Bells and Whistles Online

I had a great teacher the other day, Dr. Z. He was one of the better instructors I've had in an online class. I think that his practice and abilities at becoming a great online facilitator have been honed over those 15 years to a point he's a master at the forum. Of all my classes he has been the first to use Canvas and all of its tools to its maximum potential. 

As Cox states in our reading on Learning Style Students Attitudes Toward the Use of Technology in Higher Education and Adult Education Classes, "the new axiom in the world of technology-enhanced learning is that teachers must allow content to drive technology and should be cautious not to let technology drive the content" (2008, p. 6).  But this also goes back to the discussion we had the other day about great teachers being able to overcome poor curricula, or great curricula being able to elevate mediocre teachers. I think the same can be said with technology and online classrooms.

The ultimate solution isn't bells and whistles alone, but I think about the changes in telephone technology just in the past twenty years and look forward to the same changes to online classrooms in the future. The phone has not changed much in terms of how we use it in the past 20 years. Whether it’s a flip phone an iPhone or an old-style payphone you put the receiver to your ear and you talk. But the iPhone provides many more tangential benefits to the user than the old-style payphone ever did. That’s the change I look forward to seeing in the online classroom environment.

Right now, as I mentioned before, we are working on a VR style exercise where we were putting the VR user into real-world scenarios that resulted in a fatality. We are asking that learner to navigate his way through the scenario and afterward we intend to re-train him through analysis of the real-world event afterward. I like to imagine a virtual online classroom for the entire class could put on virtual reality goggles and get to watch the learner through the exercises and discuss en masse from multiple training destinations. They set up new variables around another real-world situation and ask the next learner to try his hand at the new task. 

Technology alone is not the only answer to effective online teaching, but the tangential benefits can potentially make it easier for the learner to engage and make memories, make it far more accessible to the learner and to a more diverse audience, and help less-skilled instructors up their game. 

Cox, T. D. (2008). Learning styles and students’ attitudes toward the use of technology in higher and adult education classes. Institute for Learning Styles Journal. 1(Fall). pp. 1-13.