K-12 Students and Online Courses
Let’s see if we can spur a discussion (alternate heading - making things more complicated than they need to be).
As we read and thought about the studies intended to present current descriptive statistics on the prevalence of online courses, it seemed that the process revealed some interesting assumptions about how we all understand the processes of teaching and learning. At first, it might seem that the difference between an online and a face to face course would be obvious. The challenge begins when drafting definitions or attempting to frame survey items so that others can categorize courses familiar to them. Survey items are also subject to the interpretation of each respondent. So, to continue this analysis, if you are asked to classify the courses in which you are using this resource as face to face, web facilitated, blended, or online, how would you respond? We anticipate that many of you would describe your setting as face to face. Here is what we find somewhat interesting about this prediction and the assumptions we think it reveals. To make our point, we would note out that at least some of the “content” in your class must have been experienced online because you are looking at online content at this moment. Of course, this is also true for K-12 students who often make use of the Internet even though a very high proportion of K-12 classes end up classified as entirely face to face. What you and the respondents in the studies we have described are probably interpreting the survey item to mean is that students always meet with their instructor in a face to face setting. The content and learning experiences in question seem to involve that information and those experiences that are directly provided and facilitated by the instructor “during class time”. Would it be fair to suggest that when we think about education we are often thinking about the behavior of the teacher as it applies during the time when the teacher is in greatest control of student experiences? We anticipate that the learning environments of the future will be more complicated and involve more flexible ways to mix instructors, learners, locations, information sources, and times of interaction.