Jack - Of course in an ideal situation staffing levels and student
numbers should be better matched in face-to-face courses, but like I
said, the *reality* of the situation is that this is not usually the
case. I can only speak from my own, relatively long experience in
online education, but I find I have more engagement and discussion
with my online students than I am able to have in my face to face
classes. I suspect I'm doing way more hours than I'm paid for that
way, but spending a few minutes, daily and spread across a week is a
more successful strategy than trying to cram in the contact with
everyone in three hours per week. It's not that online takes less
time, it's a different kind of effort.
I think you're misunderstanding what I am saying about the mentoring/
collaborative experience of online teaching when you say it's all down
to the teacher. It is, in the end, always down to the teacher, either
way. But what is inherent in online teaching is the need to carefully
structure the process *because* it is online in ways that often don't
happen in face to face classes. The slowed-down, asynchronous nature
of the interaction makes a big difference to the kind of collaboration
and discussion that goes on and that is something inherent in online –
or, indeed, text-heavy – learning and teaching.
I'm not saying it's okay for any student to be introverted and fragile
with regards to crits. What I am saying is, in fact, that it is
possible to give a much more critical crit that you might feel
comfortable giving face-to-face. Online crits also allow for a record
of the discussion and further discussion, which sometimes doesn't
happen in a face-to-face crit. The distancing aspect of the online
environment can be really useful in helping to engage in the critical
analysis of work (and taking on that critique) from the emotions of
being given a dressing down (in which it's often possible for the
student to just concentrate on the unpleasant feeling and not take on
board the critique).
I'm also not saying that "audio-only communication, or a text-only
communication has an equal chance of being correctly interpreted as
face-to-face communication". I'm saying that online or voice-only
communication carries a great deal of emotion and inter-personal
information that is easily enough and that if you genuinely examine
your daily communication with loved ones and friends and colleagues
via these media you'll see that to be the case. Otherwise we wouldn't
even be having this discussion here.
>Again, I would never say that it can't be taught online. But I will
adamantly argue that it can't be done as effectively.
And you wouldn't be alone in that argument, just wrong.
As I mentioned before, everyone thinks their own discipline area of
expertise can't be taught online as well as other areas and it's
constantly proved not to be the case. It is different and there are
strengths and weaknesses to online and you need to play to the
strengths of it for it to be an effective learning and teaching
approach. But that's the same with any teaching modality - lectures
are good for some things (not many, actually) and tutorials or
workshops are suitable for others. Effective learning and teaching is
about choosing the right approach and structure for the situation in
hand.
>I bet a student that has participated in a studio program that
performs work for actual clients will be better prepared than one who
hasn't.
I bet that too, but that's to do with them working on client projects,
not whether they did it remotely or not.
Dave - Small groups do work for crits, that's true, but you don't need
realtime communication to build those relationships. This list, our
conversations on Twitter, etc., etc. are all good examples of that.
When you wrote "here's my thought. A person gets a masters degree
remotely. They have a diploma and a set of transcripts, but is that
masters REALLY?" I couldn't agree more, except the other way around.
Educational institutions were founded on the idea of being sources of
knowledge and information. They have, up until recently, always been a
secular priesthood of, as Charles Leadbeater put it "special places
for special people". The piece of paper you get at the end of a degree
from a university is meaningless beyond the reputation of that
institution. Like bank notes, the diploma on your wall is a promise of
something intangible, it's entirely based on reputation and the theory
is that every knows that that piece of paper means you have completed
certain activities to a certain standard. The problem is nobody
outside of that program actually knows what that is, they just believe
in the reputation. That works okay until things go awry in the faculty
or in the student body.
I guarantee that, whilst a degree from a certain uni might help
applicants get past the initial cull, nobody on this discussion list
would employ someone solely based on the paper credentials. You'll
look at their portfolio and past work (and assume them to be genuine
too) and base your decision on that plus the personality of the
person. In the end most people want to work with people that are good
to work with. So the piece of paper is worthless - it's what the
person has done that counts. Of course, ideally those two align and
what that person did for student projects adds up to a good folio, but
it's still not the paper that counts.
The point here is that the proof is in the pudding. It's irrelevant
whether that person attained their degree remotely or not. What counts
is what they achieve, what they make, how they think and manifest that
thinking, especially in the area of design, which is so much more
about tangible outcomes than grades on a marking sheet.
The problem for universities is that they are stuck in a broadcast
model - you get a group of people in front of the content at a certain
time each week. This completely limits the financials of what they can
offer and to how many people. There is no possibility for niche and
longtail education there because the economics of it don't stack up.
You have to find enough students in your town, in your university,
maybe even faculty who also have the time and interest to fill up a
course enough to pay for the staff member running it. If not, the
course gets axed.
Whilst my personal opinion is that education should have the budgets
of the military and vice versa, that's not the case. The pressure is
towards a kind of Top 20 of subjects, which is why the MBA is so rife.
That drift towards a mainstream selection of subjects has meant a
great deal of small departments with great courses and knowledge to
offer have been closed down. The net result is that every uni ends up
offering the same stuff as every other uni, just like commercial radio
stations. It's a problem because when you are trading on reputation,
as universities are, there's no differentiation any more.
The potentially great thing about offering online subjects is that you
can aggregate students from a much wider geographical area - the
world, language skills permitting. That enables you to run niche
courses and it also creates rich opportunities for cross-cultural
critiques and examination of design and creative practices and that is
what we have found in the international projects we have run.
So, think of it this way if we fast forward into the future. Would you
take someone on who has cherry picked online courses from different
universities around the world, each one taught by an eminent expert in
the field or someone who took a course at their local degree but did
it face to face with a lot of professors you've never heard of?
My guess is that the former person would be better qualified, but the
only problem with that model right now is the administration between
universities because they're stuck in that broadcast model for all
sorts of reasons. Some to do with state funding, others of their own
making.
There are enormous problems with education and, Dave, you've pointed
out the nub of it, which is the pressure just to get the credentials.
The thing that is waiting to happen - and that I'm pushing for - is
for institutions to realise that this is a (service) design problem
and that education needs to really have a designer's analysis rather
than a government auditing committee's analysis applied to it to
really think through how things could work radically differently.
State funding for education is like fossil fuels - it's always getting
less and never coming back to how it used to be in the 60s and 70s.
The only way to deal with that is to completely re-think the way we go
about it, but at the moment most of the changes are nibbling at the
edges of a way of thinking about education that dates back to the
Victorians.
If anyone is interested, I've written and spoken about this issue
quite a bit. There are some links here: http://www.polaine.com/playpen/2007/08/31/creative-collaboration-the-future-of-education/
Best,
Andy
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Andy Polaine
Research | Writing | Strategy
Interaction Concept Design
Education Futures
Twitter: apolaine
Skype: apolaine
http://playpen.polaine.com
http://www.designersreviewofbooks.com
http://www.omnium.net.au
http://www.antirom.com
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