Group Project Progress

The Group Project for Assignment 3 is steadily moving forward. Although I am fortunate to be in a great group, I think that we initially got off to a slow start because we were very focused on finding realistic figures regarding our information security course. Once we got over the hurdle of figures, all other elements of the project have come together pretty well.

We’ve had meetings once a week, using the Study Group chat room, since the beginning of the project and have all been involved in the decision making for the various elements of our course. Additionally, we’ve all located and shared really great resources to aid in the development of the project.

Through our research, we’ve reviewed several cyber security courses that are currently offered at universities. The variety of these types of courses is almost overwhelming. Many institutions offer some sort of information security degree or certificate program, so planning a scenario and figuring out the finances for a mock course has been extremely interesting. I’m leading the PowerPoint development and crafting a formal course description for our course.  My other group members are taking the lead on the scenario and the spreadsheet. All group members are providing input on all of these efforts. This is a true group experience!

Although I work on online courses by day, I had absolutely no concept of the costs of developing a course or program before taking OMDE 606. This course, as a whole, and Assignment 3 have given me a better understanding of the thought and planning that must go into developing a new course.

Tony Bates Wimba Session

The Wimba session with Tony Bates was very informative and provided me with a wealth of knowledge regarding both the costs that go into creating online learning, as well as the steps in creating an e-learning plan. A few items stuck out to me during the Wimba session with Tony Bates.

First, the notion of surveying students regarding feedback on course content and design is troubling. To me, a lack of informative and useful responses from students seems to be a very weak aspect of the current online learning process. Standard surveys, as mentioned by Bates, typically do not provide a great deal of useful information and have low response rates. One strategy that Bates mentioned as helpful in the course evaluation process is the use of student focus groups. This is a great idea! Another idea for student feedback that I have experienced in online courses is a conference thread towards the end of the class that prompts students to answer content and technology-related questions about the course.

Another item that I found to be interesting during the session was the idea of providing students with a variety of options to complete their assignments in order to better accommodate students’ different learning styles. This is an exciting idea to me, as both an online learner and an Instructional Designer. In another one of my classes this semester, this topic was also discussed and seems to be an emerging idea in the online learning field. The idea that I could potentially submit an assignment through a video presentation, an audio presentation, or a written paper, etc., is amazing.

Third, the notion of creating courses that are designed with students with disabilities in mind is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, in my professional experience, courses are created for the masses and when a student needs additional support, there is a frenetic scrambling to get the student what they need in the appropriate format. I think that this is ridiculous and diminishes the student’s learning process because materials are tossed together at the last minute. The most sensible way to remedy this issue would be to design courses, as best as possible, with all learners in mind.

The "Undeserving"

One of the discussions that I found most interesting during the conference with Greville was the discussion around the “deserving” and the “undeserving”. Like one of my fellow classmates, Cynthia, who stated, “I've experienced conversations where smug decision-makers want to keep higher education for the "deserving"; for those who have proven that they are committed to success”, I have also experienced similar conversations such as this.

In my experience, this conversation came about during a company conference in which the topic of discussion was multicultural awareness and sensitivity in the online classroom. This topic was of importance because at the time, there were a large number of Nigerian students enrolled in programs at a UK school that we create courses for. Some students were having problems with the course materials and certain deadlines. The discussion revolved around designing course content in a non-Western exclusive manner and maintaining a cultural awareness during the course development process. 

Unfortunately, a couple of my colleague’s felt that designing course materials in this way would result in “dumbing” down the content. Also, there was a feeling that these Nigerian students were probably not afforded the same quality of education as their peers in the online programs and this was why they experienced difficulties.

Although I can understand the latter, the notion that designing with a multicultural awareness in mind is “dumbing” down the content seems like a pretty prejudice statement to me. This way of thinking should not have any place in distance education. I do wonder, however, what is one to do in a situation where online students are meeting in the same classroom, but may not have similar educational experience or backgrounds? One of the original goals of distance education is to provide education to students who want it, with limited enrollment requirements. This is a great idea, but I wonder how well it works in practice and how many students suffer in silence because they can’t grasp particular concepts.

This varying level of experience in certain areas made me think about undergrad and how students were assessed in Math and English and if a student scored below the requirement level, they were required to take remedial classes for these subjects. I’m not sure how many online programs offer this, but I certainly haven’t experienced this at UMUC or at any of the online schools that I work with professionally. I wonder how much it would cost to assess students. Also, what would be the cost to implement remedial courses for students?

I did a quick search in the library to identify some literature on remedial online college courses and couldn’t really find anything. I found a lot of articles related to remedial community college classes, some articles that mentioned high school classes, and a few that discussed traditional universities, but nothing for online programs.

