Online Education Vs Traditional Classroom

Ten Ways Online Education Matches, or Surpasses, Face-to-Face Learning
by Mark Kassop

How good is online education? Debate about the relative quality of Internet-based courses has raged almost since the advent of this new teaching and learning medium. In my opinion, the answers are being settled rather conclusively at my school and 18 other community colleges sharing courses in the New Jersey Virtual Community College Consortium (NJVCCC). I have taught more than 50 online sections of sociology to more than 1,200 students at Bergen Community College and Thomas Edison State College. As the distance learning coordinator at Bergen Community College and as chair of the NJVCCC, I have worked closely with faculty members and administrators throughout New Jersey and other states to create, deliver, and assess online courses.

Can online courses match traditional face-to-face (F2F) courses in academic quality and rigor? Can online courses achieve the same learning objectives as F2F courses? Can students learn as much and as well online as they do in F2F courses? Not only is the answer to these questions a resounding "yes," but there are many ways that online courses may actually surpass traditional F2F classes in quality and rigor. For the record, I am writing from the perspective of a long-time (30+ years) classroom instructor, a sociology professor, a day-to-day user of the consortium's WebCT course management system, and a person who truly thrives on interaction with students. I still thoroughly enjoy the classroom environment, and I believe that it is a sound arena for teaching and learning; however, as this article will suggest, I am distinctly impressed with the early successes and potential of the online environment as a teaching/learning medium.

Here are 10 ways in which I believe online education excels:

1. Student-centered learning: Academics have recognized for years the shortcomings of the faculty-centered classroom, but it has been difficult to break away from the paradigm. Whether the classroom instructor uses lecture, discussions, role playing, small group activities, or any other technique, it is still the instructor running the show. In an online environment, however, the instructor soon takes a back seat. Students are empowered to learn on their own and even to teach one another. Particularly in the discussion group mode, students have the opportunity to explain, share, comment upon, critique, and develop course materials among themselves in a manner rarely seen in the F2F classroom. In a recent online discussion about the meaning of deviance, students in an Introduction to Sociology course were asked to cite a human behavior that is considered deviant in all cultures. Twenty-five students contributed more than 125 responses in a week-long exchange in which various students suggested that rape, murder, homosexuality, terrorism, child abuse, and other behaviors are universally deviant. Other students noted how certain cultural contexts could make any of those behaviors (and all other behaviors) nondeviant to one or more groups of people, depending on their perspectives. Students served as instructors to their classmates, and together they worked toward learning goals more effectively than if they had been provided with the answer by the instructor.

2. Writing intensity: For many years, our colleagues in the English department have told us that the best way to teach students how to write more effectively is to have them write more often. Online education has made this maxim a reality. On average, online courses are far more writing-intensive than traditional classes have ever been. In both F2F and online classes, major assignments are submitted in written form. But in an online course, general discussions, requests for elaboration or assistance, answers to directed questions, group projects, most assignments, and many tests and quizzes are in written form as well. The consensus among my online colleagues is that when instructors require that students submit carefully written and proofread assignments, the quality of many students' work improves over the duration of the course. Those writing teachers seem to be on to something!

3. Highly interactive discussions: One of the most exciting features of an online course is the discussion forum. In the traditional F2F classroom, the instructor asks a question, and the same four or five extroverted students inevitably raise their hands. They offer spontaneous, often unresearched responses in the limited time allotted for discussion. In the online environment, discussions enter a new dimension. When an instructor posts a question on the asynchronous discussion board, every student in the class is expected to respond, respond intelligently, and respond several times.

Many online students have indicated that this is the first time they have ever "spoken up" in class and that they enjoy the opportunity. Similarly, instructors say that it is a pleasure to hear the surprisingly compelling ideas of the more introverted members of their classes. Many online instructors have also observed that the relative "anonymity" of online discussions helps create a level playing field for women, homosexuals, students with physical handicaps, and members of other potentially marginalized groups, as they can participate in class activities without being stigmatized. Moreover, the format gives non-native speakers of English extra time to contemplate questions and compose appropriate answers.

