So far in COMM 131P a few things have been brought to my attention: the use of the written letter has been overthrown by the use of the email, phone calls have been replaced by unlimited texting and IMs and finally our growing technological developments and advancements has brainwashed us with the insistent need for immediacy.
What could possibly be next?
In Randall Stross’ article Online Courses, Still Lacking That Third Dimension he brings up the very real idea that one day face-to-face classes could possibly be replaced with online classes. And not even your typical teacher teaches via email online classes at that, but instead by online classes that do not even require an instructor.
Stross even states that such online courses are already in the works, “The Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University, which has developed about 15 sophisticated online courses, mostly in the sciences, spent $500,000 to $1 million to write software for each.” And while online courses taught only by computer software are already available, no one, including Carnegie Mellon University is ready to put them to use.
One reason for this is that students cannot interact and do not receive vital feedback about their own progress that an instructor and classroom setting provides. And that online classes have the highest drop out rate. And this reason in particular was one of my main worries when registering for COMM 131P's online course. (I'm sure you can imagine my relief when I discovered that our Prof. was a blogger who has the tendency of being available on yahoo chat in the wee hours of the morning).
Anyway back to the topic at hand:
But the need for teacher-student interaction could just be based on the subject being taught. For example in a math class of 600 students, you wouldn’t receive much one-on-one interaction anyway. So in this case a completely computerized online software could just work out.
We’ll have to wait and see where this idea takes itself in the next couple of years.
ARTICLE: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/business/06digi.html?_r=1&ref=technology
No comments:
Post a Comment