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Volume 114, Number 349 - Tuesday, November 10, 1998


Distance Learning: a bit off the mark?
by John Friedlander

I read that the Connecticut National Guard is working with the U.S. Department of Defense to get into distance learning.

A "Community Learning Information Network" has been built into the Connecticut State Armory in Hartford, and an advisory board has been presenting grand visions for its use. Some teachers are eager to climb on the bandwagon, hoping that distance learning will help them boost students' sagging test scores.

Once again, educators and policy makers are looking at technology as a savior of education. They're looking in the wrong direction.

I consulted on a distance learning product out west, and I've done more work in the subject since my return to Middletown.

Distance learning allows teachers and students with personal computers and Internet connections to participate in "virtual classrooms," interactive computing sessions that allow teachers to distribute educational content via the Internet to students in any physical location.

Students can interact with the material and the teacher by email, with online "chat" software, by using an on-screen "whiteboard," or with a microphone that pipes sound through the 'net. Some setups even use miniature video cameras to send pictures. I participated in a class led by an instructor in Middletown, with students logging in from Seattle, Washington, Richmond, Virginia, and Helsinki, Finland. In tech-speak, this was "very cool" technology, with a high "wow factor." Distance learning will certainly change the way we distribute and consume knowledge, and educators are right to sit up and take notice.

But like any other tool, it should be used appropriately. Reasonable goals need to be set that recognize what it can and can not do well.

The plan I read about proposes central classrooms such as the one at the Armory, filled with 25 computers with all the latest gizmos, and optimally, another room with a video-conferencing rig. Students would come from all over to sit behind a computer and work "with" a teacher who is, presumably, not in the room, but is using another computer setup somewhere else, broadcasting to many of these classrooms.

Several things disturb me about this vision.

First, the whole point of this technology is that the classroom is wherever you are with your personal computer. That's why another term used for this technology is "distributed education." To put a bunch of computers in a room and ask people to come to the room completely misses the point. This makes a car or bus the most critical learning tool in the scenario. No ride, no class.

Then there's the idea of 25 people in a classroom together interacting with computers, instead of with each other. What's more, they're probably using the computers to interact with each other. Why don't they just turn the darn things off and talk to each other face to face?

Before you start thinking I'm some kind of Luddite, realize that I've been doing technology consulting for over a decade. I believe there are times students ought to be using computers individually or in groups, and other times they should be in classrooms interacting with a teacher. But putting people together in a classroom only to isolate them behind computers doesn't make sense.

I'll grant that the Department of Defense's needs differ from the general public's, and that the setup described above may work for the National Guard in certain situations. It's relatively easy to get a group of Guards together in a classroom. Their teacher, or Subject Matter Expert, (SME... it wouldn't be a real business if it didn't have acronyms...) may have more people to teach than can gather in one place. I'll bet that a teaching method that wouldn't be very popular with just us folks might work well for the Guard.

I'll also grant that there are lots of good reasons to use the Internet to reach outside of the classroom to bring remote teaching resources into students' reach.

But when K-12 teachers dream of using this setup to teach math to adolescents, they're not thinking straight. Subjects that can only be taught effectively by creating a rich, instantaneous interaction between a dynamic teacher and a curious student will wither on the network vine -- a vine subject to transmission delays and technical glitches. Factor in a teacher who hasn't been taught how to effectively use the technology, or a group of students who'd rather do anything but discuss what to them is surely the most boring topic in the universe, and you've got a very expensive, high tech, completely modern prescription for failure.

I'm not saying don't use computers in the classroom. I am saying to think hard about how we apply them. Replacing human interaction with computer interactivity is rarely an improvement.

Let me be clear: distributed education will change the world of education as we've come to know it. Any teaching institution that isn't studying the topic very carefully has its head in the sand. But rushing to apply the latest technology to education the way we applied nuclear technology to diplomacy will inevitably blow up in our face. The only people guaranteed to profit will be the computer makers. The benefits for teachers and students will be much less clear.

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