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Outcomes Do Matter, and a Unified Framework is the First Step
I strongly disagree with Aaron Doering. In the second section of Panel II: Implications of Cyberspace, he made what seemed to me to be an exceptionally strong stance on the need to measures outcomes from the implementation of new technologies for learning, stating that no student would ever face the decision between a media-empty and media-rich class, so measuring outcome differences between online and face-to-face courses is unneeded.
This is simply untrue. For example, in my home department, Psychology, we offer a course which can be taken either online or in person. It is an identical course. The only difference between the two sets of sections is that the lecture and discussion component is given entirely online for the online course. The lectures are the same - the online course receives a webcam-captured version of the face-to-face class.
So imagine this: if there was a consistent difference between online and face-to-face class outcomes (say, for the sake of example, students in online courses received consistently better grades with the same instructors and materials), students would be faced with the choice of taking a course that produces lower or higher grades (on average), which would be a very real and important decision for them. Our high-minded ideals of “but you learn the same amount either way” would amount to little for their decision and for their GPA, which does have important implications for future outcomes for them (graduate school, work after college, etc).
A gentleman also raised another important point in this session - “is there any conclusive evidence that online is better than face-to-face?” - which received a similar answer from, I believe, PZ Meyers. He claimed it didn’t matter to him, since an in-person component was present in his class anyway. This is also unrealistic when putting this in the larger perspective of education as a whole. Some classes DO have online components alone. This is an interesting and valid question - just because you could have a face-to-face component in addition to an online component doesn’t mean you will.
I don’t know about findings in education, but my home field of industrial psychology actually does shed some light here (industrial psychology is a relatively small field, but focuses on the application of psychological principles to the business world - such as training on the job). A meta-analysis on online vs. face-to-face training interventions by Sitzmann et al (2007) provided aggregated evidence across 96 studies that showed that, on average, online studies are no worse or better than face-to-face training. However - and this is an important however - when more training techniques were used in the online training, students did do better.
This leaves several unanswered questions. Is it simply because there are more training opportunities in the studies with better outcomes, or is is because the nature of those training opportunities is qualitatively better than traditional (usually lecture-based) training?
This is the focus of a study that I am conducting right now - and improvement and expansion on the Sitzmann meta-analysis, taking into account the actual composition of the training interventions. Do they use blogs? Do they use wikis? Is there a video component? I am sorting through several hundred studies and aggregate the results in order to understand more targetted questions, e.g. “Does online training that uses wikis produce a bigger online-vs.-face-to-face difference than online training that doesn’t?”
The major problem that I face with this is that most studies treat cyberspace-driven training interventions as “something we did,” and not as a collection of dependent features. For example, descriptions might be like “WebCT was used.” Well, what parts of WebCT were used? Did you do real-time assessments? Video presentation? Lecture materials as PDFs?
This is one of the MAJOR challenges that any multidisciplinary examination of these ideas must face. How do we define any of these inteventions? MySpace will come and go. Facebook will come and go. Google will (probably) come and go. But what makes these technologies similar or different? What is ACTUALLY changing when someone migrates from one social networking service to another for their training or education needs?
This is why we need to develop a unified taxonomy and framework to work within in order to even BEGIN to talk about these issues. We cannot talk about “the benefits of MySpace” because MySpace isn’t what’s powerful - it’s the tools that MySpace provides. This also escapes the trap of technological obsolescence - if we study the components and not the products themselves, then our research will not obsolete until the components fall out of favor - not just until Google’s stock dries up. This also keeps the research fresh, and the grant dollars coming in - as new technologies develop, they must be placed in the taxonomy and monitored as they develop. Creating this taxonomy and framework is what I would like to do, and it truly is a multidisciplinary question. We cannot address this in just one field without limiting ourselves artificially by the technologies available to and commonly used in that field.
So I suppose, in the end, this will sound like an AA introduction: My name is Richard Landers, and I need some collaborators!
(rlanders.filedrawer.org)
