Want to learn better? Crack open your laptop (and ditch the classroom)

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  1

  MichP

  08/20/09 | Report as spam

  Self-Selecting Participants

  Why were those students online? Because they wanted to be? That would be a stronger argument for better engagement. Continuing education students are most likely adults taking courses they need and find relevant.
  
  Customization is fine if you can finish the class whenever you want. But schools run on schedules. To pass the class, you need to get through every objective. If you spend twice as much time on one topic, you've now got less time to get through the others.

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  ioot@...

  08/21/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Want to learn better? Crack open your laptop (and ditch the classroom)

  SRI International is a world renowned research organization. If you are guessing that the main reason for the success of online learning is "self selection", I suspect you didn't read the research article. It cited a wide variety of research, including "experimental research". For research to be experimental means that the subjects were randomly assigned, not self-selected.
  
  On the other hand, the results are not as strong for online learning as the author of the blog indicated. The headline is a bit overblown, since the conclusion was that online learning is only modestly better than classroom learning. And in fact, the best kind of learning was found to be "blended learning", meaning that the class is both in-person and online.
  
  Online learning has the benefit of fitting around a schedule, while in-person . To find that a blend of these two is better than either alone implies that there may be some kind of synergetic relationship.
  
  One clear thing that this research shows is that even by disseminating the research, the results aren't understood clearly. It seems that even the writer of the article wasn't clear on the results, which may be summarized as the following:
  
  "In recent experimental and quasi-experimental studies contrasting blends of online and face-to-face instruction with conventional face-to-face classes, blended instruction has been more effective, providing a rationale for the effort required to design and implement blended approaches. Even when used by itself, online learning appears to offer a modest advantage over conventional classroom instruction." From page xvii, http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

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  3

  ioot@...

  08/21/09 | Report as spam

  RE: Want to learn better? Crack open your laptop (and ditch the classroom)

  The second point I might mention is that the report found that there were just not enough studies for K-12 to do a meta-analysis. As a result, this report only covered college to adult learning. It didn't have much to say about kids and distance learning, probably because there's not much possibility of randomly assigning children to participate in online learning instead of going to school.