More Future Trends in Distance Education

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.

Connectivism

• How has your network changed the way you learn?

Information is abundant and fragmented. For curriculum development, I spend most of my time filtering and creating critical thinking and problem-based learning activities from the information for the students to practice.

• Which digital tools best facilitate learning for you?

1) For curriculum and teacher development, I access the internet for science sites and educator sharing sites, professional development videotaped workshops in Annenberg Media.

2) For students, I access the internet for science tutorials, videocasts, YouTube and TeacherTube for science demonstrations and hands-on lab ideas.

3) For home school students, we use Breeze for online “live” teaching sessions.

4) For teacher collaboration, I use Skype, Conference Calls, Breeze, as well as monthly live meetings.

5) For the highly intense Robotics team 6-week build, we communicate through emails, blogs, and the Robokong website when we are not together. We also post our team videos on YouTube for other teams to view. We access a blog site called Chief Delphi where several teams come together with discussions and ideas.

6) Google docs are used frequently by spontaneous teams at our school.

• How do you learn new knowledge when you have questions?

I use the internet, Walden library database, email colleagues, or post blogs for information gathering.