The Dark Side of the 21st Century: Concerns About Technologies in Education
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Table of
Contents
ALN is defined as Asynchronous Learning Network(s) or Networking
The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and Sharing
Institutions, Reward Structures, and Traditions That Defy Changes in Higher Education
Concerns About the Explosion of Online Education
Concerns About Residency Living & Learning on Campus
Concerns About Impersonality and Becoming Irrevocably Orwellian
Concerns About Making ALN Learning Too Easy
Concerns About Library Services
Concerns About Academic Standards and Student Ethics
Concerns About Messaging Overload
Concerns About Faculty Efficiency and Burnout
Concerns About Misleading and Fraudulent Web Sites
Concerns About CyberPsychology
Concerns About Computer Services and Network Reliability
Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change
Concerns About Effectiveness of Learning Technologies in Large Classes
A Message from Peter Kenyon on November 18, 1999
The main navigation page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
The U.S Digital
Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
Undermines Public Access and Sharing
Powerful commercial interests and tort lawyers combined forces in engineering the DMCA legislation in the U.S that throws education and information use into a turmoil of risk and uncertainty. An article with frightening examples is provided by Georgia Harper, "Copyright Endurance and Change," Educause Review, November/December 2000, pp. 20-26. She states the following on Page 21"
Some of these changes --- licenses, access controls, certain provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) --- have the potential to drastically undermine the public right to access information, to comment on events, and even to share information with others.
Section 107 on "fair use" continues to, with increased ambiguity, provide safe harbors for use of small amounts of material, material not yet available for purchase when needed for students, and material that should be open to criticism and review without fear of reprisals in copyright infringement lawsuits. Nevertheless, the DMCA has provisions that erode Section 107. Georgia Harber states the following on Page 24:
Even though fair use is a key "stress point," there has been no change to Section 107. The stresses on fair use result from other things: technological "fixes" that control dissemination of copyrighted works; legal frameworks, established to control dissemination, that marginalize fair use; and license terms that ignore fair use as well as other public rights protected in the Copyright Act. Ultimately, I am concerned that the basic goal of copyright --- to improve our society by fostering creativity, encouraging the dissemination of information, and supporting the development of knowledge --- is endangered by the erosion of fair use in the digital environment.
Remember, fair use embodies a balance between the competing interests of owners and users, between control and access, between control and the First Amendment, and it bridges the gap between a willing seller and a willing buyer of rights to use. A diminishing role for fair use may well mean less public access and less ability to speak, to criticize, and to comment.
Institutions, Reward
Structures, and Traditions
That Defy Changes in Higher Education
The military has a chain of command and a tradition for carrying out orders promptly throughout the system. A university is the antithesis of the military. There is very little chain of command in a tenure system that allows faculty to ignore many edicts from their "superiors" in the administrative chain of command. Probably more at fault than tenure is the tradition of allowing faculty to make independent decisions concerning what they put into "their" courses and what topics they will pursue in "their" research.
Funds are rewarding innovation and change are scarce in university budgets. Even more constraining is the comfort a faculty member takes in student evaluations at present and the risk and fear that hovers over innovation and risk taking.
Be assured that most faculty members in universities are not lazy. It may appear to be a cushy job with only nine or twelve contact hours in the classroom, but it is not at all uncommon for faculty to put in sixty hour weeks staying abreast of the new knowledge of their disciplines and contributing to this new knowledge with research and writing. A huge effort is made to build and maintain a reputation for scholarship and research. This means that there is precious little time to carve out for learning new educational technologies.
Universities seeking to offer online courses must often hire new faculty or attempt to make deals with existing faculty by providing release time, summer grants, and other incentives that often fail to have a lasting impact on genuine commitment to change and genuine long-term contributions to innovation and online education.
University policies, resource constraints, and promotion and tenure traditions stand in the way of competing with corporations such as UNext that will treat instructors more like professional employees. The salaries and benefits will be greater in the corporations, but there will not likely be any tenure or job security. Indeed the reward packages may be so great as to provide very real competition to universities seeking to hire the best new faculty or retain the best tenured faculty.
The Digital Divide is Real
In the 15th Century when the printing press was invented, the majority of the world's population was illiterate and could not make use of the books that poured forth. Six hundred years later, a large proportion of the world's population still can neither read nor write. In the 21st Century when the printing press gives way to digital storage and networked distribution, the hardcore illiterate will not benefit by virtue of being illiterate. An even larger number who can read and write will still not have access anywhere close to the privileged populace having access to modern technologies.
One day, modern technologies will be the main agent in eradicating illiteracy and ignorance. But in the interim decades, or even centuries, these technologies will exacerbate the divide between those who can benefit directly from technologies and those who are denied access for one reason or another (poverty, isolation, religious constraints, cultural constraints, etc.)
Concerns About the Explosion of Online Education
Concerns About Residency Living & Learning on Campus
In 1997, I listened to an address by Robert S. Sullivan, Directory of the IC2 Institute, University of Texas at Austin. He was extremely positive about opportunities for ALN networking and bridging of curriculum gaps with web courses that in many instances will become much higher in quality than a single university will normally be able to develop only for its own campus. At the end of his address, in response to a question from the audience, he did raise two very serious concerns (that I paraphrased below from my videotape of his remarks):
Problem 1: One day a "university" may only be left with onsite faculty and programs that distributed education vendors are not willing to "pay for." There is an important debate going on that focuses on the issue of whether the "university concept" might be undermined.
Problem 2: Students, especially undergraduate students, cannot have a complete learning experience without being physically present on a campus. The interpersonal and social dynamics of a campus may be put at risk with distributed learning.
Robert S. Sullivan, August 20, 1997 Plenary Session
Annual Meeting of the American Accounting Association
Concerns About Impersonality and Becoming Irrevocably Orwellian
One of my students, Elizabeth Eudy, coined the phrase "irrevocably Orwellian." At http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/eeudy/aln.htm she writes the following:
Although it is too far fetched to say that we will turn into cold, heartless robots as a result of ALN and that our society has become irrevocably Orwellian, the lack of face-to-face social interaction could potentially do more harm than good in our education. Will graduates of ALN degree programs be left wondering how they will cope in an actual job interview? Students need social interaction as vital component of maturation and professional development. The most successful use of ALN thus presents itself as a combination of online courses and real classroom interaction. The classes do not necessarily have to meet twice or three times a week as most do now, but rather as needed by the demands of students or by the judgment of the professor. In any case, as the market for ALN courses expands (as it is doing) traditional universities will have to upgrade their curriculum to ALN in order to remain competitive.
