What should be the future trends in Distance Education (DE)and Instructional Design (ID)?
ID should play a key role in building a research base to make decisions on ID for K-12.
The key is that the ID must serve the needs of students and the ID must ensure that the environment where the course is delivered is supportive for student-centered courses.
We may need to reorganization and hire professionals to develop DE curricula to meet these needs and to determine how we engage learners. Nationalize curricula like the AP courses are starting to emerge. We must honor that DE is not another quick fix educational program and we must focus on the needs of the learner.
George Siemens (2010) sees the role of teachers as radically different as students have varied access to information and collaborations, start asking their own questions. Siemens refers to it as “fragmentation of content” and sees the teacher role more as
1.Amplifying
2. Curating
3. Wayfinding and socially-driven sensemaking
4. Aggregating
5. Filtering
6. Modelling
7. Persistent presence
Refer to Siemens’ blog posting on connectivism, Siemens. (2010, Feb 16). Teaching in Social and Technological Networks and Connectivism. Retrieved from http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=220.
In addition, it is always interesting to examine the Horizon Report for future trends. In the next four to five years, the 2010 Horizon Report anticipates gesture-based computing, retrieved from http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/gesture-based-computing/. A collection of future trends in Distance Education can be followed on Future Trends in DE Facebook, retrieved from
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Future-Trends-in-Distance-Education/137930219558379.
Learning and the role of the student and the teacher are rapidly changing. Jay Cross Blog reports that “individuals are becoming their own instructional designers and knowledge navigators.” Cross. (2005). Retrieved from http://metatime.blogspot.com/2005/10/george-siemens-connectivism.html
In conclusion, since there is such a gap in the research and when comparing DE to f2f, what research we have is not showing significant differences, we need to build a research base for e-learning and ID.
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Hi Marlene,
ReplyDeleteI finally got here! I hope all is well and I do remember you from our class last year. It is indeed a pleasure to be in another class together.
In your post, you indicated that according to Simonson (2000) despite our differences, all students should be provided with the opportunity to learn in appropriate and acceptable ways. This correlates to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), enacted in 2001 by President Bush. Although NCLB is a mandated law, students are still lagging in their educational growth. Therefore, if we hire professionals instructional designers to construct the curricula, will they have worked in elementary, secondary or higher educational sectors and be knowledgeable about the needs for online learning?
Michele Baylor
Hello Michelle, good point. If personalized learning is the objective, then there should be an easy translation into the online world for learning strategies. Personalized learning includes student-centered learning strategies like choices, inquiry, problem-based, and collaboration and team activities. In my opinion, all of these are concepts that need to be built into instructional design, whether f2f or online.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think?