Humanizing an online learning environment: issues and strategies.
New Learning Environments 4/1/2012
Josefina Quintero Universidad de la Sabana
Humanizing an Online Learning Environment: Issues and Strategies
Technology has been influencing and changing in many aspects our educational field that sometimes teachers and a large community around it have felt things may start to get out of control or turn into a different thing than being useful. In some cases teachers have misunderstood the relevance of migrating the course content to the Web. In some others, students have not taken advantage of the presence of personal, networked devices for the academic benefit. In this short reflection I would talk about some issues and some strategies both teachers and learners can change for better professional development and life-long learning. As Ken Graetz (2006) states in his article “The psychology of learning environments” technology has appeared to change the learning environments directly or indirectly. Therefore, educational institutions should take care at the moment of taking decisions to implement a new design for their curricular programs with the benefits or distractions technology comes with. It is not that technology is bad in itself, however, its use in the different scenarios of learning. Nowadays it is not hard to find courses and lessons taught online. They have been adopted by many institutions with the purpose of distance or F2F teaching and learning. One of the possible misunderstandings with the presence of wireless laptops and cellular phones in the classroom is that some teachers do not know what to do with them or have not worked on the idea of turning them into their friends. Since then, students and teachers have been suffering because of lack of ability to use them for their good. In some situations these electronic devices were taken as distractors and objects which dehumanize understanding and relationships among “normal” people. Due to other perspectives social life started to experiment with the new generation. They seem to be less open when being face to face than when sending instant messages and texting their friends. In order to humanized online education many considerations were put into practice as teachers commenced to use networked devices in meaningful and engaging activities related to students’ own learning. At that time virtual learning started to make sense and build a new community which had the necessity to establish ties by combining the traditional classroom with other learning spaces.
To illustrate a little what I want to say in the previous paragraph, I would like to take some situations of mine as examples of understanding and bringing into context the incredible potential technology may have in my own teaching. First of all, I realized I was not aware of who a digital gener was and what it meant in traditional education. Devices in their hands were just part of their isolation and absenteeism from society, brains wired and called to be unsuccessful people. Fortunately, my perspectives and knowledge about this new generation were tuned in the right way and time to be a facilitator more than the provider of content I used to be. Another issue that seems to dehumanize online learning environments is the poor value some teachers could have given to the classwork itself. While some teachers were complaining about the negative results wireless devices had in the classroom, there were some others who started to unveil the real academic purposes by using them. Instead of making the mere migration of course content to the Web, teachers understood how to design their classes to facilitate learning and students engagement. It was just a matter of perception: from a teacher-controlled class to a more class-related discussion and collaborative work ( Graetz, 2006). Also, it was just a matter of training teachers and administrators for a better use of management systems and other tools easily found and explained on the Internet. That is to say, inexperience with virtual worlds had been the cause for ineffective and unsuccessful teaching. Solutions such as the correct use of platforms brought different views of what technology was for. In addition, the problem of boring classes has also been tackled when students found a sense of mystery and enchantment in what they were doing in any of the two learning environments they pass most of their time: brickand-mortar and bits-andbytes as Ken Graetz called them. Michael Brown (2005) refers to those learning environments as they can happen in real time or asynchronously. The difficulty here points at which one becomes in more or less degree an advantage toward collaboration and real contact with the human side of a person. Once more social aspects seem to worry the normal development of relationships
among participants in a virtual environment. Nonetheless studies have shown that cooperation and collaboration can take place in both types of delivery of knowledge. The issue here is to provide students with tools to connect what is happening in face to face sessions with what happens in virtual spaces. Also, the agreement between the institutions´ objectives and teachers and learners’ goals might be thought as if one or at least strongly related to achieve their purposes. Furthermore, the way we understand the transference of content and instruction into online environments might assure us succeed or failure of our learners (LaBonte, R., et al., 2003). One aspect this author explains when working with students in virtual or physical spaces is that both have to keep the social interaction in order to continue favoring the human side of learning and working together. Finally, students need to take responsibility of their own learning process. Meaning that the teacher can act as a facilitator, but if the learner does not bring their part to build knowledge, not many positive and enriched outcomes can come out from that relationship (LaBonte, R., et al., 2003). Succeed in learning and teaching depends on both parts. Technology alone is not enough to experiment succeed. It is important and imperative that education be planned and directed to the engagement and enchantment of all members of the educative field.
References Brown, M. (2005). Learning spaces. Chapter 12. In Oblinger, D., & Oblinger, J. (Eds.) 2005. Educating the Net generation. Available electronically at www.educase.edu/learningspaces LaBonte, R., Crichton, S. & Allison, D. (2003). Moderating Tips for Synchronous Learning Using Virtual Classroom Technologies. Odyssey Learning Systems Inc. Retrieved from http://odysseylearn.com/Resrce/text/e-Moderating%20tips.pdf [Available as an E resource] Ken A. Graetz. The psychology of learning environments. Chapter 6. In Oblinger, D. G. (Ed.) (2006). Learning spaces. Available electronically at www.educase.edu/learningspaces