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| Image: opensourceway, CC BY-SA, via Flickr |
With the pace of technological change in the world being so fast and only gathering momentum, the variety and types of change we are constantly adjusting to often get mulled together in one strange conglomerate we like to call modernity. In the last 10 years alone, there have been huge paradigm swings taking place all around us, with technology at the nexus. For example, the move from analog to digital in terms of our entertainment (books, music, data), or the shift from isolation to connectivism in our relationships with people, content and systems - there is this massive and expanding interconnection at play, tethering us to other people, things, and ideas all the time, essentially through the touch of a button (so cliche, I know).
With all of this available, why are students going to colleges with physical campuses? Can't they get everything they need from distance education? According to David Wiley in his keynote at an Open Education hosted by Penn State in 2009, the primary reasons students are still electing to attend physical college campuses ahead of distance learning programs are the academic content, the support services, the social life, the institutional reputation or familial associations, and the degree in-hand.
But, he argues, each of these needs/reasons can be met online with existing and open resources - as degrees are merely "credentials" we all get and take with us through life.
Wiley claims that everything traditional, face-to-face universities provide to their students is already being provided by someone else. And, he adds, "universities do what they do well, but the cost to consumers is higher now than it has ever been, accompanied by steep budget cuts for institutions and their programs" (Wiley, 2009)
He even goes one step further to say that web-based courses are no longer innovative enough to keep up with the pace of change in today's student's world. Wiley characterizes e-learning as generic, isolated, and closed.
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| Image: opensourceway, CC BY, via Flickr |
The rest of his keynote is spent explaining how openness underpins those values missing in distance education. Wiley also mentions that learning management systems should work the same way as social networks - making the consumers the creators.
This is about the only part I agree on, not because I think he's wrong, or uninformed, but because I'm a working student taking online classes and it also happens that I work in designing distance learning curriculum. There is certainly something to be said for the value of openness in education, and teaching, and I have valued nearly all of Wiley's talks and writings to some extent.
The trouble I have with them is their impracticality. I can't see how we make the next step in education today, or why we should. While learning is a personal endeavor, and making students active participants in their own learning is great pedagogy, I don't have as many problems with the traditional delivery methods of education as Wiley seems to.
I realize the great utility in driving down cost - I'm someone who is still paying on educational loans and is paying for current credits. And yet I still can't follow the path Wiley is walking - at least, not all the way.
That's because I don't see distance education as an isolating mechanism with closed, generic content tucked away behind a firewall. Just like anything else in education - or in any context, really - the information you get is only as good as the source. And I like to think that in my job I play an important role in infusing the source, i.e. the LMS we use, with information that is useful, relevant, and designed for the working adult learner.
Furthermore, I don't see Open Teaching and Distance Education as oppositional. They can complement each other. If the Open Movement is everything it claims to be, and its proponents really believe in empowering learners by providing them with choice and value in their educational endeavors, then let's work together.
Let's take what's great about traditional classroom learning (because there are a lot of great things), what's exciting and new about open teaching and openness in education, and blend it with the power and robustness of online education technology and pedagogy.