In addition to prompting more discussion, online education fosters higher-quality discussion. Before students respond to an instructor's discussion question or to classmates' posted comments, they can refer to their course materials and think through their answers. As a result, students have the opportunity to post well-considered comments without the demands of the immediate, anxiety-producing F2F discussion, which often elicits the first response that comes to mind rather than the best possible response. See Exhibit 1 for a sample discussion exchange that illustrates this point and others made within this article.

Finally, asynchronous discussions are not limited to a few minutes of live class time; they frequently last for a week, and it is not unusual to have 100 or more student postings during that period of time. When was the last time that you saw that many well-reasoned responses in a F2F setting from the majority of the students in attendance?

4. Geared to lifelong learning: In their everyday lives, individuals do not have a teacher at their side to direct them in their acquisition of new information. One of the roles that we need to perform as educators, then, is to teach students to find and learn information on their own or in concert with their colleagues. The online environment fosters self-motivated education. Students direct their own use of Internet links, search engines, discussion boards, chat, e-mail, and other media. While such resources cannot guarantee student initiative, they establish a framework that gives precedence to the autonomy of the learner.

5. Enriched course materials: I distinctly remember the time I showed one of my highly respected history colleagues a publisher-created online course site that gave students the opportunity to "visit" recreations of battles, military museums, and various primary source documents. "Wow!" he said. "This site offers my students so much more than I have ever been able to give them in the classroom." This response is typical. A well-constructed, creative online course can take anthropology students to cultures all over the world, archaeology students to active digs, art students to the finest museum collections, and business students to corporations large and small. World-class resources can be accessed, viewed, and studied 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If they wish, instructors can pair these virtual experiences with physical ones for an expanded benefit. An art appreciation instructor that I know requires his online students to visit a local museum and write a report on selective works that they either strongly liked or hated.

6. On-demand interaction and support services: Help is only a click away in an online course. Instructors can offer many types of interactive learning aids on their course sites (e.g., flash cards, immediate feedback tests, and PowerPoint presentations). Contact with the instructor and classmates through e-mail can occur any time, not just during traditional (limited) on-campus office hours. Students can also use e-mail, chat rooms, and discussion boards to establish impromptu or scheduled study groups that defy conventional time and space restrictions. Just as importantly, an online course site can make a whole host of campus services available to students, including registration, academic advising, financial aid information and forms, services for students with disabilities, 24/7 libraries, and online tutoring through Smarthinking or similar vendors.

7. Immediate feedback: Even though they do not see a teacher across the classroom every day, online students generally have greater access to instructors. Traditional students rushing off to their next class or off-campus jobs often cannot squeeze in a question to their instructor. Online students, however, can and do e-mail countless questions to their professors and frequently engage in a dialogue that would be hard to duplicate in the F2F world.

On a more formal note, online tests and quizzes can be constructed with an automatic grading capability that provides immediate feedback and references to text and class notes that explain the correct answers. Assignments, including grades and editorial comments, can be returned to students more promptly and usually with more detail than in the F2F environment. There is no need to wait for the next class to return an assignment.

8. Flexibility: Students with family or work responsibilities are often unable to commit to a traditional course because they cannot be in the same place at the same time for 15 consecutive weeks. Even if a course schedule is acceptable, limited enrollment may be a problem: A student who attempts to register for a Thursday night course only to discover that it is closed has no other immediate options. The advantages of online learning, however, include ample opportunities for students to pursue coursework at any time that fits into their busy lives.

