Distance education is a redundant term. You can read my take on the subject in On Distance Education.

As you’re working through this muddy field, remember that the institution has a vested interest in assuring that the classroom remains the gold standard. When the only mechanism for education was the classroom, that was an easy case to make. Once there are alternatives, defense mechanisms kick in. Arguments like “You don’t know who’s really in your class” and “Students can cheat more easily” and “I can’t tell who’s not getting it if I can’t see their body language” start popping up. All red herrings intended to create a perception of difference between “classroom” and “distance” education. Anything to maintain the status quo.

But in the words of Dr. Horrible:
“The status is not quo.”

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Most teachers never think about the classroom. While it may seem odd in a course about distance education, we need to acknowledge some realities about that box we call the “classroom.” Please read On the Classroom and tell me what you think about it.

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Many members have not yet posted much and at least a few are still struggling with the technology. As I indicated in a previous post, there is a method in my madness. The EduBuzzword is “Learner Centered.”

Learner centered is one of those oxymoronic phrases that educators use when they mean one thing but want to make it sound better than it is. There really is such a concept as “Learner Centered” but it can’t really be applied to schools where the teacher (or the school) gets to decide what the learner will learn. There’s something amusingly wrong about any program that declares itself to be learner centered and then requires the students to attend class at a given day and time for a prescribed number of hours.

For this class, we’re incorporating tools which you can use to create a learner centered environment of your own and will, perhaps, provide some insight into how some of these learner-controlled technologies can be put to use in online courses.

They fall into three categories — blogs/gators, community, direct message.

Blogs/Gators: I spend some time on this subject earlier in the week so I won’t belabor the point now. The key issue here is that blogs and aggregators provide a mechanism for reading and writing. You automatically become a participant in the professional discourse on Distance Education. These writings — your postings and your responses to others — provide the fodder for my assessment activities. Most of you have noticed that there are no tests in this course. You’ll have to do a final project to demonstrate mastery, but I don’t believe in tests as an assessment tool. Your blogs demonstrate your performance mastery each and every week. For those of you who maintain that online students must be more self motivated, this is one mechanism where I can help those who maybe aren’t quite so motivated on their own. You must write every week. You must read every week. If you want the best grade, you’ll do it almost every day and not wait until Sunday morning to post the minimum amount.

Community: TappedIn provides a community of educators. It’s kind of like a campus. In many ways, it’s what I’d like to see Blackboard become, but don’t get me started on the short comings of Blackboard. It’s too early in the semester. TappedIn gives us a place to hang out, meet people who aren’t in the class, and find people who may have similar goals and interests. Where the blogosphere provides one kind of community, TappedIn provides another — one that includes chat, repositories, and other features that are under your direct control.

Direct Message: IMs provide us with the ability to “see who else is here” in a real time basis. One of the things that we do in a school is look around at the other people while we’re there. In the typical Bboard course, you can’t see who else may be there with you. IM gives you a window into the shared online space that represents each of us as we participate in course activities. Some people will appear a lot. Some won’t appear at all. It’s a way for us to share, not only with me, but with each other.

Later in the course, we’ll be looking at a basic theory called “Equivalency Theory” that provides the theoretic framework for these tools but for now, we’ll just use them as a given and, once you’ve had a chance to become acclimated, we’ll be discussing their use from a meta-cognitive perspective.

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Will Richardson has been one of the front runners in the educational blogosphere. This post on scaring kids reports a phenomenon that’s just way too common.

Weblogg-ed » Let’s Just Scare the #$%& Out of Them, Ok?
Of course, this requires that the teachers in the room have the ability to educate their kids about the dangers AND the potentials of social networks. More often than not, unfortunately, that’s not the case. And I have to say that I’ve been surprised of late in my travels (4,000 miles worth just last week) at the almost palpable fear that a lot of teachers still exhibit when we start talking about putting content online or sharing documents or being transparent. In a lot of ways, it feels like we’re no closer to making social networking a K-12 curricular imperative than we were when I first started doing this four years ago.

Think about what your administrations might do if presented with the notion that teachers need to know about tools like My@pace and Facebook.

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I’ve already seen a couple of the “I’m too old” comments come thru and this post from CogDogBlog showed up:

“I Can’t” is a Self Fulfilling Prophecy » CogDogBlog
But I am tuned in now when I hear people recite thing things they “Can’t” do. Don’t tell me the things you “Can’t” do and tell me the things you are trying to do.

Good advice.

