The History of the Future of Distance Education in Alaska
ADEC Panel September 29, 2005
fake blog ping, doorst5; holiday 100 search: search lookup | home loans
The Current Situation
- Distributed designers throughout Alaska with varied goals
- Distributed deployment of courses with various common carriers
- Decentralized survival with uneven spread of rewards
- More of a University issue than a K-12 issue? Not a threat to current teaching assignment for K-12 ed…
- Educators care about the students, but there are admin issues that can cause confusion
- Contractual issues with unions/associations, is it part of workload or not. Staffing impacts.
- Feeling desperate makes it easy to embrace innovation in delivery and pedagogy
- Nervous about students leaving the districts for home schooling, etc.
- As some needed courses are lost (AP, etc) faculty become more willing to look at alternative offerings.
- Interlocked student body – students take courses from more than one institution
- Online delivery accompanied by a need to preserve existing non-online delivery modes
- Uneven appreciation for the real and potential quality of distance learning
- Distance education is seen as a replica of onsite education
- The reality of being decoupled from particular place (brick and mortar) is being obviously and actively challenged.
Motivators for Change
- Increased demand for enrollment
- Increased number of non-traditional students
- Increased competition for students with outside vendors
- Change in student expectations for customized, personalized instruction
- Digital natives and their expectations/understandings
- Increase in Social Networking software enabling folksonomy categorization
- Increase in meta-tagging to enable a “discovery” mode versus a “hierarchical categorization:.(individual storing of knowledge – desktop search)
Limiting Forces
- Lack of easy articulation agreements to enable “swirling”
- Uneven connectivity
- High cost of software applications
- High barriers to participation for distributed student cohorts due to centralized revenue generation and student credit hour accounting
- Social software can have unintended effects in terms of filtering (user names, etc) and security
- How do you protect kids?
- A new emerging literacy (John Seely Brown)
- Obligation for safety rules and regulations and policies
- Fear driving our teaching techniques
- Lack of knowledge/education of the teachers, faculty development/training
- People don’t actually change, they talk about it, but in the end it’s hard and not “necessary”
- How to subvert from within at the K-12 level
- If you enable a student to use a tech and they find trouble, who is responsible?
Whaddaya Gonna Do?
- Support decentralized survival with negotiated revenue sharing
- Lower barrier to participation threshold with easy creation of interlocked low enrollment classes AKICE
- Conceptualize distance education as safe havens for students embedded in communities of practice
- Collaborate for common purchase of software tools
- Require all teachers to take an online class… just as students should
- The 6th graders of today will be the teachers of tomorrow— what will they expect in college?
- Use tech as lever: provide information admin and instructors need through the technology itself.
Presentations