Thoughts About Jona

Respondents to the teacher survey expressed concern that student access has became linked to demands for courses to be “serviced” seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

Consider the following. How flexible is flexible? How is it possible to capitalise on the potential offered by learning communities in practice in a context where flexibility (time, place, pacing) takes on a whole new meaning? This question is now one that is critical for the future direction of online education.

Flexible access technologies – without these I wouldn’t be able to study this Masters.

Perhaps the most critical challenge to traditional universities is develop capacity to change.

Jona “Learner choice is the touchstone of the paradigm shift that needs to take place in education and in how it is delivered.”

Natural Human Learning
• Natural learning is goal-directed -
• Natural learning is driven by expectation failure – enable risk taking
• Finally, natural learning is case-based – enable personal experience

What does this mean for the future. I think that the future holds a blended approach for schools in the the contact time will be shorter and firmly focussed on action, drama and sport activities.

The pillars of “The Vicarious Learner” project then are action and conversation

“Instructional methods that use a constructivist approach to teaching and learning focus on dialogue, learning partnerships, and the joint construction of knowledge. This approach is used for the design of many of the online courses at USQ”

is the level of teacher participation sustainable? Does “more” necessarily mean “better”?

“Palloff and Pratt (1999, p. 15) note that “in the online classroom, it is the relationships and interactions among people through which knowledge is primarily generated”.

Disinhibition (Suler, 2002) is one of the more frequently mentioned effects of online learning. It is sometimes described as the increased likelihood that a shy student will speak up, for example, or that students will be more forthright. – I have witnessed this myself when my students engaged in blogging. The shy students were more able to participate given that they could spend more time cultivating their responses and not have to engage F2F.

A major difference between F2F and online is - Operating in the online environment means that bodily differences and social values attached to visible differences are invisible and irrelevant - teachers and learners online construct themselves through text in the discussion forums, for example (distinctions of gender, ethnicity, body shape or impairment, accent or speech styles ‘don’t matter’ – visual cues of difference are missing) and the challenge is to know more about online sociality and the ‘special circumstances’ of learners.

USQ Approach

Intelligent tutoring systems – look this up!

The fifth generation of distance education is essentially a derivation of the fourth generation, which aims to capitalize on the features of the Internet and the Web.

How does it work? In the USQ approach, many teaching staff makes use of discussion groups, which entail students posting “reflections” via the asynchronous CMC system. The teaching staff also post comments, which are aimed at engendering student engagement and ensuring that the focus and depth of the online threaded discussions are appropriate to achieve the learning outcomes.

Results

I got back my results. This is the worst mark that I have ever had. I feel like such a failure! To think that I had hoped to get all HD in this Masters! That's not going to happen now!