The height of this flexibility may be the well-publicized eArmyU.com program, which I teach in through its partnership with Thomas Edison State College. All students are on active duty, and they belong to military units throughout the world. With the computers provided to them, students can keep up with coursework while they are involved in field exercises. Moreover, the courses are structured so that students can submit assignments in a manner that permits them to fulfill their military obligations. In a recent class of 25 students, the participants were located in Europe, Asia, the South Pacific, Alaska, Hawaii, and all four time zones in the continental United States. Some of the students were preparing for deployment to the Middle East, and others were engaged in unexpected field exercises. Nevertheless, during the 12-week course, most students had the opportunity to read assignments; participate in threaded, online discussions; write and submit papers; and have questions about assigned material and college policies answered in a timely fashion by me and the college staff.

9. An intimate community of learners: Strange as it may sound, one instructor after another notes the surprisingly close relationships that they have developed with their online students. They say that it is common for participants in online courses to develop a strong sense of community that enhances the learning process. Probably as a result of the relative anonymity of online courses, students are much more prone to open up and reveal information about themselves in e-mails and on discussion boards than they are in the F2F environment.

Although some instructors may discover more than they wanted to know about their students, my online teaching experience disproves the notion that online courses are impersonal and do not foster relationships, either between students and instructors or among students themselves. I still regularly receive e-mails from a midwife several states away who took an online course from me several years ago. I "know" her husband and children and many of the families that she has worked with, as she would routinely submit assignments with a personal e-mail at 3 a.m. when she returned from delivering a baby.

10. Faculty development and rejuvenation: As a faculty member with more than 30 years of experience, I am thrilled to see and hear my colleagues venture into this new academic mode. Creating an online course takes them back to the excitement and work of creating a course for the first time. Undeniably, teaching online is more work—frequently much more work—than teaching in a classroom. However, I have heard from very few faculty members who are not energized by the creative process of achieving the same instructional goals in an entirely new format. The thinking, planning, research, learning, and effort that goes into constructing and teaching an online course has rejuvenated many faculty members who were frankly going through the motions after numerous years of teaching the same courses, semester after semester, in the same classroom environment. As a result, many of our senior, most respected faculty members are actually leading the movement into online education. They are not scared of the Internet, and they quickly master the consortium's WebCT Campus Edition course management system.

Admittedly, some faculty members have learned that their teaching styles do not work in the online environment (just as some students have discovered that their learning styles make online courses unworkable for them). However, over a very short period of time, a significant number of my peers—including many who were skeptical at first—have adapted and discovered the satisfaction of creating and teaching online.

In conclusion, online education is one of the most exciting enhancements to contemporary education. Online education is neither right for all students nor right for all faculty, but it frequently meets the needs of both for an exciting, high-quality educational experience. As with any instructional mode, the quality of online courses varies, but the potential—often met and still expanding—is on a par and in some respects even better than with the traditional F2F mode. Admittedly, it is up to future research to support or reject the impressions I have reported in this article. The important point, however, is that online education can be done well, and the demand for it is such that we all have to work to make it better. It is here to stay for all of the right reasons.

Virtual meetings save millions for BT

Virtual meetings save millions for BT

Researchers in Bradford have found that video and web conferencing can save millions of pounds for companies, improve employees’ working lives and reduce impact on the environment.

http://www.innovations-report.de/html/berichte/wirtschaft_finanzen/bericht-45282.html

Telecoms giant BT has saved £128 million a year by replacing face-to-face interaction with video and web-based conferencing.

Research carried out for BT by Dr. Peter Hopkinson and Professor Peter James of the University of Bradford’s Department of Environmental Science has found that, on average, each avoided meeting saves the company a minimum of £432 in travel costs, accommodation fees and people’s unproductive travel time.

By eliminating almost 300,000 face-to-face meetings, the research estimated that BT has saved over £128 million in the past year alone. Around 1.5 million return journeys have also been avoided which is a major bonus for staff and a significant reduction in fuel consumption and impact on the environment through carbon emissions.

In 2002, the Bradford researchers conducted an initial survey of conferencing at BT, in collaboration with technology charity SustainIT (who also collaborated in the current project). Since then, the company’s use of the technology has almost doubled.