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There’s often some confusion about what we’re doing with all this stuff. There is a method in the madness. The challenge we all face in the networked World 2.0 is trying to keep track and make sense of it all. A key tool for that is the feed aggregator.

See Why a Feed Reader for an explanation.

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And so, another semester begins as we scramble for lost passwords, new books, and the sense that it’s all slipping out of control before it even begins.

Historically, my traditional greeting for the class has been via email. With the advent of blogging and other simple tools, I’m able to create an archive of materials that I can use and re-use pretty much on demand and at any point in any course. Read the greeting at the following address:

Good Morning, Mr. Phelps

Welcome to your new world.

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As the semester winds down and you get ready to evaluate my performance using the IDEA tool, this just in from the Dept of Duh:

Validation for RateMyProfessors.com?
A new study is about to appear in the journal Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education and it will argue that there are similarities in the rankings in RateMyProfessors.com and IDEA, a student evaluation system used at about 275 colleges nationally and run by a nonprofit group affiliated with Kansas State University.

It’s gratifying to know that somebody recognizes that these kinds of comparisons mean, “omg, this one is just as bad as that one!”

Remember that the next time somebody wants to do a study comparing online and classroom courses.

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As the course has unfolded this semester, there has been a recurring theme. I’ve seen the theme echoed throughout the web in practically every environment where educators hang out. The theme revolves around “professional development” and how teachers need more, better, and more relevant professional development. I’ve purposely let this subject hang fire for the last few weeks to see if anybody would make the connection. So far, it hasn’t come out as clearly as I would have liked, altho several people have tap-danced around the edges.

The idea is that teachers seem to believe that professional development is something that’s done to them. “If we could only get the district …” and “When they finally get around to teaching us …” and “They give us the software/hardware/whatever and then don’t train us how to use it …”

In “Welcome to your world,” I explained the model of professional development. What do you want to know right now? What’s keeping you from learning about it?

The tools of Web 2.0 put amazing resources at your fingertips. Wikipedia is a good start for an overview and often has follow on links. Google will give you perhaps more than you want to know, and then, once you’ve done your homework (hint, hint, for all you Classroom 2.0 people), you can start looking for people who are experts in that field. Twitter’s great for general callouts. Facebook is a good place to look for expertise.

With all this information available to you, then, why is it that “professional development” is something that waits for “District” to hold a workshop?

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Dear (Your name here):

You’ve done a lot of “motherhood and apple pie” posturing for the press on Education and Education reform lately. Some of you have asked for ideas, but before you accept the data forms on your websites, you make us give you other people’s addresses.

Sorry. Too close to McCarthyism for my taste. I know it’s just marketing. I’m not interested in your marketing. I’m interested in your policies.

Here are some suggestions:

Problem: Recruiting mid/late career change teachers. Two years as a “fast track” is too slow and often costs too much, requires the candidate move just to get the training, and move again to take a job.

Suggestion: Start a national licensure program. Offer it online so that people anywhere in the country can get the courses they need. Offer incentives to local school districts to support those people with “student teaching” opportunities so that they can get the certification BEFORE they move to the high need schools. Make sure the program actually turns out qualified teachers.

Problem: Professional Development of current teachers lags behind technology. Many tools exist which teachers know nothing about, and which cannot be taught in a 4 hour or 6 hour “professional development day” format. These skills and tools are critical to bringing the nations 7million existing teachers knowledge and skill base up to par.

Suggestion: In conjunction with the certification program above, incorporate a real technology integration program - offered at a distance and using the very tools the teachers need - as continuing education and development credits. These should be REAL courses, not the trumped up “we certify that you had seat time in professional development” but actual courses.

Problem: Highly qualified teachers need specialized knowledge in particular knowledge domains. This is especially true in math and science. Many teachers graduate from university, get the job, and never look back. Their knowledge base becomes stale. Further, it becomes impossible for teachers to transition from one field to another (math to science, for example) because the cost of going back to school to acquire the requisite transcript credits is cost prohibitive.

Suggestion: In conjunction with the above two ideas, incorporate sufficient knowledge domain content to permit experienced teachers to change their fields without having to give up their jobs in order to return to school to get — what amounts to — an additional degree.

Problem: How to implement these ideas?

Suggestion: Hold a grant competition to fund 10 university programs around the country for up to five years to develop (first year) and implement (years two thru five) real programs to provide teacher certification, continuing technology training, and specialized knowledge domain (math, science, language) education to facilitate building teachers’ skill and knowledge base. Stipulate that every program MUST offer the courses completely online, and that any grant funded program MUST charge their local in-state tuition rates for those courses no matter where the student lived.

Your turn.

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