At a later point she writes the following:
ALN courses can be dehumanized to such an extent that students will no longer feel as if they belong to a learning community. Community is a key concept for the learning process, and enables students to gain support from each other. This concept is taken to the limit in traditional universities where students belong to a university community--they live in the dorms, they eat together at the cafeteria, they join various student organizatons, and most importantly, they learn together. The professors and students ideally belong to the same community of learning; although in some universities students feel that professors are too inaccessible. Many proponents of ALN still agree that the human component of education and university life is necessary. Degerhan Usleul, the chief operating officer of Interactive Learning International Corporation (ILINC), is quoted as saying: The importance of an instructor's physical presence, complete with body language, as well as the rapport one builds with classmates, are not easily replaced. Jo Ann Davy continues in the article, writing that Usluel recommends holding a physical event to help relationships, before connecting online.
Davy, Jo Ann. "Education and Training Alternatives." Managing Office Technology: Cleveland. April 1998.
Another student named Katie Lawrence lists drawbacks of ALN in a term paper as follows:
- There are more dropouts than in actual on-campus courses
- Loss of commuinty/campus atmosphere
- There are no current standards for program assessment, so it is difficult for students to know which courses will be worth the money they are spending
- Often, the high fees charged for some ALN courses go to fund actual campus courses rather than the virtual courses being offered.
- Due to the large number of students taking ALN courses and their tendency to contact professors frequently, more professors or teaching assistants are required to adequately teach a cyber course.
- "Learning ceases to be about analysis, discussion, and examination, and becomes a product to be bought and sold, to be packaged, advertised, and marketed." (taken from Dangers of Global Education)
- Students loose out by not actually reading published books.
- Because the courses are developed in the Western world, Western views are spread to all parts of the globe, which may inhibit the cultural growth of other societies, thus creating a unified, undiverse world. Computer access and availability and modem speed are problems for ALN courses given on college campuses - students are often times unable to log on due to slow modems or busy network lines.
Barbara Brown discusses the myth of asynchronous learning impersonality:
Another myth one frequently encounters about computer-mediated instruction is that of impersonality. People assume that in the absence of face-to-face interaction, relations automatically become more distant and impersonal. Traditional distance learning formats are said to be plagued with this problem.[9] Not so, in my experience with the interactive digital classroom. There is a type of intimacy achievable between teachers and students in this medium that is quite extraordinary, reminiscent of what Sproull and Keisler refer to as "second-level" social effects of the technology. I believe this intimacy results from a sense of shared control and esponsibility, commitment to collaboration and dialogue, and increased willingness to take risks in communications with others online. The verbal and writing-intensive nature of the text-based forum network also forces one to make one’s thoughts very explicit whenever possible; there is little room for subtlety. As one administrator put it: "In an online environment, words matter.... Words are everything."
Also, it takes longer for groups to reach consensus in brain-storming and problem-solving situations online.[10] People’s feelings can be hurt easily, so more time and effort are put into explaining meanings and supplying detailed contextual background to enhance mutual understanding. Thus, writers get to know one another intimately over time while computer-mediated conversations - both formal and informal - unfold. Neither e-mail nor chat, the forum classroom environment at Fielding calls for and inspires thoughtful, composed (after reading and reflection) asynchronous networked interactions, without sacrificing human warmth.
At this stage in the evolution of Internet educational technology, we are all learners. There is also a sense that we are innovators and early adopters who "crossed over" early in the technology transfer and diffusion process.[11] In the Fielding culture, this pioneer experience has come to be known as riding the waves, or embracing the "turbulence" of rough seas - a metaphor for global and organizational unrest as well. The attention given to group process online and the thoughtful nature of master’s-level conversations establish an intimacy within the group, belying the myth of impersonality.
B.M. Brown
"Digital Classrooms: Some Myths About Developing New Educational Programs Using the Internet,"
T.H.E. Journal, December 98, pp. 57-58
The online version is at http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/current/feat04.html
Concerns About Making Education and Training Too Easy
It has been demonstrated in various ways in cognitive and learning science that making a training environment easier may be dysfunctional in the sense that it improves short term memory at the expense of long-term memory and performance. Complex information needs to be multiply encoded in semantic and/or situational associations. Computer-aided training may either enhance or detract from long-term performance.
For example, I am inclined to make it easier for students to find answers or get leads in each course topic. I view it as taking the Mickey Mouse drudgeries of finding things that consume time. I hope to provide my students with more time to study what they find and less time trying to find what they study. To do so I provide as much literature as possible on CD-ROMs (many of which I record myself), my LAN hard drive, and the University's web server. However, it is possible that the Mickey Mouse activities contribute significantly to long-term memory. To the extent that I am making discovery less difficult and more predictable, I might in fact be improving students' short term performance at the expense of long-term memory and cognition.
Robert Bjork states:
It has now been demonstrated in a variety of ways, and with a variety of motor, verbal, and problem-solving tasks, that introducing variation and/or unpredictability in the training environment causes difficulty for the learner but enhances long-term performance --- particularly the ability to transfer training to novel but related task environments.
Robert A. Bjork
"Memory and Metamemory considerations in the Training of Human Beings,"
Metacognition: Knowing about Knowing
Edited by Janet Metcalfe and Arthru P. Shimaura
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
ISBN: 0262132982, 1994, Page 189
Other references are provided later on in this document under the section entitled "Fostering Deeper Learning: Risks of Teaching More Than You Know."
.
Concerns About Making Education and Training Too Hard
All courses at Trinity University are three-credit courses. Virtually all of my students are full-time students who are taking at least five courses each semester. On the faculty evaluation forms one of the questions reads: "How would you rate the workload of this course?" Another question reads: "How difficult did you find this course?" As I added more ALN modules in place of lectures, answers to these questions virtually all moved to "Very Heavy" and "Very Difficult." The following quotation is representative of class concerns:
The work load was very heavy and put a strain on my other classes. I liked the material, but weekly quizzes and examinations plus 50-90 pages of reading per class along with other classes is too much.