In 2004, BT’s Conferencing unit asked the researchers to conduct another survey, with the aims of testing whether the general conclusions of the 2002 report remained correct whilst looking into the financial and travel benefits. A representative sample of 4957 people (about 5% of total BT employees) was selected at random for the survey with 18 per cent (911) of those contacted replying.

Peter James, Professor of Environmental Management at the University of Bradford, said: “As well as saving time and money and enhancing the employee’s work-life balance, conferencing can also have a significantly positive impact on the environment.

“Each of the 1.5 million journeys BT eliminated last year created an average saving of approximately 32kg of CO2 emissions. This means that the use of conferencing prevented a total of around 47,400 tonnes of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere every year.”

Like many other organisations, BT realised that a heavy meetings culture often interrupted the flow of the working day, necessitating additional travel and often meaning an earlier start or later finish for already time-pressed staff. But it found that conferencing generally requires less time investment in terms of participation.

Two-thirds of BT users said their last call lasted less than an hour, making it easier for busy people to attend, and ensuring minimal draw on precious resources. It also emerged that conferencing has a major impact on meeting quality and effectiveness.

Because conferences can be set up and held virtually in an instant, the company has found that decisions can be made much more quickly than if everyone had to meet face-to-face. Similarly, if documentation needs to be shared, web conferencing allows anyone with a PC and a phone line to see the same documents in real time.

The majority of conferencing at BT is done via audio conferencing, which makes use of conventional voice telephony. Video conferencing – used when some form of visual support is essential - is generally conducted from a dedicated videoconferencing suite.

Mirroring the growing trend towards more flexible working practices, BT has found that an increasing number of staff are also attaching videocams to their PC, allowing face-to-face contact from home.

Another significant impact of the move to virtual meetings has been a reduction in the time many staff spend travelling outside conventional working hours. As a consequence, some fifty seven per cent of BT staff told the researchers that use of conferencing technology was having a positive impact on their work-life balance.

The researchers caution that there are some downsides to conferencing. But the majority of respondents agreed with the views of one BT employee that conferencing: "saves huge amounts of time both in terms of travelling and because meetings tend to be more focused. Things get done quicker because a conference call can be organised weekly rather than holding monthly meetings.”

Business impacts:

• Each conference saved two hours of unproductive travel time for five people, i.e. 10 hours in total. The average cost of a BT member of staff is £25.41 an hour.

• With an average cost per meeting of £432, BT avoided total costs of £128 million.

• 71% of conferencing users stated that their last conference call had definitely or probably replaced a meeting.

• Over two thirds (68%) of conferencing users believed that their last conference call met all its objectives. Most (62%) of the remainder didn’t believe that the partial or complete lack of success was related to the ‘virtual’ nature of the meeting.

Personal impacts:

• 73.5% of people who stated that their last conference call had definitely or probably replaced a meeting believed that they had saved at least 3 hours in travel time.

• Conferencing delivers better work performance and better work-life balance.

• A small number of respondents identified negative effects of conferencing, particularly lack of time due to its over-use.

Environmental impacts:

• The last conference call avoided a mean mileage of 146 miles for petrol car users, 229 miles for diesel car users and 146 miles for train users

• 46% of avoided trips would have been undertaken by car

• 78% of the avoided trips would have been undertaken at peak travel times, thereby freeing up road space and seats on public transport

• 35% of replaced meetings would have been in London (reflecting the fact that 33% of respondents had their main working base in London or South-East England), thereby helping deal with the capital’s congestion problems

• By a very conservative estimate each conference call is saving a minimum 32 kg of travel-related CO2 emissions and all conferencing calls are saving at least 47,400 tonnes of CO2

Employees Working from Home

ANNUAL SURVEY SHOWS AMERICANS ARE WORKING FROM MANY DIFFERENT LOCATIONS OUTSIDE THEIR EMPLOYER’S OFFICE

Results Presented by ITAC From The Dieringer Research Group's 2004 – 2005 American Interactive Consumer Survey

http://www.workingfromanywhere.org/news/pr100405.htm

Silver Spring, MD– October 4, 2005 – ITAC, the Telework Advisory Group for WorldatWork, reports that millions of Americans are working in a variety of different locations outside of their employer’s office. This result is based on research conducted for ITAC by The Dieringer Research Group as part of Dieringer’s 2005 American Interactive Consumer Survey.

