When students return to school this fall, more of them will find their classroom courses supplemented by online resources—the gradual fulfillment of the online education revolution promised a decade ago.
It has taken some time for the classroom to catch up with the tech, but the exponential growth of e-learning suggests that has changed.
For some students in far-flung northern Ontario towns, courses absent from their local schools will be just a click away thanks to millions invested by the provincial government.
University students across the country are already used to going online for assignment details and the syllabus, but more will now find their professors podcasting the last lecture or posting power point presentations for download. Video games, vilified the world over for gobbling up the sunlight of too many young people, are now being co-opted for engaged education.
And the best part is that many of these resources are available for free.
E-learning is an ambiguous term with different meanings to different people. At the most basic level, it is education empowered through technology and can be as simple as a visit to Wikipedia, the questionable at times but always informative online encyclopaedia.
At the most advanced level, students can be put through the paces of an online education complete with readings, audio and video materials, interactive educational video games, quizzes, tests, and final assignments.
Early Adopters
Universities have been quick to adopt and advance e-learning, and many have seen an exponential adoption of technology. One of the most popular platforms for delivering course content online is called Blackboard, a commercial course management system that can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year for licensing and support.
But for many the cost is worth it. University of Cincinnati adopted Blackboard a few years ago and has seen adoption skyrocket. Professors went from just posting a course syllabus to podcasting lectures and now 85 percent of students use it in at least one of their courses.
Tim Richardson, a professor at Seneca College and the University of Toronto has been an avid adopter of e-learning since the days when a person had to actually know html to create their own website. His name tops Google’s results for the term “ecommerce professor,” a testament to the amount of content he has put on online and the number of times other websites have linked to it.
But taking advantage of the technology requires an education for the educators, he notes.
“To be a person using e-learning, you have to know it yourself...if you do, it can be very useful.”
Richardson has created his own website to side-step policy restrictions placed on instructors using university webspace. His site is a craigslist of content, with everything from to youtube videos, audio clips, and embedded links to other resources.
He says his online efforts make material available to students outside of class so he can use classroom time for more engaging discussions.
“So instead of them sitting in class and trying to scribble down the content, you put it online and let students download it... Then you can spend more time in the classroom engaging the students in interesting topics.”
While the danger in posting all his course materials online is that others will steal them and use them to turn a profit, Richardson says the benefit beyond student engagement is that these materials can be used by other teachers to enrich their own curriculum.
Many universities share Richardson’s attitude and some offer a dizzying amount of free learning. The renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) offers 1900 courses, on everything from Chinese to the Aerodynamics of Viscous Fluids, through MIT Open Courseware.
Although the Poynter Institute’s online News University charges for many of its journalism webinars (online real-time video seminars) they offer some for free in addition to a number of interactive flash video games that put students through the paces of being a reporter.
Provincial Investments
Patricia MacNeil, a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of Education which funds e-Learning Ontario, says the province will be investing $6 million in e-learning for K-12 in the 2009-2010 school year.
The province started with a pilot project of 11 school boards with 15 courses that 860 students enrolled in 2006. By 2007, every school board in the province had signed on and the province now offers 83 courses through e-learning. While stats are not yet available for 2008-2009, in the 2007-2008 school year, 23,000 students registered in online classes.
For northern schools facing declining enrolment, MacNeil says e-learning can mean the difference between having a course or not.
“When you look at declining enrolment across the province, e-learning is one of the elements that can ensure students, regardless of where they are, have access to a wide variety of quality programs.”
A school board might have one teacher giving an e-class to students in different towns, or two school boards collaborating to share the cost of having a class online, she said.
Tanya Blazina, a spokesperson for the Ontario’s Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities says the province will invest $2.5 million this year to open 12 new e-learning network centres and to support five centres already up and running in southern and eastern Ontario. Each centre is receiving about $150,000.
Other provinces are pursuing a similar plan. British Columbia has put muscle behind BCcampus, a collaborative online learning initiative established to assist public post-secondary institutions provide online instruction.
BCcampus serves the entire public post-secondary system in BC, including students, educators, and institutions. It buys and develops technology to help university offer online learning. BCcampus also administers an online program development fund and trains instructors in education technology.
Expensive Opportunity
But this online opportunity comes with a price. Some software can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to license and support. There is also a need to train and encourage teachers and professors to use it, although there are free, open-source alternatives like Moodle that can fill the role for a fraction of the price for schools willing to roll up their sleeves and read the self-help tech forums.
Sometimes the cost is offset by the private sector. Microsoft Canada has been opening ProTech Media Centres in Ontario and is looking into opening similar centres across Canada, though they may be virtual rather than physical.
In Toronto, the ProTech Media Centre opened at the Kennedy/Eglington branch of the Toronto Public Library this August features a computer lab loaded with software for students to learn everything form video production to book keeping. Centennial College will help develop courses while a local non-profit will administer it. The centre aims to close the digital divide between Toronto’s rich and poor.
But some see other potential downsides to e-learning aside from cost. Research by University of Toronto psychology professor Steve Joordens has found that students learning from videos, where the ability to rewind and fast forward is thought to be a benefit, don’t necessarily benefit from the technology.
While that tech advantage helps in courses that demand memorization, it can result in students learning in a “surface” way in courses that teach cognitive skills.
“In courses that focus more on teaching students cognitive skills—like the Calculus courses we examined—those who pause and rewind the lecture a lot actually perform worse,” he said in a handout provided by the university’s media relations department.
While Joordens noted that online lectures do increase student satisfaction, he said it was important to study the technology and its impact on learning.
“It’s not sufficient to simply introduce a new innovation because it seems like a good idea,” said Joordens.
“Any such introduction must be accompanied by research that assesses the merits and potential disadvantages of new technology. This research then shapes future implementations and allows us to inform our students on how to most effectively incorporate these new approaches into their learning strategies.”