Actually I usually do not assign pages to read, but in the process of studying assigned topics, my graduate students dig out a huge amount of material that they themselves feel they must study. In research projects constituting over 50% of the course grade, they must seek out, sift, digest, and nurture a vast amount of learning material. Often students must spend a great deal of time building foundations to even study the material. For example, projects entailing both design and implementation of relational databases entail learning how to make complicated software work. Projects entailing how to account for financial instruments derivatives entail learning what those financing contracts are and how they are used in hedging strategies.
The bottom line is that it is not be reasonable for all five graduate courses each semester to take as much time as my courses. Students would become frustrated, angered, and seek to somehow short circuit their effort if there was not enough time each week to cover five similar ALN courses. Their traditional lecture courses are often neat and tidy with problems assigned from the back of the textbook and sufficient material in the textbook or lectures to master the assigned materials. Students all study the same materials and can help each other in many lecture courses. In my asynchronous modules, students must do a lot more digging on their own and generally come away frustrated by the "loose ends" that they neither have the time nor skills to master nor the skills to master. For example, in the process of studying risk exposures of derivatives contracts they encounter mathematically complex Value at Risk time series models. A few of the mathematically inclined students who elect to delve into such models learn more about Value at Risk than students who go down other avenues on their projects. Hence, students are not all studying the same materials, and it becomes more difficult to lean on each other for help crossing troubled waters. In many instances their instructor, me, is not sufficiently up on the particulars of each topic to bail them out. For more on this, skip to the section entitled Fostering Deeper Learning: Risks of Teaching More Than You Know.
I like to force students to struggle on their own, because I think this prepares them for life after graduation. However, there is a fine line in ALN between making ALN too easy versus making ALN too hard. I have not yet achieved the correct balance. One example where asynchronous learning appears to achieve a good balance is the Business Activity Model (BAM) in Intermediate Accounting at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia. A portion of one of my recent email messages is quoted below:
The mere fact that many ALN courses are shown to improve grades and/or the rate at which learning takes place does not imply that long-term performance has been enhanced. It is not clear whether better performance arises from a confounding of added sweat with ALNs. What does intrigue me, however, is how an entire year of Intermediate Accounting (typically very tough courses requiring memorization of lots of accounting rules and procedures) is now being taught at the University of Virginia totally without lectures by the two professors (Croll and Catanach) who, up until 1996, lectured (quite brilliantly) in virtually every class. Their anecdotal claims for the "BAM" non-lecture approach are that students are doing markedly better on in course examinations, the CPA examination, and on the job (which they can monitor since all students have internships with firms). I now feature a multimedia workshop module of the University of Virginia BAM ALN program. The average SAT of students in these UVA classes is over 1300. It is not clear that BAM will work so well on lesser mortals.
One way to judge good ALN workload balance is to keep track of teaching evaluations. Students generally voice complaints when workloads are unreasonable (they will not always complain when a course is too easy). The BAM asynchronous courses at the University of Virginia have heavy workloads, but Professors Croll and Catanach manage to pull these courses off with some of the highest instructor evaluations in the McIntire School of Commerce.
For more detailed information on the BAM pedagogy, I recommend the following two links:
Working
Paper 265 on Metacognition
Metacognitive Concerns in Designs and
Evaluations of Computer Aided Education and Training: Are We Misleading Ourselves About Measures of Success?
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
Download the audio and presentation files
of Professor Catenach.
You can download
(for free) nearly six hours of MP3 audio and the PowerPoint presentation slides
of one of the best education technology workshops that I ever organized.
This was the pre-convention workshop that I organized for the American
Accounting Association, August 12, 2000 in Philadelphia. The speakers,
topics, and download instructions are given at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000cpe/00start.htm
Concerns About Corporate Influences on Traditional Missions
There are two types of partnerings between business firms and universities. The first type is where the university's faculty deliver a specialized degree program to employees of a business firm. The program is often specialized calendar, courses, and mode of delivery. For example, the PriceWaterhouse Coopers MBA program at the University of Georgia has a customized calendar, customized courses, and all courses are delivered asynchronously on the web.
Another type of partnering is where the business firms deliver courses for the university degree programs. An example of this type of partnering is the AT&T partnering with Western Governors University that was announced in two magazines that I track regularly. For example, see
"AT&T Learning Network Hosts WGU Content," T.H.E. Journal, February 1999, 14-16.
One of my undergraduate students, Paul Meekey, notes the rise of partnerships between universities and corporations where the universities participate in educating and training employees of companies. Paul's paper can be found at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/pmeekey/frame2.htm wherein he states the following:
Employers are always trying to find ways to cut costs and now with the introduction of ALN,
they should be able to do so. Two companies that have enabled this technology are helping to reduce costs in their post graduate business training programs. CIGNA Corporation, an
insurance company located in Philadelphia has formed a partnership with Drexell University, also in Philadelphia to create a master's program for information systems. They came up with a three year program that would train their students online. The only time they actually met offline was for a two day orientation at the Drexell campus and after that it was totally online. After the success of the program, Metlife, another insurance company decided to form a similar partnership with Drexel University. One advantage to this program that both company enjoyed was that both companies didn't have to give up their employees to go back to a university campus for the 2 yr. graduate program.
The employees could remain working for the company, continue working on their projects and fulfill their educational requirements after work, before work, on their days off, or on the weekends. Richard H. Lytle, dean of Drexel's College of Information and Technology, says that the he is really excited that both companies are not only using his program but applying it to software application within their own applications of everyday work. The program helps the companies to eliminate some costs and uncertainties of trying to hire full-qualified employees from major universities and also the time lost when employees have to go to these classes during normal working hours. The companies are also using what they have learned through Drexel University to eventually have all training in the company done through ALN, in all departments. New York University's School of Continuing Education also participates in online learning, and just recently formed a partnership with IBM to offer information systems courses for their professionals, on a global scale. We are sure to see a huge increase in ALN used in the business environment. Companies can keep their employees working hard and earning the profits while training them to make them more efficient at their job. Although still young, ALN is helping companies such as Citicorp, NYNEX Corp., and Sandoz to become more cost efficient in training their employees.
