I started my career teaching online a while back when 56K dial-up connectivity was king of the information superhighway (now called the Internet). It started on the tech support team making sure the latency on the audio is good enough for the student to hear the moderator. I remember being fascinated chatting with customers from Asia. Being an Atlanta based company, this was huge. Think about it, real-time chat with someone in China; Incredibly amazing! It was full of emotion and torture at the same time, since our audio transmission was always insufficient for the client to understand the conference that was being delivered. So during those times, the core issue was connectivity. All data (course content ie PowerPoint, Word, Jpegs) had to be reduced so that it could easily fill the page. The biggest problem was the delay time or the latency of the audio. It was choppy enough that you can’t understand it. So, as a contingency, we provide customers with a phone number to call. Content, such as assignments and tutorials, was stored in each of the student web spaces and could be accessed asynchronously. Each class had an element of face-to-face interaction and some type of live interaction. If you take the old brick and mortar platform of reading and discussion, this form is what we have come to expect in any classroom. This wasn’t that long ago.
So what has changed? Did the old school instructors, teachers or facilitators forget their lesson plan? Or, they are a new generation of educators who rely more on just creating the content and pushing it to the learners (build it and they will have to do it). I see more and more eLearning systems transforming into these kind of library systems where most of the content (course items) is manufactured asynchronously. This is good because it defines what online learning is all about, flexibility. Students and users can take their time, when possible, and go to class. It works for some (as I mentioned in my other articles) but is it better learning? Where is the element of good interactivity, the human sense of class? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for flexibility. I, like the rest of the online learning community, like the fact that I’m not relegated to time and location when I’m learning online. So if this is the case for students, why am I talking about replicating old-school learning practices as “real-time” responses to student concerns in an online classroom?
Well, just like the results you get from a live “offline” discussion, you’ll get a good assessment of a student’s knowledge of the topic when you participate in a collaborative conversation. Additionally, this improves the Instructor’s ability to modify course content because it will be apparent in discussions which area needs further elaboration or explanation. This makes the learning experience more exciting because it replicates an old school kind of platform in an online environment. With this platform, we can start to connect better with our peers, as the discussion has a much more organic structure. As a complement to the standard post and reply method, live discussions can elicit excitement, fear, anxiety, and really all the emotions common to a physical classroom discussion. By doing so, we eliminate outside feedback, such as disagreement noise or unsolicited rude comments. However, it also includes other factors such as audio claps for agreement and laughter for clever comedic responses.
What do we do to meet in the middle? How can we get some kind of immediate interaction with the flexibility of the asynchronous platform? In other words, extract the beauty of both worlds. Well, not all the juice, but most of it. After all, this is online learning. Well, we can create simulations with full web 2.0 interactivity. Designers and developers can create a fully integrated lecture with the AI response system to derive the best answer to a student’s question related to the topic. Think about it; Let’s say a Business Instructor needs to give a lecture on the differences in management style. Then a student asks a question related to what style does she possess in her work? The developer can create a database of questions to try to understand more about the behavior of the student and compare them with the already existing answers built in relation to the particular behavior indicated. So it’s not live. It is not synchronized. It’s not even exciting. But it will provide a quick response for real-time interaction and still has the main component of flexibility.