Pitt and Clark's work is a place to send beginners who are worried about online instruction and who may view it as isolating or even second rate; the vision that is presented here is one that is exciting and innovate, if a tad uncritical.
While their paper does include a brief discussion of learning styles (really only referencing the fact that different students learn in different ways), the heart of the paper is a list of ten ways of managing instruction. These ten ways are available to teachers in both off and online classes. They include:
learning contracts, lecture, discussion, self-directed learning, mentorship, small group work, the project method, collaborative learning, case study, and forum.Each of the ten methods is defined; the authors then do a very nice job of translating those methods for cyberteachers. What might, for instance, the lecture look like in an online course?
Online lectures can be presented in a variety of ways. Lecture notes can be placed on a web page for the learner to review. Notes can be put together in a packet for the learner to refer to and either downloaded in file form using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or sent via regular postal mail. Lectures can also be presented via audio or video over the Internet. Since online lectures must, of necessity, be carefully prepared in advance, they are likely to be shorter and more to the point than many lectures in live classroom which, all too often, can extend far beyond the attention span of even adult learners.What is of interest here is that there are a number of means presented that use a number of technologies and bandwidths. Too, I appreciate that the authors discuss the differences between the lecture in cyberspace and the lecture in real world.
And the text is heavily sprinkled with citations to many scholarly references, a fact that makes this site even more valuable to the beginner hoping to find her or his way into what make cyberteaching work.
Still, I have to give this paper one thumbs down -- access issues are mentioned and downplayed making connectivity problems seem much less of a concern that they in fact remains for many institutions, many students and many teachers: ". . . easy, inexpensive access for learners and educators makes the Internet one of the educator['s] most important tools (citing McManus, 1997). Whether or not the Internet is all that it is made out to be is still a very open question, but without a doubt, for many people access to the Internet, let alone to the Web, a much more high bandwidth proposition, is still very much an open and difficult issue.
As educators, we cannot simply assume that we can assign a task that requires use of the Internet and know that all of our students will be able to perform that task.
McManus, T. F. "Delivering instruction on the World Wide Web." Web Page." http://www.edb.utexas.edu/coe/depts/ci/it/projects/wbi/wbi.html#cognitive (no longer available at cited location).
Last Modified: June 28, 1999