Rumble's "Social Justice, Economics, and Distance Education"

Rumble's article explores ways that distance education can be used, as a cost-effective effort, in order to improve “bad lives”.  I totally agree with Rumble's opening assertion that “education…is a fundamental right” (p. 167).  Although I wholeheartedly agree with this statement, history has shown that higher education is seen as more of a business and a place for those in the elite class, as opposed to a “fundamental right” for all. Even today, when one encounters someone from a lower socioeconomic class who has graduated from an Ivy League school, it is viewed as a nearly impossible success story and a welcome surprise, not at all something that is seen as normal.

Rumble asserts that the state or government should “ensure that education is provided cheaply and flexibly to meet the lifelong needs of some 9.4 million people in 2050” (p. 168). This number is staggering and makes me wonder, how can the government ensure that access to education is available for this number of people? Also, is this something that the government wants to do? The state of primary education that serves students of lower socioeconomic status, at least in the United States, is pretty reprehensible in certain areas of the country. This primary education that the government is supposed to be providing is, in recent years, being overshadowed by a much higher quality of education that these students are receiving from charter schools that are not run by the government.

With this said, my belief in the government regarding its priorities when it comes to education, in general, is not high. Essentially, I am not sure if the government would want to ensure equal access to education for 9.4 million people.

Rumble states, “The implications of my position for distance educators are varied, but they include a re-emphasising of the humanitarian mission of distance education as a means of meeting lifelong educational needs of massive numbers of people” (p. 168). This ideology is amazing and is one of the reasons why I enjoy the field of distance education so much. Unfortunately, not everyone working in the distance education field has this humanitarian mission in mind when creating and teaching courses. Is this because some educators find themselves suddenly creating courses for students in various corners of the world and no longer engaging in traditional education with their local students, who they know and identify with? Or could this be because the same disparities that are seen in traditional education are spilling over to distance education, despite its humanitarian beginnings? Or is it the fear of the “unknown”?

Either way, I believe that in order for distance education to meet the needs of all students around the world, those working on and teaching courses for these students must understand the humanitarian purpose of distance education.

Reference:

Rumble, G. (2007). Social justice, economics and distance education. Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, 22(2), 167-176.

Reflection on the 2nd Assignment

Unfortunately, Assignment 2 did not go as well as I had hoped. Like some of my fellow classmates, this assignment was difficult for me because of the heavily-infused mathematical aspects of the assignment. Initially, creating the Excel file with the required items was pretty simple, but connecting the Excel sheet to some of the questions in the question and answer part of the assignment was a lot more difficult for me. Number crunching and equations typically make me panic, but tying these numbers to the different costs was overwhelming.

I realize that by working in the distance education field, one must be knowledgeable about the different types of costs that must be researched, accounted for, and budgeted. As an Instructional Designer, my hope is that I won’t have to worry about costing items too much. In my experience, that has been more of a concern of Project Managers and those in executive positions. Still, I wish that I had grasped the concepts a bit better in order to turn in an accurate and completed assignment. Better luck next time.

Inequality in Distance Education? Costs and Economics of Advanced Technologies

A fellow classmate posted the 2012 Horizon Report. This is the third or fourth Horizon Report that I’ve read and this is probably the first time that I’ve truly thought about the implications of the technologies discussed in the report, as it relates to costs and economics.  I thought about the distance education institutions that are currently struggling with providing their students with basic distance education services and wondered how or if they would ever be able to implement some of these “fancy” technologies in their distant classrooms.

This made me think about the fact that distance education has been implemented by many institutions, such as the Open University, in order to provide access to all those who seek an education, but who do not have appropriate access to the educational institutions in their communities.

The notion that distance education is an equalizer may not be so true because all distance education institutions are not on the same playing field. The institutions that may be able to implement some of the more complex technologies such as gesture-based computing for students and learning analytics for instructors will, by using these technologies, provide their students and instructors with a technological advantage over students who are using less-recent technology resources in order to complete their online classrooms.

In thinking about this topic, I realized that as an Instructional Designer, by day, and an online student, by night, the technologies that I use for these two segments of my life are totally different. By day, I use Blackboard, which many see as the “gold standard”, to create courses for various universities, including Walden University. By night, I use the less advanced WebTycho, which many students complain about in almost all of the courses that I’ve taken here at UMUC. The fact that UMUC is still using Webtycho is very confusing to me, especially since I’m enrolled here in a Distance Education program. I realized that if I were in a different work position in which I didn’t have access to and experience using more advanced technologies, such as Blackboard, I would probably not be as enriched as a student.

So my question is--how do smaller, less financially able institutions compete in the distance education world with institutions that provide students with online learning experiences that are enriched by the use of highly interactive and advanced technologies?