Flapped learning
By Gilly Salmon (February 2005 Issue)
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You’ve seen some of the films of man’s early attempts to fly. Like most people I can’t help laughing, especially at the focus on frantically flapping feathered wings, inspired by observation of birds. The breakthrough came when the inventors developed aircraft based on fixed wings in a steady airflow.
Early adopters of e-learning have a similar tendency to flap their wings. They fall into two main categories. Some assume that the cyber is much the same as earth-bound learning and simply requires better motivation in those along for the ride. Tell that to the first victims of powered flight! Others observe the key aspects of learning in the training room and burn out their human pilots by insisting they work harder and longer to make mediocre design succeed.
A recent survey of US college teachers (from the State University of New York) found that for 85 per cent of them, their experience as online teachers will have a positive effect on their classroom instruction. Do you think that’s strange? Why might this be? I think it’s partly the Hawthorne effect (and why not?), as enabling educational activity through computer mediation requires time and attention because it feels different. It is the training, development, and sheer time and energy that people put into preparing to teach online that stimulates their interest and their confidence in any environment.
Most importantly, online does not simply involve some kind of mimicking of what happens in the training room. Rather, it requires a transformation: a re-conceptualisation of the learning and teaching constraints and the opportunities of the new environment. At the moment, the focus typically is on the technical aspects of the technology. What a pity! By the way, this is why I use ‘e-moderator’ for the online teacher, trainer or facilitator. When I first wrote about the e-moderator role in 2000, none of the words available to me quite captured the complexity and sublety of the social and emotional environment that is required to make the online experience for learners and supporters alike.
Just as the motorised flight pioneers needed to understand the science of lift in an airstream to achieve success, so e-moderators should explore a little of the psychology and artistry of the online environment before launching themselves on an unsuspecting remotely connected class. If we avoid sliding assumptions around from one environment to the other, then we quickly find out that teaching online has almost nothing to do with computers and everything to do with time, motivation, knowledge and the new agency of cyber-experience.
E-learning has suffered from many problems since it’s euphoric birth, but for me the biggest one of all is the lack of recognition that trainers need considerable support to change their approaches. What many took to be de-humanising technology actually demands that trainers develop more empathy with their students and (horrors!) very much more pre-planning before the class arrives. Probably the biggest challenge is how to create a sense of community: how to enable an ongoing e-built setting in which students get to know the e-moderator, each other, and have ample opportunities for quality interaction and feedback. Clearly we need to learn how to design online for participation by everyone and then intervene to promote learning. One prerequisite without the other spells disappointment for all. Flapping harder, even with great dedication, just does not suffice.
Learning to e-moderate enables experienced offline trainers to take their tacit skills, knowledge and talent, and surface them – make them explicit, more obvious, more available not only to others but also to themselves. Attempts to address the reskilling of training staff through half-day earth-bound workshops and the like do little more than scratch the surface of the paradigm change, as well as convincing trainers that working online is about learning to use a computer programme. (It’s not.) We should enable them to shuttle backwards and forwards between what they already know and what they are prepared to develop, between specific details and their implications in the special environment of online and then fully explore their own practice. We should offer them online experiences and a high level of opportunities to learn from their more experienced e-peers.
It’s true they are denied the ability to ‘wing it’, which occurs with face-to-face classes, and instead need to articulate and plan exactly what it is that they do to create those magic moments that otherwise appear to occur ‘naturally’. However, once their strategy, tactics and craft are surfaced and polished they gain, or regain, a new level of e-self-assurance. Flapping is no longer required and is replaced by the lift of confidence.
Surf it!
Early flights
* Those magnificent men (and women)
www.thosemagnificentmen.co.uk/tmmitfm.html
* Flapping returns
www.ornithopter.org/index.shtml
* Becoming an e-moderator
www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A5010.cfm
www.e-moderating.com
Dr Gilly Salmon is Professor of E-learning and Learning Technologies at the University of Leicester. Prior to this appointment, she worked at the Open University Business School for 15 years. Gilly can be contacted at gilly.salmon@le.ac.uk
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