Learning Technology: Learning "With": Online Learning

Online Learning

• Overview:  Simply using the information technologies as new media in which traditional teaching is perpetuated has led to failure. Is it unrealistic to think that introducing Internet access to schools and universities will improve learning in those institutions? Online or Net learning is not a panacea, and will come to complement other, more traditional forms of instruction. 
  
  And yet, its impact is expected to be enormous, with radical consequences for education at all levels, for training in business organizations, and in society generally. Two principal features of Net learning need to be considered up front: its richness in information and its poorness in process. Interactivity is the learning ingredient that assists skills development.
  
  While Net technology provides a push in the general direction of rethinking education, it is not, however, a fix for poor teaching. Those who wish to resist the push will undoubtedly do so until new realistic models of teaching fully take center stage in educational thinking.
  
  While a great deal of money and effort have gone into the production of educational software and in the training of teachers, some of it leading to excellent results, the fact of the matter is that schools and pedagogy have not changed that much from what they were before.
  
  To repeat the same mistake now with the introduction of the Net into the schools will simply lead to wasted money, energy, and hopes; it will also become yet another example of the struggle with the unfamiliar and the natural tendency to adapt the technology to the environment one is familiar with.
  

More...............................  Online Learning and Teaching in an Information-Rich Context