Many colleges and universities have reached a point of comfort with online learning and that comfort has produced a complacency that might erode any gains made by the early years of efforts to excel. For the first ten years of online learning, schools had a rapidly changing environment of course management systems. Those environments ran from simple Internet hosting programs which allowed for the posting of assignments and the sharing of e-mail to the eventual housing of whole course areas that included messaging, test creation tools, grade recording systems, and links to embedded audio and video elements of a course. By 2005 many schools had found a course management system that they could live with, and they bought into long term agreements that gave them the security of consistency.
The early years of online learning produced the need to change online learning formats because of the rapid evolution of the course management system. Sophistication of the new systems meant revising what was presented and how it was presented. Where communication with students began with swapping e-mail comments, the newer systems allowed for public exchanges on screen between teacher and student and between the students themselves. With these changes came the recognition that teachers could use this public forum for discussions on topics that had earlier not been possible. It also became apparent that a greater number of students would participate in a discussion because the dynamic of the physical classroom where one or two dominant talkers spoke for everyone else was no longer the case. Everyone had an equal opportunity to speak up and make a point, and they did. In addition to the growth of ways to involve the student in classroom discussion, we have begun to provide a variety of media presentations as well. Video and audio are added to the class for students to use to broaden their exposure to course content. The speeches of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Winston Churchill, and John Glenn can all be brought into the class with the same urgency that they were delivered originally. Now, the manipulation of 3D objects, the virtual use of images and sounds have given even more depth to the learning environment. But these learning options have also come with changing student needs.
The traditional students of 2010, the ones just out of high school, have brought with them an abundance of experience with the virtual world and the manipulation of content in a way not dreamed of just a few years ago. They are as comfortable with the virtual world as they are the physical world. The expectations of the current student are for classes to be interactive, engaging, and fun. The new class must in large part revolve around the student as an active participant not a passive receptor of information. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in an article by Marc Prensky, where he discusses the Digital Native and the Digital Immigrant. The good side of this story is that we currently have the tools and expertise to meet the needs of the new student and to make the experience more worthwhile for the nontraditional student as well.
Thinking Inside the Box
Realization of what we have to work with and who our students are is the first step in meeting the needs of today's learner. Software provides us with the tools to meet student needs. Primary among those new tools are SoftChalk, WIMBA, and 3D imaging software. Gaming is another way to meet the needs of the diverse learner. Teachers also come to the courses they teach with new concepts of what a class should look like and how it can function as a learning environment. Imagination/innovation is a requirement of the new course structure. Colleges cannot rely on yellowed notes or aged software for the classroom of 2010. Seeing the course content in an interactive way brings all students closer to the content and gives them more ownership in what they take away from that course. Costs are not the factor they once were. Open Source materials and Open Textbook materials are a step toward a level playing field.
All of these resources will be discussed in the presentation to assist the participant in discovering the power of current course reinvention and the influence of the new student on course design.