The above trends are a mixed blessing. Clearly, expansion into corporate education and training expands the market alternatives for colleges facing a shrinking and increasingly competitive environment for traditional students and traditional continuing education students. The flip side of the coin is that the universities may sacrifice some of their independence in setting curricula and course contents since corporations paying for the education and training will dictate such matters to a large degree.
For more discussion and references about corporate universities and partnerships between corporations and traditional universities, see http://WWW.Trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#CorporatePartnerships and http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#ErnstandYoung .
Concerns About Library Services
The Internet has become the world's library. However, content pales in comparison with scholarly works found in libraries that contain vast resources that either are not or cannot be digitized. Making centuries of literature available on networks is cost prohibitive to digitize for and deliver from web servers. Copyright restrictions deliberately protect vast bodies of new and older literature from being digitized.
When asynchronous courses are delivered off campus, library access becomes a major problem that is frequently ignored in the hype of ALN promotion. One of my students, Katie Greene, addresses this problem at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/kgreene/distanceno.htm
In the above document, Katie provides links and references to literature on looming issues and "new roles for librarians." She states:
Librarians must change their role if they want to keep up with the changes in education. They will need to change in three different ways. The first way would be that "librarians will take on a more proactive role in the classroom and will work more collaboratively with the teaching faculty to develop assignments that are feasible in the off-campus/ distance environment." (Lebowitz) Secondly, distance education will bring about "greater collaboration among institutions". (Lebowitz) Because their are no constraints on location, libraries from all over can work together to create collections of works and pool their resources. A good example of this cooperation, is Western Governors University, which is a university made by the governors of the western states. Along with this cooperation, though, "the supplying of library services will become highly competitive, and libraries may choose to outsource the provision of services to other institutions" (Cavanagh). Thirdly, the librarian's role "will shift to one of facilitator/instructor, rather than provider of information." (Slade) Librarians will now be communicating with students in remote locations via e-mail, video conferencing, chat lines, or audio conferencing. One example of this is at University of Maryland University College where students can "chat" with librarians online and ask any questions they might have. Librarians will have to be proactive and learn about the new technologies and make the materials available to students all over the world.
Many have already used these devices and made the information available. Old ways included loan programs and mailing books and other materials. Now librarians use information technology to develop online, virtual libraries. One criticism is that distant students do not have access to as much information, but librarians are now able to put entire works, full texts of books, journals, references, newspapers, as well as web searches and internet access on the internet.Some Examples include:
VIVA the virtual library of Virginia - electronic collections of books, journals, newspapers , as well as internet searches.
Online Literature Library
Internet Public Library- references, magazines, newspapers, online texts.
Carrie-Full-Text Electronic Library.
Katie Greene raises other concerns and discusses the challenges of giving distance learners the same access to libraries as the access available to resident students. One wonders how top programs such as the Duke University Global Executive MBA program and the Ohio University Online MBA Without Boundaries program manage to provide library resources to students.
Judy Luther provides a paper entitled "Distance Learning and the Digital Library: What Happens When the Virtual Student Needs to Use the Virtual Library in a Virtual University," Educom Review, July/August 1998, 23-26. Although no virtual library is going to contain the text of all books and journals in a major academic library due to copyright and impracticalities of digitizing trillions of pages of text and graphics, there are some collaborative efforts being made by various universities to aid students taking virtual courses off campus. Judy Luther's article is available at http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/edreview.html.
Concerns About Academic Standards and Student Ethics
One of my students, Sophia Mena, at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/smena/learning.htm wrote the following:
The first thing that came to mind when I first started researching the Virtual Classroom is how professors monitor if students are doing their own work. In the Traditional Classroom a professor can easily detect if a person is cheating on their test, but how can they monitor that if someone is taking a test by way of a computer? It seems very easy for someone to cheat in an asynchronous learning environment. To find out more about computer ethics you can visit:
Computer Ethics - Cyberethics:
http://www.siu.edu/departments/coba/mgmt/iswnet/isethics/index.htm
IEEE Code of Ethics: http://www.ieee.org/committee/ethics
In the 1900s it was common for students to take tests in the presence of the village vicar who then certified that all conditions placed upon taking an examination were followed. Some conditions are easily met with existing technologies such as timing the examination and webcams and microphones that allow the examiners to view and hear the student from most any distance around the world. Newer technologies such as retinal scanners are emerging to verify that the student taking the examination is truly the student who is authorized to take the examination.
Nevertheless, there are enormous problems with ethics and academic standards in ALN. For example, monitoring students on chat lines becomes expensive and intrusive. Most ALN courses assume that the email messages and chat line messages from a student are genuine without monitoring those messages with the same scrutiny that is given to course examinations.
In some ways investigating suspected plagiarism is easier on the web. Unhappily, I have discovered several instances where my students lifted parts of their work (in two cases the entire paper) from sources that were not cited. Finding these instances of plagiarism was much easier in their web documents due to the ability to search for suspected phrases in web search engines.
Plagiarism has always been and will always be a problem in education and research. The problem is exacerbated by computing technologies due to the ease of selecting all or part of a document and clicking on (Edit, Copy) and (Edit, Paste). Culprits do not even have to type the text. If they cleverly use the technologies, phrases can be easily modified so it becomes more difficult to discover that the passage was first lifted and then modified so as to escape detection.
One problem with emerging speech recognition technologies is that spoken words (e.g., in a lecture or a session at a conference) can be recorded and digitized automatically such that text that has never appeared in print is created by speech recognition software. How easy it becomes to beat the speaker in putting that speaker's presentation into printed text. Faculty clinging to traditional lectures and classroom case discussions may not even be aware that whatever went on in their classrooms is now available at hidden sites on the web at either a public or a private web site. Those infamous "fraternity files" have never been so rich as they will become with speech recognition technologies.
