Didn’t This Used to Be Called “Distance Learning”?

Greetings, blog readers and fellow students!

My name is Brennan, and I’ve just graduated with an MA in TESOL. I also have a BA in English, and an MBA in International Marketing, focusing on Japan and East Asia. I’m taking a couple of extra post-grad classes in DTTL so I can append a concentration onto my degree, which will hopefully make me a more valuable and useful employee. In addition to being a perma-student, I am Lead Instructor and Product Manager at Global Vision Training in Burlingame (www.globalvisiontraining.com), where we help international business professionals refine their English skills in the business situations they require — such as networking, presentation skills, cross-cultural collaboration, etc etc.

My company is just beginning to dabble in online education, so my current Cyberculture: Building Online Learning Communities class with John Bansavich is timely and intriguing. In all my years (and years and years) of education, I’ve personally only taken two online classes, neither of them for credit towards a degree.

About 15 years ago, the bookseller Barnes & Noble experimented with a rudimentary online discussion class that was led by a university literature professor. Basically, it was an asynchronous “online bulletin board”-style book club; for about $30, you got a copy of a classic book republished in swank Barnes & Noble branding, and access to the class, with its weekly discussion questions. I was underwhelmed. In fact, I can’t even remember which book I read. That’s how engaging it was.

Trying to think about what was wrong with that style of class, turn the clock forward a dozen years or so, and I took a free Coursera course on the History of the Internet. This was a series of prerecorded lectures from a University of Michigan professor, interspersed with an occasional super easy quiz, just to make sure you were awake. Watching a video of a person talk directly to you from their desk in Ann Arbor was a lot more engaging than reading blog posts and replies. This professor had personality, and was telling a story; I was hooked. He had mastered the right communication technologies so he could write on his tablet onscreen while talking to the camera, cut to relevant images, charts, graphs, timelines, etc; it was smooth and very well-executed. As with most things, this must come with practice. I hope to be there some day soon.

What about this “distance learning” thing? That was a popular phrase when I was in college, back in the late 1980s-early 1990s (yes, I’m old…..but lifetime learning keeps you young, right? right??). As an English Major, I took a Shakespeare class one summer. On the first day, I walked into a classroom that was not a classroom — it was a television studio. There were spotlights and cameras and an overdressed professor getting make-up applied before a well-lit mirror. I thought I had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Turns out, this “distance learning” class was being broadcast live to all the University’s other campuses around the state. These were the days before easy teleconferencing equipment. If we wanted to ask a question, we had to push the red button on a NASA-era microphone to speak, and since the other campuses did not have TV cameras to broadcast from their locations, students thereĀ could still ask questions of the professor that arrived in a cloud of disembodied speakers above our heads. The whole thing was a bit surreal, and actually a bit of a distraction from the learning process. So even though it was synchronous “distance learning”, I was learning onsite instead of from afar.

My takeaway from these three technology-enhanced learning experiences is that the students who will get the most out of an online education are the self-starters, the ones who are driven to seek and explore and collaborate and communicate. The ones who aren’t just sponges soaking up one-way lectured knowledge; the ones who want to take that knowledge and do something with it, within their online community, for starters. I did not get that experience from any of the aforementioned classes, and I am hoping that this Cyberculture class will model this behavior for me. The whole idea of an online collaborative community of learners is especially germane to ESL students, because it offers more practice in English communication; of course, it would work best if that communication were oral real-time, and not just written and asynchronous. But technology advances quickly and all things are possible, pretty much, so I want to start learning about all this now and get a head start on the industry.

Thanks, everybody, and I look forward to working together during this short, intense DTTL class!

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