonderful tool, but it does not teach analytical or critical thinking.”
Thank goodness you’re not teaching my children You clearly missed the point of Hetty Greene’s comment. Her mentioning Wikipedia was not as on-line education, but rather that it is NOT solely for profit as the content provided is contributed by users free of charge. She contends much of college on-line learning is driven by profit, NOT educational reasons.
— Robert
105. August 24, 2009
4:19 pm
Link
Amidst the debate of the finer points of the meta-analysis and anecdotal evidence supporting/against online education, I offer this as a way of critically assessing headlines like “…online education beats…”:
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
— student
106. August 24, 2009
8:14 pm
Link
Duh…
— Dr. Michael K. Clifford
107. August 25, 2009
5:43 am
Link
Many people who take online courses are already mature adults. They are motivated and already bring a lot of life experience to the course. I totally agree with JS17 that a great deal of education and learning comes outside the classroom at a college and inside the classroom while interacting with other students and professors. To have a junior high student staying at home and not developing social skills scares me. Fitting into society and having social skills is a huge part of future employment.
— lindyf
108. August 25, 2009
10:31 am
Link
If the quantitative measures of effectiveness were themselves taken online (or on a computer), as I suspect, then the study is flawed because online learning will translate to better online test results. I couldn’t gather from the article whether the testing was computer-based or not.
— duh
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