Online education has become an effortless machine these days churning out programs, and working with millions of students worldwide. It is a challenging enterprise that has created flexibility, creative tension, and unfettered exploration beyond the classroom walls, as well as fears from some brick-and-mortar institutions who wonder if they will someday be supplanted. The efficacy of what goes on within the online educational enterprise has proven itself in many ways as a valuable educational partner (Taylor & Maor, 2002; Bell, 2007; Benton, 2009). The most important question that is often mentioned is: how well do students feel that online education makes them competent for future goals and workplace achievements? A more interesting question is--How is learning being changed by the online learners in this particular learning environment? And conversely, how are students being changed by online education? Some of the current learning theories like situated learning, ecological learning and constructivism can become conversation partners with online learning to answer this question (Niewolny & Wilson, 2009; Worthem, 1999; Rolhlfing, Rehm & Goecke, 2003). Student narratives of personal transformation need to be evaluated within the online learning environment to see how online learning impacts these multi-faceted stories. What does online education do to a person who works from home alongside family, at various hours of the day, with thousands of articles and books available at the touch of a few keystrokes? How does online education impact the ecological boundaries of home, family, workplace, time off from work, hobbies, vacation time? Does the learning that a student receives and works with from online learning centers make life decisions easier, clearer, more muddled, more creative, less linear? How does online learning’s insertion in the home make life more or less integrated, problematic or eventful? On the other hand, how do learners impact the story of online learning? What learners perceive as important depends on their situated knowledge, the place where they are digesting and producing their knowledge and their interactions with the larger entities of knowledge (Lave, 1997; Saxe, 1992). How is online learning impacted by students whose lives either intersect with the course they are taking (or not)? How does working with my spouse on a course (since he or she is sitting alongside me) impact my answers to the test I am doing? What does my child in my lap bring to the paper I am struggling over? How will the layoff at work make me study the leadership principles in my next course, besides taking back my laptop (Bronfenbrenner & Evans, 2000)? Even more than that, online education does not always provide conversation partners in its process of education, so my family or roommate may be the only people I actually talk to about the course. And these available people may not have the investment or interest in the course of study. Does the online education system provide systems, personnel and instructors who understand that students often crave and need to personalize the education they receive, perceive, create, share and bring to the table? The student ecologically is bound up in family, culture, workplace interactions, creative personal philosophies, and tableaux of expertise. That is how the ecological system of the student can change and want more from online education (Gibson, 1986; Bronfenbrenner & Evans, 2000; Vygotsky, 1987). For the online education purveyors, ecological setting is that prepackaged knowledge is sent long distances to the student who is supposed to respond enthusiastically and learn everything in sight. How do the instructors of online education respond to the disparate environments of students who do not have the ecology of instructors or the tradition of academia in their backpacks? What does online learning need to learn from its participants in order to be more effective in meeting the stories and dreams of their participants? How will online education change because of the distance, and at the same time the closeness of participant’s embeddedness in their own environments as they learn? A person’s situatedness in his or her environment has a profound impact on success in learning as well as how much a person will perceive as a successful learning experience (Lave, 1988; Brown, Collins & Duguid, 1989). It is important to acknowledge that many online learners are in the situation of directly learning something from their various environments instead of being artificially separated from them by a makeshift learning opportunity in the classroom. Yet online learning may fall victim to the notion of having separated knowledge online that has to be demonstrated in a fake and unnatural setting. This presentation will seek best practices for online learning in the situated representations of the learner to see if situated cognition and embedded ecological frameworks can make this more apparent to online educational institutions.