Concerns About Faculty Efficiency and Burnout
Barbara Brown wrote the following:
There are many myths and tacit assumptions about computer-mediated learning that can be explored in the Fielding context. Much has been written about technological efficiency and the potential of the Internet as an educational medium to save time and money or increase productivity. The author’s experience inspires a healthy skepticism in this regard. Having taught students in conventional classrooms for two decades, I experienced the computer-mediated mode of instruction as more time-consuming, at least initially, both from the standpoint of up-front course design and later, painstaking, labor intensive hours online - designing messages for the classroom forum, reading and downloading from the screen, posting new material, providing feedback, checking community bulletin boards, e-mailing student comments and grade reports, etc. In fact, there were many times when I felt torn between my real life and my virtual life on-screen, in an identity challenging [Turkle, Sherry (1995), Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.] sort of way, simply because there did not seem to exist enough hours in the day to do justice to both. This was the case even in an "asynchronous" environment where I had the flexibility to conduct electronic office hours in my bathrobe over morning coffee or post feedback in the dead of night. Moreover, absent face-to-face contact and ordinary non-verbal clues, even very mature students on the Internet demand more frequent interaction and reassurance in dialogue with their professors, an observation confirmed in student course evaluations. Students demand more feedback; and the more feedback they receive, the more interaction they want. There are at least two possible interpretations of this phenomenon: One is that it reflects the way students compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction. Or, it may be that this medium disinhibits student communication, thereby stimulating the message exchange process. As the intellectual excitement of these conversations grows, so does the amount of interactivity in the virtual community.[See Rafaeli, Sheizaf and Fay Sudweeks (1998), "Interactivity in the Nets," in Network & Net Play: Virtual Groups on the Internet,
Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press/The MIT Press]I estimate this mode of instruction requires roughly 40% to 50% more work on the teacher’s part in comparison with conventional classroom delivery. For example, where I might put approximately 36 hours of work per week routinely into a regular course load with a total of 120 students in four traditional class sections at a large public university, online instruction at Fielding required 50 hours or more per week - with only 24 students in just three sections of my digital classes. It also takes longer for faculty members and administrators to reach consensus in electronic group meetings.
B.M. Brown
"Digital Classrooms: Some Myths About Developing New Educational Programs Using the Internet,"
T.H.E. Journal, December 98, p. 57
The online version is at http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/current/feat04.html
Also see Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change
Concerns About Misleading and Fraudulent Web Sites
An emerging area of interest to me is the rate at which marginal and fraudulent asynchronous courses and programs are emerging. For example, I consider it a shame when someone other than a major university uses a domain name of that university. One of my students, Elizabeth Eudy, wrote the following at http://www.resnet.trinity.edu/users/eeudy/aln.htm
I may be mistaken in the specific case, but the person in Reykjavik, Iceland who owns the domain name CarnegieMellon.com seems well positioned to offer services in a way that just might be confused with services offered by a well known U.S. university. Hundreds of examples exist of domain names that seem purposely designed to be misleading...Two problems stem from this: First, there is no way for the typical user to know whether the actual location of an Internet site is in, say, Pittsburgh or Reykjavik. Second, these sites are not under any single legal jurisdiction. The FBI, for instance, probably has little clout in Reykjavik
Concerns About CyberPsychology
The accelerating pace of networking for education, entertainment, research, therapy, and commerce is having profound psychological impacts on society. IFOBITS in May 1998 made the following announcement about a new CyberPsychology journal:
CYBERPSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIOR is a new, peer-reviewed journal for the mental health community devoted to the "impact of the Internet, multimedia and virtual reality on behavior and society." Articles in its inaugural issue include "The Gender Gap in Internet Use," "Internet Addiction on Campus," "The Relationship Between Depression and Internet Addiction," and "A Review of Virtual Reality as a Psychotherapeutic Tool."
Cyberpsychology & Behavior [ISSN: 1094-9313] is published quarterly by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., 2 Madison Avenue, Larchmont, NY 10538; tel:
914-834-3100; fax: 914-834-3582; email: info@liebertpub.com; Web:
Concerns About Computer Services and Network Reliability
This morning I went to one of our student labs to check to see if one of my new ToolBooks was being transported properly on the Internet. I discovered that someone had wiped out both the Internet Explorer and the Netscape Communicator web browsers on the first three lab computers that I logged into. It is terribly frustrating for faculty and students to repeatedly encounter hardware and software failures. Student frustrations center around not having enough lab computers, wasting time on lab computers that fail, having their own computers crash during the semester, and encountering network crashes or delays due to clogged bandwidth.
An enormous problem for universities who engage more and more in ALN courses that rely daily upon networking systems is to keep those systems efficient and reliable for students. Faculty members occasionally miss class due to illness or scheduling conflicts, but faculty miss class much less often than computers crash on most campuses. In addition, there are disruptions due to necessary maintenance and updating of computer systems. Few, if any, campuses have budgets to provide backup systems for disruptions of service.
There are increasing risks of security failures on campus computers. Geeks hack or crack their way into systems on every college campus. In most instances they do so without intent to cause great harm. However, they may also be intent upon bringing down the system or parts thereof. Equipping divisions (e.g., a College of Business within the university) with their own servers, labs, and computing maintenance centers reduces the risks of university-wide computer system failure, but the cost becomes enormous in terms of hardware and personnel costs. However, this may also spread technician talent so thin across the campus that the risk of poor performance in some divisions may be increased.
There are no easy solutions to the problem that ALN learning is absolutely dependent on reliability of computers and networking systems.
Concerns About Effectiveness of Learning Technologies in Large Classes
Email messages from Roger Debreceny and Andrew Priest
I do not doubt for a minute that small group, f2f teaching can be highly effective. I sure hope so, because like many of the people on this list, I have devoted many hours of my life to the pursuit of better f2f small group teaching! <g>.
As regards large group f2f teaching, I am much less sanguine. I lecture to a group of 750 students (!!) in one large (ok, it’s enormous!) lecture theatre. There are clearly some benefits to such large group teaching (mostly sociological) but not many. In most cases, large group lectures are poorly presented, inadequately planned and almost completely lacking in challenges to the students. Large group lectures lead, in my view, to the "I attend, therefore I learn" syndrome. We all know that all the evidence points to the inability of humans to concentrate in such environments for more than a few minutes at a time. Yet we consistently ignore such evidence.
There are many problems, however, with both small group and large group f2f teaching and learning processes. Key amongst them is the idea that we engender in our students, that they can go to a sage and receive knowledge in some structured fashion. Contrast that with our research processes. OK, we do have research tutorials (e.g. at the AAA Annual Meeting), but they are relatively rare. Research is undertaken by search for, and integration of, knowledge. Research is much, much more like the real work world that our graduates will experience than the f2f classroom.
