FABIO GIRELLI-CARASI

 

Best Practices for Online Learning

 

Premise n. 1

Language is communication and language is learned through communication. Yet, in our classrooms, very little communication takes place. This is not an indictment, rather an observation.

 

Premise n. 2

Communication creates communities, as is implicit in the shared etymology of the two terms. Yet in our classrooms often the only community is that of teacher and an individual student who is “on the spot” resembling more an interrogation with the student in the role of suspect.

 

Technology in the classroom for the most part so far has been used as an additional study aid, in the form of quizzes, exercises and entertaining games. Only rarely, is it used to import genuine materials from the web.

 

The way technology is conceived misses the point of what the infotech revolution is about. If we look at the Internet, we instantly recognize that the fundamental aspects of this revolution are the creation of new forms of communications and, consequently, communities: listserves, discussion boards, chat lines, conference calls on skype, open forums, blogs, and sites like YouTube redefine the meaning of communication. Social networks repackage all these elements and the resulting synergies propel communication to an even higher level (Gestalt interactivity).

It could not be otherwise: since the beginning of culture and civilization, each successive medium of communication, has succeeded only insofar as it has created its own community, organized around a sense of ownership and participation.

 

Each medium is organic to its message (as per Marshall McLuhan) but it must also be organic to a community. The oral teachings of Socrates had their own walking community. Plato's philosophy, in written form, and thus unacceptable to many, created a new kind of community centered around the text. With the invention of the printing press, new contents were created, first of all the novel, which engendered yet another type of community.

 

When the radio was introduced, it formed its own community not through readings of novels on the airwaves, but by the broadcastings of concerts, the invention of the radio-drama and the live news.

 

And television had to invent entire new forms for information, entertainment and music.

 

In each of these cases, communities were formed that were different from those that had congealed around the previous media.

 

With the Internet we see the same phenomenon repeat itself.  The concepts of "ownership and participation" are the essence of this medium, along with the "horizontal," non-hierarchical communication that other media so far could not accomplish.

 

These properties of infotech must be understood and assimilated so that they can be applied to education. The result  will be a transformation of our classes into the communities they have never been.

The “how” can be best described not in theoretical terms, but in concrete, factual ones. It is the event that creates the community, and, simultaneously the community that creates the event.

 

The condition is that the entire interaction takes place online.

 

Example 1:

a) Assign common projects to small groups of students.

b) Each groups executes a projects and presents them to the class.

c) Each group ranks the projects (or just selects the best.) Alternatively, the evaluation can be done by students on an individual basis.

 

Practicum:

• On different days, each group monitors major news website.
• Each member surveys a different, general-news website.
• The students correspond online (email, instant msg, skype etc) and identify the major national and/or international news items of the day. They prepare a report made of news clips to show their findings and send it by email to the other groups (and the instructor.)
• At the end of the cycle, one of the groups summarizes the finding and focuses on the long-lasting news items of greatest interest.

 

[This is a  less competitive type of activit: the ranking is  eliminated and replaced with a summary of all  the findings in one final document.]

This kind of exercise can be assigned by default at the beginning of the semester and carried out routinely without worrying about the mechanics.

 

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The number of activities that can be created based on technology is countless, limited only by time and imagination.

 

If imagination is a problem, the instructor can request the groups to invent activities that would interest them (they know better than we do what the web has to offer.)

 

Example:

• Each group submits a proposal.
• The proposals are evaluated and ranked by the various groups and the winning project receives credit.

 

Examples of project proposals: (in parentheses the disciplines they could be applied to)

a) Track certain types of announcements in craigslist.com. (English: analysis of spelling, grammar errors. English: emerging of communications conventions, ex: LOL IMMO, WTF. Business: longitudinal study on rent prices.)

b) Compare auction prices for common items on ebay in different countries.

c) Create a class wiki using webmaterials

d) Read/summarize book/movie/play/radio show reviews (English, Foreign Lang, Film, TV, radio.)

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Moving away from the specifics of projects, and focusing instead on general principles, we can encourage the creation of communities using two very simple incentives:

 

1) Have students work in groups and have each student of the group take responsibility for part of the outcome.

2) Have the groups rank the projects, with an ensuing holistic evaluation based on pre-agreed upon criteria.

 

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Ideally all online learning should happen in group situations. However, this may not be always possible. The instructor may be limited to giving regular individual assignments that the student will disseminate to the rest of the class via broadcast media (youtube, blogs, facebook etc.) or simply by email. For instance, read/recite a poem and record soundfile and/or video.

 

In this type of activity, the community ostensibly is formed only for the evaluation. However, something more important takes place: The students become aware of the standards of proficiency and performance of others in the class.

 

This aspect, the knowledge of what the standards are, is sorely missing in today's instruction. Students study and take quizzes, which still amounts to the majority of the final grade, yet they are hardly aware of what kind of performance is expected of them. Having their work published (albeit in anonymous form) exposes them to standards, i.e., the "best practices" employed by their own peers that are organic both to the material and the class learning dynamics.

 

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If we go back and look at the big picture one more time, we will see that the new forms of community created by infotech put the responsibility for their own existence on user contribution.

In class, the responsibility for learning falls on the students, individually and collectively. Even the production of materials and opportunities for learning can be the responsibility of the students themselves.

 

Stretching this scenario to its logical albeit extreme conclusions, we can envision that if the opportunities intrinsic in the medium are exploited to the maximum, we could arrive at the paradox whereby an instructor with almost no knowledge of the technical aspects of technology, could actually teach a course with a very heavy technological component.

 

This would go to great lengths to allay the fears of our technophobic colleagues that barely know how to use email. We could actually suggest to them that email is all they need to integrate online elements into their classes.

 

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One last consideration:

 

If we move from integrating technology into classroom instruction to teaching fully online courses, we will see that the issue of creating communities becomes even more pressing.

With online courses, we remove the physical community of the classroom from the teaching/learning equation. Technology, which is responsible for this loss, is also the method by which a different community can be created in its place, a community that could be even more active and effective than the one that we abandoned.