Article: Getting the Mix Right Again: An update and theoretical rationale for interaction ..by..Anderson
Anderson attempts to define interaction at the beginning of the article since interaction has long been valued in education (Anderson, 2003). There are three modes of interactions: student-teacher, student-student and student-content. The body of the article is mainly used to discuss the equivalency of interaction among student interaction, teacher interaction and content interaction. Anderson believes that getting the mix right means balancing the three interactions in a way that it’s most cost effective and meets global demand for effective and affordable lifelong learning opportunities. Towards the end of his article, he gives examples of applying the equivalency theorem to popular education delivery modes.
Having read Anderson’s article, it got me thinking about how we, teachers who are interested in working with non-traditional classrooms, should really be careful of getting the balance right. For me, long distance learning such as web-based course should require less student-teacher interaction and require more of student-content interaction because one of the objectives of long distance learning is to save teacher time. Then, teachers can use their valuable time in planning, designing and evaluating courses. Now, there might be a question about teacher’s feedback. Students need teacher’s feedback.. of course I agree with that. However, I think that could be done periodically and as needed. It doesn’t have to be too frequent.
This is my first time taking an online course. I found that this course provides me with lots of student-content interaction by asking me to read the assigned reading and student-student interaction by asking me to respond to classmates’ blogs. I like the course so far so good.
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16 years ago
2 comments:
Kwan, you mention feedback (student-teacher interaction) as being important. I agree that excessive or too frequent feedback can get to the point where it the student doesn't gain the skills and confidence needed for self-correction. Perhaps the delivery (medium) used for feedback makes a difference. In contrast, for student to teacher feedback, there are online/computer-based assessments that appear to be popular with Australian Universities. I actually just completed a distance-delivered ESP course through the University of Newcastle in Australia, but didn't experience any major online assessment. However, there's an interesting article on the subject at: http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/03/online.html
Sio
Hello Kwan, thanks for sharing. I do agree that online instructors need to spend time designing and evaluating the class frequently, and even adjusting teaching method or content to better fit students' needs! For me most of the designing should be ready inadvance, before the students enroll in, most of the online courses at IU are like this. But the more important is to "monitor" the ongoing class from time to time, I personally had a very bad online course learning experience that the instructor just left us to self-study everything, without interactions with her. It turned out we students were just figuring out a way to "survive" as if we didn't have an instructor. I could only say online instructors may also have very different teaching styles/beliefs.
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