Where networked technology can assist us is to change the teaching and learning model from sage/pupil towards research leader/co-researcher.
We should listen more to the ideas of thinkers such as Schank (see, for example, a short article by Schank in the July issue of Communications of the ACM).
Now, just as an example of a colleague who has made some interesting advances in using networked technologies to move from pedagogy more towards androgogy here is a write-up on Mark Freeman at University of Technology, Sydney that was recently posted to ATeach-L by Andrew Priest. We can get a flavour of a new learning environment.
Roger Debreceny
=============================
Hi Folks
Thought this article from the Business Review Weekly http://www.brw.com.au may be of interest.
Regards Andrew Priest
Mass lectures, often repeated, are the usual way that university business courses cope with cost pressures and student loads. Students are bored to tears by them. Mark Freeman, a senior lecturer in finance at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), and a specialist in teaching methods, thinks he has found a better way: using the Internet. "The groundswell of student interest in Web-based learning is like no other phenomenon I have seen in educational innovation," he says, after tests involving more than 2000 students.
At 4 am students can have lively interchanges on the site.
Business students make up 30% of the enrolment at UTS but their courses get only 15% of total UTS funding. Freeman felt an obligation to make learning better for students who are struggling to hold down a job or cope with English, pay fees, mind children and resist fatigue at night. They may travel to university and find there are 30-40 students in a tutorial. Or part-timers might visit reserved sections of the library, only to find that desperate students have torn out the pages of a book or stolen it altogether.
Freeman began Internet-based teaching in 1996 with 800 students on a basic Internet system. Last year UTS brought in experimentally a special on-line teacher-student pack called TopClass for messages and conferences, involving 1000 students. This year 10,500 students, nearly half the UTS student population of 23,000, are using it. In one class of 100 last month, Freeman found that every student had private Internet access.
Some academics misuse the medium by merely posting their lectures on the Web, he says. This is no better than telling students that information is in the library and "go get it".
One of Freeman’s examples of "new learning" is an on-line role-playing exercise this year for post-graduate students of securities markets law. They take the identity of people such as John Howard, Allan Fels, or securities regulators, with their real identities staying secret until the program ends. The program was based on a method used at Macquarie University in a simulation of Middle-Eastern politics.
In the first week the students describe their roles; then crises are provided, such as a currency slump, bank failure or misleading prospectus for a privatisation. Students must research how their character would react, and type responses to the central on-line site. The "prime minister" can even negotiate privately with the "stock exchange chairman", as occurs in the real world. Freeman is the only observer able to read the messages. Since each student researches a unique situation, cheating is difficult. In normal work, cheating is a serious problem, now that vast amounts of material can be cut and pasted into assignments or lifted from "cheat sites" on the Web.
In team debates, groups take positions on issues such as corporate law reform, and hone their responses in private conferences before posting them on the Internet. Many students in their professional lives are already feeling the effect of corporate law reform, and have strong opinions. Even at 4am there can be lively interchanges among six students using the site.
Freeman says: "Students get completely immersed in the role playing. In addition they do not have the hang-ups often suffered by people in face-to-face arguments, such as deferring to those of the opposite sex or those perceived to be higher in status. Shy people are not argued down, rhetorical flourishes can’t be used, and non-English students cope better with the language."
Later there is a coming-out session at the university where the students show their real identities, often to surprise and applause. The debate is also a permanent and expandable record useful for future students. "The best part is that the students are not learning just what I tell them, but learning to think and make choices based on good information." An individual assignment is to investigate and give an assessment of a domestic and international securities regulator’s Web site, and present the results to a discussion forum.
Freeman admits to having the usual failures of a pioneer. "Technology in teaching can operate like an unguided missile unless the goals are well specified, such as changing student understanding," he says.
There is less staff administrative work because the Web is used for announcements, such as where to lodge assignments, errors in a text, changes to deadlines, and guides to marking. Staff have to discourage students from calling by phone and private e-mail, instead of logging on to the site.
But there is still a huge workload in the Internet-posted queries. Some students at other universities became irate when Freeman failed to respond to their queries. Students expect staff to respond seven days a week, and mark faster. Now, without the Internet, the requests would be totally unmanageable. "I used to get 40 calls on my voice-mail before I even started work. This morning I had none," Freeman says. He predicts that in the coming decade, some universities will fail, especially those that have chased short-term economies at the expense of quality. Students are already exercising their consumer rights and demanding "just-in-time" learning, rather than conforming to university teaching schedules. University teachers failing to get average grades of "highly satisfactory" would be sacked, since students would no longer tolerate mediocrity and would take their "business" elsewhere.
Freeman predicted six months ago that many universities would become user-pays systems where for $1000, for example, students could use a bare minimum of the facilities, and pay $100 each for a menu of add-ons such as on-line self-study material, videos and discussion groups. Replies within 24 hours would be guaranteed seven days a week, with a ceiling of ten sessions per subject and $100 per chat thereafter. There could be a $500 premium service involving time with experts face-to-face, on-line or in video-conference. "In the US, user-pays universities have already arrived," Freeman says. "It’s no longer a prediction."—
Andrew Priest, School of Accounting, Edith Cowan University
Mailto:a.priest@cowan.edu.au
Mailto:apriest@imstressed.com
http://www.bs.ac.cowan.edu.au/acctinfoplus/
"Early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese"- SteveWright
Concerns About Faculty Resistance to Change
Probably the major stumbling block to education change is faculty unwillingness to venture into technology and new learning experiments. Instead of leading the way, faculty in traditional schools and colleges are behind corporate and military/government trainers in adapting to technologies and learning experimentation.
A funny thing happened to a campus event designed to bring our faculty together to exchange information and demonstrations of technology in the classroom. In the three years since the conference was launched, we have had steadily fewer faculty attending.
We surveyed our faculty to find out why attendance had declined at our on-campus technology conference (scheduled during a day when classes were not in session). Results indicated that while some faculty and staff did have a disinterest in technology, more often the problem was their frustration with it. Among reasons for why they were not using technology in their work, they cited lack of the following: training, support, space, equipment, and knowledge of what was available and how items could be obtained.
