About Tapped In Session (Jan 22)
I really enjoyed this Tapped-In session. The participation was excellent and I learned a lot. However a lot of questions came to my mind. Are these kinds of distance-learning tools the most appropiate for a distance-learning session? There were 17 people talking in that session and sometimes was very difficult for me to read what everybody was saying. What happens when instead of 17, there are 30 people online? How can we, as a Instructors, control the session? Do we have to apply the same control criteria when we are leading a K-12 class than when we are leading an undergraduate or graduate class?? How can we help a student who is a “slow” reader to get the maximum amount of knowledge generated by the discussions in one of these online-sessions? How can we know what is the most accurate way to control and evaluate these sessions? Also, and this is really worrying me: How can we know for sure that the student in the other side of the screen is the student that is actually enrolled in the course?. “Distance education is... seen as an environment where cheating cannot be controlled, and an environment that threatens the teaching role both through the lack of any physical constrains on class size and through the objectification of the “course”. (Duffy and Kirkley, 2004 p. 4)
In one of my courses, (I was a college teacher and in this particular course I was instructing my students in how to make webpages) the students had to make their personal webpages, to publish them on the web, to make a graphic and conceptual analysis of them and to send it to me via e-mail. We had 3 weekly online meetings (we used Mirc) to talk about doubts concerning the software (Dreamweaver) and to surf through Internet to check and analyse examples of other webpages, but also we had face-to-face sessions in where I checked the advance of their webpages. At the end of the course I found out that one of my students had cheated (her boyfriend did the webpage) and I discovered this through another student who told me what happened. I think my failure as an Instructor was the fact that I never saw them working on their projects (we only had reviews), so I strongly recommend to have a lot of face-to-face sessions where you can check if the knowledge they are acquiring, is in fact applied.
In my next course I did that and I didn’t have any problems at all.
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