The national survey was conducted from August 15 – September 1, 2005. The survey asked respondents to check up to 13 different locations where they may have conducted work in the past month. The survey found that out of 135.4 million American workers:

• 45.1 million worked from home,
• 24.3 million people worked at client’s or customer’s place of business,
• 20.6 million in their car,
• 16.3 million while on vacation,
• 15.1 million at a park or outdoor location, and
• 7.8 million while on a train or airplane

Among the 45.1 million Americans working from home, the average number of locations they work from is 3.4.

This survey demonstrates that millions of Americans are embracing telework – the ability to work from anywhere. Other terms relating to telework include telecommuting (work at home), virtual work and mobile work.

“The ability for people to work from anywhere is attributed in part to increasing availability of portable computer and high-speed communication technologies,“ said Robert Smith, Director of ITAC. “For example, the use of broadband in the home by teleworkers increased by over 60% during the past year resulting in 25.6 million home-based teleworkers with high speed access.”

Another interesting finding from the survey results was a 30% increase during the past year in employee telecommuters, while self-employed telecommuters decreased by 2%. These findings are possibly the result of a strengthening economy and an increasing acceptance by post-recession employers to permit telework. Overall, there are 26.1 million people who work from home at least one day a month, and 22.2 million at least once a week.

About ITAC
On January 1, 2005, ITAC (www.workingfromanywhere.org) became the Telework Advisory Group for WorldatWork. Prior to this year, ITAC was the International Telework Association and Council (ITAC). ITAC continues its mission of advancing the growth and success of work independent of location. ITAC members will receive additional summary analysis of this research.

Enterprise Conferencing is Coming

Enterprise Conferencing is Coming Your Way. Here's Why You Should Care.

By Ron Zalkind, The VoIP of Reason

http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2005/sep/1180049.htm

Anyone involved or interested in their company’s efforts to build a converged IP voice-data network should be vitally interested in Enterprise Conferencing. Why? Because Enterprise Conferencing can:

• Accelerate – and increase – the cost savings that your boss probably promised as the short-term justification for funding your converged network effort.
• Prevent the coming complexities that are certainly headed your way as different departments in your company adopt different Web and voice conferencing products and services.
• Make you a hero by providing a highly visible business benefit to every knowledge worker in your organization. When was the last time you could say that about an IT project?

What is Enterprise Conferencing?

I define Enterprise Conferencing as the integration of voice, video, and Web conferencing in a single, IP-based platform that can be widely deployed across your organization for use by people both inside and outside your company.

Enterprise Conferencing differs in several important ways from the voice and Web conferencing point applications you may be familiar with. Unlike these more limited applications, Enterprise Conferencing:

• Supports a wide range of business activities across multiple departments, from simple, small-group meetings to specialized seminars and learning activities involving thousands of internal and external participants.
• Addresses the needs of an increasingly mobile and dispersed workforce by allowing them access to these conferencing capabilities through a variety of devices – including PCs, TDM and IP phones, and mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs.
• Scales sufficiently to support extensive usage without choking network bandwidth or requiring lots of administration or support resources.
• Offers enough flexible deployment options to support initial trial as a hosted service, complete on-site installation, and customized on-site / hosted deployment that can change with your business requirements.
• Integrates with your company’s existing multi-vendor IT infrastructures – including products in the areas of communications (PBXs, IP Gateways), security (firewalls, proxy servers), management and administration (directory services, single sign-on systems), as well as process-oriented enterprise applications like portals, and systems for content management, ERP, CRM, and call centers.
• Supports a business model that allows your company to afford to roll out this conferencing “utility” broadly across the enterprise, just like email.

