[SUMMER SHORTS THEME MUSIC]
KIERAN 00:04
Welcome to Wired Ivy, Summer Shorts!
The new academic year seems like an opportune time to ask… are online, asynchronous, and hybrid strange new teaching strategies, or are we simply using new terminology to describe familiar techniques?
[SUMMER SHORTS STING]
00:25
My first exposure to online learning was as a graduate student.
Up to that point, from kindergarten through undergrad, I’d had all the usual brick-and-mortar classroom experiences public education in the U.S. offers. I wasn’t intimidated by the technology aspect of learning at a distance but, even so, I thought enrolling in an online graduate course was akin to becoming a foreign exchange student. I expected to be a stranger in the strange land of virtual classrooms.
00:54
What I experienced instead was a profound and repetitive sense of deja vu.
Learning at a distance didn’t feel all that different to me from learning on campus. The structure of class content delivery and graded assignments was curiously familiar -- same old lectures, readings, homework, papers, and exams.
01:12
I’ll grant that when attending my online classes I didn’t claim a desk in a particular room in a specific building. I wasn’t in the same physical space, yet at the scheduled time on the appointed days, I was accessing the live components of the course. The only difference was that I used my laptop to tune into a live broadcast of the lecture, or scroll through a PowerPoint deck while listening to the instructor via conference call, or to join a first-generation video conference on Skype. But no one who saw my notes after class would have been able to tell where I was when I wrote them.
01:45
Well, duh! That’s because the channel is not the content, or the catalyst. Classrooms, whether on a campus or in the cloud, are just a venue for communicating information. What and how we teach is far more important than where.
And by the same token, just as we don’t want to eat green beans because we have a can opener, we don’t want to learn because we have computers… can openers and computers are just tools that help us to satisfy a hunger.
02:13
Pre-recorded content wasn’t a revelation to me as a new online learner. At various points in K-12, I’d learned from taped shows aired on public television, from educational filmstrips with 45 rpm records providing the soundtrack, from 35mm film winding its way through movie projectors, and from cartridges shoved into VHS players.
02:35
Of course, all of this content was presented in the classroom, in real time, but a student who happened to be out that day, for whatever reason, could request time to see that content later, at recess or during study hall or after school. That wasn’t an option for content presented aloud by the teacher.
02:52
And by the time I started grad school, pre-recorded content could be downloaded and watched on a personal computer. That meant I could review anything I didn’t understand the first time through, as often as I needed. This on-demand access to lectures is one key reason student learning outcomes for online courses tend to be higher than for in-person delivery, according to multiple longitudinal studies.
03:14
Don’t make the mistake, though, of thinking that on-demand course content wasn’t available before the development of VHS, CDs, DVDs, and the Internet. It’s always been a fundamental component of education. That’s a bold statement, I know, but I can back it up with a single example.
03:31
You call it a textbook. I call it the original asynchronous learning technology.
03:36
For thousands of years we’ve been using books to learn when we choose, wherever we are. After all, regardless of the media -- words printed on paper or pixels on a screen -- written language is a simple but powerful way to transmit information, documented by a specific person, from a specific place, at a specific time, to anyone, anywhere, anytime hence.
03:59
And while I’m at it, let me point out something I realized once I had a few online courses under my belt… so-called in-person classes have always been hybrid.
04:09
In addition to real-time lectures, labs, seminars, and studios, students are assigned readings and homework to be completed outside of the formal class meeting time, asynchronously. Why? Because educators know that simply listening to someone and taking notes isn’t enough to ensure good learning outcomes.
04:27
Think 100% asynchronous courses are a contemporary addition to higher ed curricula? Wrong again.
04:33
When distance education was introduced in the 1800s, all courses were taught asynchronously, by necessity, because the only feasible communication channel was the post office. As radios became a common feature in homes, educators switched to synchronously broadcasting lessons over the airwaves. Live television added visuals to the mix, and the introduction of inexpensive recording media allowed learners to choose between real-time and on-time delivery. More recently the Internet has made on-demand learning easier, faster, and cheaper than ever before.
05:06
Bottom line? Terms like synchronous and asynchronous, hybrid and blended, online and virtual may look like uncharted territories to some folks in the ivory tower, but to my eyes they’re just a fresh coat of paint that makes everything old new again.
[SUMMER SHORTS STING]
05:25
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[SUMMER SHORTS OUTRO MUSIC]