"Where Are They?": Why Technology Education for Teachers Can Be
So Difficult"
by Claudia Rebaza
http://www.microsoft.com/education/hed/vision.htm
Although the barriers mentioned above by Dr. Rebaza are serious, in my viewpoint they tend to be excuses rather than reasons in many instances. Far more serious are the lack of credit given to technology innovations in promotion, pay-raise, publication, and tenure decisions. In fact, I maintain messages of selected "daring professor" who are willing to take chances in adverse environments. The web address is http://WWW.Trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm
Some email correspondence from a faculty member at Trinity University is provided below:
Dear Bob,
Thanks for sending along your web assignment and its rationale. I’m interested in doing a book-length project that has web links to my own set of materials and exercises. Or even doing the whole book in this way.
Question is, does one receive academic credit for producing work on the internet? Have you ever discussed this with the Administration?
Thanks,
[Name of the Trinity University Faculty Member Deleted]
========================================================================
Reply from Bob Jensen
Hi ______
One problem with web publishing is that if you submit your stuff to a top journal, the editor wants you to hide your research from the world until the journal gets around to publishing your work (which in a recent case took five years "in press" for an accepted Jensen and Sandlin article to finally get published). I recently had another paper accepted for publication. Then I had a long ‘fight" with the editor over whether I can keep a "live" and ever-changing version of the essence of that paper at my web site.
I have discussed web publishing with administrators is many universities. They have not and cannot take much of an official position without action by the faculty. Matters of promotion and tenure are pretty well decided all along the way (departmental faculty, Chair, Dean, and P&T faculty) with rare administrative reversals of recommendations. Faculty bring individual biases into peer evaluation, and at the moment web publishing is a new thing to most of them. Until the peer evaluation culture is changed, web publishing will not count heavily toward promotion, tenure, or take home pay.
The main issue is that web publishing is not refereed with the same rigor (as refereeing in leading journals) or, in most cases, is not refereed at all. This is a concern since it is pretty easy to disguise garbage as treasure at a web site. Leading journals will one day offer refereeing services for web publishing and may, in fact, do away with their hard copy editions. Until then what do we do? Most certainly we do not put up a web counter and brag about the number of hits --- Playboy probably gets more hits per day than all professors combined.
Somewhat of a substitute for hard core refereeing is a record of correspondence that is received from scholars and students who use your web documents. This lacks the anonymity of the refereeing process. Also there are opportunities to cheat (I’ll lavishly praise your work if you will adore mine in a succession of email messages), but most scholars have more integrity than to organize that sort of conspiracy. If you have a file of correspondence from people that your peers know and respect, chances are that your peers will take notice. Include copies of this correspondence in your performance reports. But this process is more anecdotal than the genuine blind refereeing process.
Until a rigorous web refereeing process is established, those who must evaluate a web publisher must do more work. They must study your web materials and make their own judgments regarding quality and relevance. It is much easier to simply tick off the refereed hits (For when the binary scorer comes to write against your name, he writes only ones or zeros, to him the unread articles are all the same). It is easy to become too cynical about the refereeing process. We have all had frustrations with bad referees, including acceptances of our weaker output and rejections of our best work. At my web site, I have section for my "big ones that got away." See http://WWW.Trinity.edu/rjensen/#BigOnes Refereeing is a little like democracy --- it ain’t perfect, but until a better system comes along it beats the alternatives over the long haul.
My trouble, and I suspect that Mike Kearl has the same problem, is that web publishing is addictive. The responses that you get from around the world set "your tail wagging." I have published many papers and several books (a sign of my advanced age), but I have never had the "action" following hard copy publication that I get from web publication. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that more people than you can imagine stumble on your web documents while using a search engine on the web. Not all of them send you nice messages, but a message recently received by me last week from a total stranger is reproduced be low:
==================================================================
Messages like the above message "keep my tail wagging." I even like the messages that signal items to be corrected --- at least those users found my stuff worth correcting. If you have audio on your computer, you can listen to Mike Kearl discuss what makes his "tail wag." Mike also discusses the issue that you raised in your message to me. The web address for Mike’s audio on this is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ideasmes.htm . That particular article is entitled "Daring Professors" and contains audio and email messages from other faculty members who were willing to take some chances with their careers.
I can offer you a wagging tail and small pay raises if you rely entirely on web publishing as evidence of scholarship. Old hounds like me can opt for more tail wagging, but young pups need more nourishment shoved into the other end. (Actually I still publish hard copy to maintain respectability, but I personally am far more proud of my "living" web research documents than my annual refereed "dead" hits over the past few years).
Until the evaluation culture is changed in peers who hold you on leash,
try to do web publishing alongside your refereed journal publishing. But don’t let
the tail wag the dog or you will wind up in the dog house. If your book or journal editor
objects to having your working documents published at your web site, remember who your
master is at all times. His title is Editor in Chief!
An interesting paper by William H. Geoghegan at IBM Academic Consulting is entitled
"WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY?" discusses some of the issues
as to why the faculty are not yet adapting to education technologies. Estimates run as
high as 95% of higher education faculty are not using these technologies. Geoghegan
analyses social and diffusion barriers in particular. The paper is at http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/links/library/geoghegan/wpi.html
Bob Jensen
Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity.University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-736-7347 Fax: 210-736-8134
One of my students, Joshua Miller, lists the following concerns:
may require students to have "technological literacy" (I think this a
good thing but some of the sites I visited said otherwise)content may become subservient to the technology
poses new difficulties for program evaluation and accreditation
could alienate academics
may encounter language barriers/translation problems
can be obstructed by time zones
requires forms of institutional support to be projected to distant
studentsis complex in relation to copyright issues
often requires establishment of regional centers
can be costly for students to obtain equipment
My own experience is with a three-semester experiment of a non-majors "survey" course. We met as a class once at the beginning of the semester and once again at the final exam. Without presuming that my experience can be generalized to others, I've made the following observations.
It was MUCH more work to prepare and execute the course than I ever expected. I covered a little less material than in the traditional course. Assessment was very difficult. Student reaction was strong and about equally divided between those who loved it and those who hated it. DL seems better suited to mature learners with well-developed learning skills.
In the end, I concluded their was little for me to like about this mode of instruction. It takes away the part of my job I like best (classroom interaction) and substituted mass quantities of gizmo tweaking (GT). Improved tools will reduce the need for GT, but I don't see how we maintain interesting human interaction. I use gizmos to support traditional instruction, but I have no desire to give up the classroom.