Why is it Becoming Such a Hot Topic Now?

Three trends are putting Enterprise Conferencing in the spotlight today:

After ten years of hype, converged networks are a reality.

According to Deloitte and Touche, 26% of Global 2000 companies are already using VoIP in some form today and two-thirds of them will have started deploying VoIP on the desktop by next year. Research by Gartner shows that spending on VoIP and VoIP hybrid systems is growing in excess of 30% this year, and that 97% of all new phone systems installed in North America by 2007 will be VoIP or VoIP hybrids. Service providers have jumped in with both feet to provide a wide range of IP services. Traditional TDM providers like AT&T, Verizon, BT and many others are offering both business and consumer VoIP services. Cross-over providers are selling IP services as well. Cable companies such as Comcast are touting their VoIP capabilities.

More importantly, my own personal observations from the field confirm what the pundits and statistics are saying. I spend a lot of time talking with our own customers and prospects and VoIP/converged networks are increasingly on their minds – and, not just the companies that are traditionally the early technology adopters. Recently, a large North American supermarket chain outlined to me their plans to completely revamp the voice infrastructure for their entire chain of local stores. Their plans call for removing all legacy TDM PBXs from the local stores and replacing them with an IP-based voice infrastructure. When this kind of conservative business, operating on razor thin margins, starts adopting IP voice technology on this scale, then I know these trends are real.

Critical software applications that use those converged networks have arrived:

Like any infrastructure, the value of converged networks remains latent until exploited by visible business applications. Enterprise Conferencing is the highest value, most visible application using capabilities of converged networks today. The rapid growth of Web conferencing has drawn attention to the communication potential of IP data networks, and given many IT shops experience and comfort with this class of application. Today, mature, flexible, software-based conferencing platforms that can also take advantage of the IP voice component of converged networks have arrived to take this application to the next level.

The economic benefits of Enterprise Conferencing applications running on converged networks are compelling:

Many companies today spend between $250-$350 per person each year on a combination of voice conferencing, Web conferencing, eLearning, marketing seminars and long distance calls into the conferencing bridges. Enterprise Conferencing solutions that consolidate these capabilities and leverage converged networks can cut these costs in half, and can replace wildly unpredictable per-minute charges and overage penalties with fixed price/unlimited usage business models. What enables this magnitude of cost reduction? For larger companies, those with 500 employees or more, IP-based software-only conferencing solutions make it dramatically simpler to bring conferencing completely or partially in-house, replacing per-minute service fees with fixed price software licenses. They eliminate the need for expensive, proprietary hardware-based conference bridges. And, they allow IT to consolidate multiple products into a single enterprise standard, with all the cost-of-ownership advantages that brings in the areas of support, training, and vendor negotiations. For smaller companies, these solutions allow service providers to offer conferencing applications as a hosted service at much lower cost.

If economics is the carrot, loss of control is the stick when it comes to deploying Enterprise Conferencing solutions sooner rather than later. Savvy IT managers are realizing that the longer they allow individual business units to keep using multiple point solutions, the harder it will be to standardize on a single enterprise-wide standard. Supporting half a dozen products and services across the company can make the Tower of Babel – or Boston’s Big Dig - look efficient! Hence the sense of urgency I see in CIO’s search for a company-wide solution.

Now that you see what Enterprise Conferencing can do for you, your converged network effort, and your business, I’ll provide you with the information you need to harness its benefits. In future “The VoIP of Reason” articles, I’ll answer those questions that are likely at the top of your list, including:

• What does my company need in terms of Enterprise Conferencing?
• What solutions out there today match my requirements?
• How do I build/analyze my business case?
• How do I navigate from today to tomorrow?
• How do I handle issues around capacity planning, QOS, integration, user adoption and change management?

Throughout this series, I’ll focus on the requirements of two different types of companies: a smaller company looking to use a hosted solution and a larger company looking to own its own Enterprise Conferencing solution. Stay tuned.