Online learning tools and techniques—including fully online courses, blended learning, mobile learning, game-based learning, and social networking—are some of the newest and rowdiest children in the family of higher-education resources. They hold the promise of expanding, improving, and deepening learning for our students. A quick exploration of Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, or the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education’s National Repository of Online Courses, or Florida Virtual School’s Conspiracy Code (a history course in a game) gives you sense of what’s possible and what’s coming.
IN THE RIGHT COLUMN: More on Online Learning
BROWSE THE FULL ISSUE: News, Commentary, and Data
BUY A COPY: Digital and Print Editions at the Chronicle Store
However, too many innovators brag at length about the bells and whistles of their tech-savvy children. They wax poetic about their exciting features and ever-growing functions that may or may not have anything to do with student achievement. Moreover, in the quest to increase credibility, some advocates for online learning argue that technology-enabled learning is vastly superior to traditional chalk-and-talk methods. Some of the more vocal zealots regularly lambast all lectures and mock any required face time as anachronistic. In their minds, these are vestiges of a failed system. In response, traditionalists scold the newcomers, reject their innovations, and pine for a simpler time.
So the family feud continues, each side shrieking that the other is sucking resources and has little proof of quality. The irony is that, in some ways, both are right. And with the financial challenges at hand, coming demographic changes, and education aspirations of the day, both are necessary, but neither is sufficient.
It’s time we move beyond these dichotomous diatribes to a more nuanced exploration of how we can apply the entire family of tools, techniques, and resources at our disposal to help our students learn deeply, become active citizens, and complete their educational journeys with a credential in hand. It’s time to put online-learning conversations in a larger context of learning resources and, more importantly, help them stay on purpose.
Let me offer a few of the most powerful possible purposes. Only about half the students who begin higher education finish. The number is less than one-fourth when you look at low-income students, and slips far lower if you include first-generation students. Our country has dropped from first in educational attainment to 12th, and we’re on target to turn out a generation that is less educated that the one that proceeded it. Even more challenging is that the types of students who are least likely to succeed—low-income, minority, part-time, and adult learners—represent the fastest-growing segment of higher education. The headline: traditional methods aimed at traditional students won’t work.
Given these challenges, we should be innovating with all our might and using any resource at our disposal to help all students succeed. Online-learning resources should be a powerful part of this work, especially in the following areas:
Plugging the loss points. Take a hard look at the data on student pathways through higher education, and you can’t help but notice the key loss points—places where huge numbers of students stumble and fall off the path to a certificate or degree. While rushed or sloppy application of online learning to these loss points could actually make the situation worse, the thoughtful use of online tools holds the potential to be a major difference maker.
Remedial education, for example, is the Bermuda Triangle of higher education. Students who are shuffled off into a sequence of such courses are most likely never to be seen again. However, with more nuanced assessments that better discern remediation needs, these students can catch up more quickly using an interactive blend of online-learning tools (often used in on-campus labs) and on-ground tutoring support. El Paso Community College has had success with its early pilots of this model—based on Virginia Tech’s Math Emporium, which leverages self-paced digital courseware in a lab environment staffed with tutors and support staff—and is expanding it to all of its campuses.
Technology can be applied with purpose beyond developmental education. Ask any community-college or university leaders where students fall off the path, and they will point you to the same set of core courses that wipe out huge numbers of students each year. The failure rates of these gatekeeper courses used to be a badge of honor for some, but now these data are viewed as lost opportunities, wasted dollars, and deferred dreams, all the result of a Darwinian attempt to assure quality.
Course-redesign efforts such as those led by the National Center for Academic Transformation have helped colleges and universities re-engineer these courses with significant success. The redesigns, which make strategic use of online resources, most often in a blended format, lead to significantly improved student achievement and reduced costs. In an attempt to outfit other colleges with improved resources to respond to this same challenge, the first wave of a $20-million national grant program called the Next Generation Learning Challenges was just released by Educause. This program is asking colleges and consortia to innovate with online courseware and blended learning models specifically for these gatekeeper courses.
Finally, “life happens” is still the most often reported challenge for working, part-time, and returning students. Kids get sick, parents fall ill, work schedules change, jobs get lost, cars break down—and learning takes a back seat. Leaders at Corporate Voices for Working Families, a nonprofit group that is doing significant work catalyzing the conversation between education and employers about supporting working students, find that simply adding an online section or even a blended component to a course can significantly increase the likelihood that a working student or parent will not only attend but succeed.
Increasing academic momentum. In addition to plugging loss, we should focus on increasing academic momentum. Purdue University’s Signals project shows the power of analyzing data gathered from student use of Purdue’s online-learning-management system to keep students working in gatekeeper courses like chemistry. Simply giving up-to-the-minute, predictive-model-based feedback in the form of traffic lights—red, yellow, and green—lets students know how they’re doing along the way and helps them succeed at significantly higher rates. In an age where students are used to getting immediate feedback on performance through video games, it’s not surprising that this kind of resource works.
In a related but broader effort, Valencia Community College created an online student-service support system called Atlas that builds momentum for the student from first contact through completion. Students fill out a full profile and degree plan in a first-semester course devoted to student success, which helps them develop their “Life Map” through to a degree. From that point on, Atlas/Life Map is their virtual connection to the college and pathway to their academic goal. A part of a larger group of reforms, this type of strategy has contributed to Valencia’s graduation rate being almost triple that of its peer institutions.
Western Governors University uses this type of holistic pathway support with its faculty-mentor strategy. The university’s faculty members—who are mostly full time and online—focus almost exclusively on guiding students through to success. The university champions a competency-based learning model that allows students to leverage online-learning resources and work at their own pace—completing degrees that often take 55 months in 30.
Reducing costs and increasing quality. With tools like OER Commons, Connexions, Curriki, iTunes U, Academic Earth, and MIT OpenCourseWare, we have more free education resources at our fingertips than ever before—much to the delight of cash-strapped students buying ridiculously expensive textbooks they seldom use. However, the quality development and curation of these resources is a challenge—as is their thoughtful integration into instructional practice. We’re moving from traditional text- and textbook-based curricular resource strategies to more robust “play lists” of digital resources aimed at helping students master better-defined learning goals.
As these conversations continue, I’m intrigued by the faculty who are looking to displace as much as possible online—including lectures—to ensure that precious time with students is increasingly used for questioning, mentoring, interacting, and other deeper learning activities. Moreover, others are basing their instructional design on heavily researched learning-science models, not on simple online replicas of current teaching. They are asking hard questions about what works, what doesn’t, and with which students; and harder questions about pacing, timing, and presentation strategies that maximize learning. It’s compelling work, and there is much to be learned about the effective mix of online and on-ground strategies.
We need to end the family feud over learning strategies. Particularly for low-income students, the journey to and through our institutions is the pathway to possibility. We owe it to them to steer our conversations about online learning away from the tired “use it versus don’t use it” arguments. Like the examples cited here, we need to get online learning explorations and efforts on purpose, and begin the process of envisioning a new generation of learning that leverages all the resources at hand to help all students make the most their time with us.
