Several recent letters from Canada were in this list, some making negative
comments about my views I criticized the courses currently available on the
internet. I do not think there is much of value there, and I know of very
little competent research that thinks otherwise.
I see the following problems with current internet courses.
1. They are mostly imitations of courses based on lectures or
video, so they suffer from the same problems as the older courses.
2. These courses are primarily passive, with large chunks of video
or text. So there is little interaction.
3. There is little adaptation to the needs of the students, or
attempts to find the learning problems of each individual student. This is
critical for effective learning and possible today.
4. Many students do not learn with such courses.
5. They tend to allow the student to jump frequently, in the sense
of hypertext. Research with the Brown hypertext courses and with the IBM
products - Illuminated Manuscripts and Columbus - shows that the student
choices are mostly random.
6. Most of the testing in such material is multiple choice. This is
an inferior testing method, as skill in answering multiple choice questions
can be learned so that students can do well with no knowledge of the subject
area. I had some interesting experience here in working with ETS on GRE
physics. An article today by Lisa McNeil tells of her experience in passing
a hepatitis exam intended for the continuing education of doctors while
knowing nothing about the subject area.
Multiple cholce is the work of the devil, unsuitable for humans!
7. There is little well done evaluation of these courses.
8. The Internet itself has many problems. NSF is currently
investigating what should be done.
9. Learning in the US (and Canada?) is not improving with these
available courses.
We know today how to overcome all these learning problems, and produce very
effective courses on networks. The problem is that many current developers
do not understand how to produce better learning units.
Alfred Bork
University of California, Irvine
Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science
_______________________________________________
DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list
[email protected]
http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide
To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE
in the body of the message.