As Barry Rice says, the traditional classroom MAY be a dinosaur in need of extinction. But when it does, I'll find other work to do because there's little joy for me as a cyber-prof.
Peter Kenyon [pbk1@AXE.HUMBOLDT.EDU ]
The most frequent refrain that I hear from my wife is: "Did you hear what I just said?" I am sorry to say that I often must ask Erika to repeat both that question and her comments preceding the question. In fact, my penchant for listening without hearing has become somewhat of a joke between us. She has threatened to learn about computers just to communicate with me. Her problem is that she is just too busy to learn about computers. When she does find the time, however, I'm in for big trouble. Seriously, however, when I am in the midst of concentrating on one thing, I have a bit of the same problem with student communications on other issues.
I agree with Peter and Ron to a point. However, the Sloan Foundation Experiments suggest that faculty/student and student/student communications increase with asynchronous courses. Students who rarely take the trouble to visit faculty during office hours will send email and chat room communications. Students have a penchant for catching us in our offices at a bad time, and they become embarrassed that it is a bad time. The trouble is that, being so busy, there is rarely a really good time for us to really communicate face-to-face. Sometimes students have to wait outside our offices, and being human, they conclude that they have better things to do with their time --- such as seeking out a teaching assistant or another student in the class. I sometimes think my "former" students know be better, via email, after graduation than while they were my students. Perhaps it is because they learn to appreciate my work more after they have graduated. But I am certain there is more to it than that.
I taught in five universities over the years and encountered a few, surprisingly few, professors who have great face-to-face encounters with students outside the classroom. There are many (like me) who seem to do better with electronic communications. Years ago, I encountered an assistant professor from a prestigious university who reported that the only way for faculty or students to really make contact (before email was invented) with one of the superstars on the faculty was through written memos even though that superstar was located two doors down the hall.
For more on the relation between communications and pedagogy, see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/slide01.htm. For more on student evaluations, see the course evaluations at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/255wp.htm#Illinois. What seems to be more of a problem with asynchronous courses seems to be faculty burn out that, in large measure, is caused by increased communications with students. Asynchronous courses are also more demanding on materials development. Much of what we expound in lectures comes from long-term memory that is triggered by something (patterns of association) in the midst of class. Beforehand, the same thoughts may not have surfaced in our offices that surface in the middle of a class. This makes it almost impossible to write down complete lectures for asynchronous courses having no lectures.
Electronic communications, of course, are not as satisfactory in many respects as face-to-face encounters. However, I would argue that electronic communications are sometimes "closer." For example, there are times when I feel a bit intimidated myself in the presence of some people that I communicate freely with by email. There are people that I hate to interrupt with a telephone call, but I am rarely embarrassed to send them email messages. After a face-to-face or telephone visit, there are almost always things that I belatedly think that I should have said or not said. This seems to be less of a problem with email, and when it happens I just send out correction/addendum messages.
My point here is to avoid associating "closeness" with "face-to-face." We can be virtual strangers face-to-face and close friends over a network. We may repeat daily greetings with colleagues in the hallways who we rarely communicate with in depth. I am less close with colleagues that I "see" in our hallways than with many of you with whom I correspond regularly. There have been some studies (one was reported in Playboy) showing that husbands and wives that see each other every day have a surprisingly small amount of genuine communication except at certain peak moments such as when they are in a car together on a long trip or awaiting a meal by candlelight in a slow-service restaurant. Would some us learn more about our spouses and kids if we communicated anonymously or openly with them via email and chat rooms? Will our kids open up more to anonymous strangers on the web than they will face-to-face with us?
But then maybe I am just "listening" to Peter and Ron without "hearing."
Bob (Robert E.) Jensen Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212 Voice: (210) 999-7347 Fax: (210) 999-8134 Email: rjensen@trinity.edu http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
-----Original Message-----
From: Ron [mailto:rrtidd@MTU.EDU]
ent: Friday, November 19, 1999 6:55 AM
To: AECM@VAX.LOYOLA.EDU
ubject: Re: Distance Learning with traditional undergraduate studentsPeter made one comment that I suspect reflects the sentiments of many 20th century educators- any technology that detracts from our ability to physically connect with our students is going to diminish our career satisfaction. While I share this sentiment whole heartedly, I believe that we confront two inescapable realities in 21st century education.
First, distributed education (whether distance or proximity) is going to become a more prominent feature of the academic landscape. Second, students are going to become increasingly comfortable with online social interaction and communities.
Given those two "assumptions," most (if not all) educators must learn how to develop an appropriate classroom community in cyberspace. To me, that means having a community that fulfills all participants' needs to connect, while achieving academic objectives. A difficult challenge when the participants come from two generations that define connecting and community in such different ways.
I have not had a chance to read it, yet, but some might find "Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace," (Palloff and Pratt) to be informative.
Ron Tidd
The Future and Darker Sides of Distance Education
Alternative Futures for Distance Learning: The Force and the Darkside
Murray Turoff
Distinguished Professor of Computer and Information Science Department of
Computer and Information Science
New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark NJ, 07102, USA email: murray@vc.njit.edu
homepage: http://eies.njit.edu/~turoff/ Copyright Murray Turoff 1997
Abstract
There are forces at work that are going to reshape the practice of distance learning and higher education in the United States. Technology only enters as an opportunity to channel these forces in very different directions. The channeling process is really that of administrative and management practices and policies that govern the utilization of educational technology and methods. While there are desirable futures possible it is becoming evident that many current practices and related economic forces can result in a future that is quite analogous to the "darkside" of the force.The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views of any organization with whom the author may have an affiliation.
Table of Contents
Introduction The Force Commercialization
The Erosion of Tenure
Faculty and Adjunct Compensation and Considerations
Performance Throughput Rates
Budget Paradoxes
Future Alternatives
Accreditation of Distance Learning
Program Support
Evaluation The Nature of Learning
Related Administrative Practices
Warped Views on Distance Education
Faculty Developed Materials
The Organization of Distance Learning
Final Conclusion and Observations
References
http://www.westga.edu/~distance/turoff11.html
http://eies.njit.edu/~turoff
http://eies.njit.edu/~hiltz