Pass the SoLT

This is just a brief entry for anyone interested in the Open Education Resource (OER) movement. I'm currently involved in an Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) funded research project ($220K) investigating the adoption, level of use and current policy initiatives around OERs in higher education.

Over the next few months we will be surveying the Australian sector to help establish the current 'state of play' along with conducting a thorough literature search and discourse analysis of local, national and institutional policies in this area. More information about the study is available on the project wikiresearcher site. In addition, you can view the Pecha Kuch presentation we have prepared for the EdMedia Conference in Lisbon which provides a useful summary of our objectives and intended outcomes.

On a related topic, the recent eLearning Africa Conference included a highly publicized debate on whether the OER movement is flawed and this newsletter contains a useful summary of the arguments. Tony Bates also provides some critically reflective thoughts on the recent debate, which he points out is likely to continue for some years, and Stephen Downes captures the ebb and flow of the debate in a summarising blog posting.

The debate over the validity of the US Department of Education's meta-analysis on the benefits of online learning continues in a recent edition of Inside Higher Ed. In many respects the argument has become somewhat pointless as context is everything in educational research. As I have pointed out on several other occasions online learning is not a single entity and it can be used to reinforce 19th century style passive forms of learning on 21st century networks. On the other hand, when used well there is the potential to engage learners in active and meaningful learning which leads to deeper knowledge and understandings. The crucial variable is not online learning but the teacher and the specific instructional context. Thus, I have little time for debates which insufficiently account for the educational context. As John Bourne, executive director of the Sloan Consortium, concludes:

“I am exceptionally dubious of studies that tend to compare online education and on-the-ground education without even an attempt to understand the differences in the mechanisms of teaching.”

This week the debate over the effectiveness of online learning was refueled with publication of an article entitled Seed of Doubt in the online daily Inside Higher Ed. The article asks the question: Is online education as good as traditional, face-to-face education?

Rightly the piece acknowledges this is a loaded question. The feature begins by citing a recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research which challenges many of the claims in last year's US Department of Education funded meta-analysis on the growth and effectiveness of online learning. Although the meta-analysis has several flaws, a failing of this type of research, the authors fundamentally misunderstand the potentially transformative nature of new online pedagogies. In the past I have written about how this line of reasoning is like asking whether teaching in a tutorial size room is better than in a traditional lecture theatre. On the surface this sounds like an easy question to answer; all you need to do is randomly assign two groups of students to the two different teaching venues and compare the outcomes.

As a quick aside, how often do we test or challenge the status of the traditional lecture to this simple comparison? What is the answer to this question?

Well the answer will always depend on the instructional context as both venues can be used to 'deliver' education through relatively passive forms of pedagogy. Put another way, the venue itself does not automatically change how someone decides to teach or their deeper pedagogical belief about the nature of effective teaching. That said, the venue is not neutral and it can provide an opportunity to rethink one's teaching, especially in the context of new online and blended forms of learning. But the 'will' is required along with new skills. Facilitating a tutorial discussion requires very different skills than delivering a lecture to a large audience.

The key point is that the teaching space--large, small or virtual-- is only one variable and different types of pedagogical beliefs and teaching approaches can be adopted regardless of the venue. In other words, a bad lecture is a bad lecture--online or offline--just as a great tutorial can be taught in physical and virtual settings.

The real question we need to be asking is what are the specific pedagogies and conditions whereby particular learning environments have particular advantages or affordances? Crude attempts to compare face-to-face instruction with new (and not so new) online approaches (e.g., online videos of lectures) are guilty of assuming that traditional forms of teaching form the gold standard of higher education. It's time to confront our own false clarity and neo-romanticism in this regard as some traditional practices in higher education fall short of indicators of teaching excellence.

I could talk at length about some of the other pedagogical and methodological failings of this latest critique of online learning, but I'm pleased to report that the article finishes with a robust response from Dr Barbara Means, author of last year's original meta-analysis. Her response reminds me of a favourite quote from almost two decades ago from Gab Salomon, then President of the American Educational Research Association, on the complex and ecological nature of educational research:

"The music we enjoy is produced by the sound of symphonic orchestras rather than from the sound of a single flute".