DL critic gets his comeuppance

Actually I suspect that many in academe find DL threatening for any number of reasons. One of them is the change in the power differential between student and professor. In my DL experience, my professors had a different relationship with me than in traditional settings. In DL the professor does not have the opportunity to stand up and lecture before a mass body of students who are lower down on the power hierarchy. The interpersonal relationship is of a different quality, more of a mentoring and tutorial relationship. In DL the learning process is more dependent on the student than on the professor and perhaps some faculty find this hard to swallow. In addition, many DL students are older adults with an established career path and professional experience. This also makes teaching in a DL format a different experience as well. Seasoned professionals returning to school are far less likely to accept being treated the way some 19 year olds in a B & M school often are.

 

I agree fully with Anthony. In fact, the most methodologically sound and accurate study on the effectiveness of online instruction was conducted by Gerald Schutte at Cal State, Northridge (McCollum, 1997). In his study, Schutte randomly divided his statistics class into two groups. One attended class as usual, listening to lectures, handing in homework assignments, and taking examinations and the other took an online version of the course, completing assignments on a World Wide Web site, posting questions and comments to an electronic discussion list, and meeting with their professor in an Internet chat room.
After an orientation session, students in the virtual class went to Dr. Schutte's classroom only for their midterm and final exams. On both tests, Dr. Schutte found, the wired students outscored their traditional counterparts by an average of twenty percent. This disproved the myth on the lack of quality in the online program and, in fact, proved that the online medium is an improvement in the field of quality education.
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McCollum, K. (1997). A professor divides his class in two to test value of online instruction. Chronicle of Higher Education, 43, p. 23.
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Eli
ABD, Touro University International

 

Come to think of it, did Socrates have a classroom or just a stick and some loose dirt?