"this is all about cheap"

Lisa posted an interesting article in The New York Times called More Pupils Are Learning Online, Fueling Debate on Quality

The article starts off contrasting why many states say they are using online course (i.e. preparing students for a global economy and to prepare students for higher education) with what they believe is the real driving force--to save money. One example that they provide is what Tom Luna has proposed in Idaho. If his measure passes students will be required to take four online courses to graduate and Idaho's state legislature just passes a bill that would provide each 9th grade student with a laptop using money that they will save from teachers salaries. This is just the beginning and Luna recently said that four courses was “going to be the starting number.” I am not against requiring online courses but online courses require teachers too. It feels like Luna has introduced a form of independent study courses with little learner-instructor interaction which I think can be dangerous for some adolescent learners. They said that Memphis also requires their students to take an online course and that "Memphis supplies its own teachers, mostly classroom teachers who supplement their incomes by contracting to work 10 hours a week with 150 students online. That is one-fourth of the time they would devote to teaching the same students face to face." That is just bad policy. One advantage of online learning is that allows for more direct tutoring and contact from teachers. Teaching 150 students is a full time job.

The article also talked about how online courses are being used to makeup credits called "click-click credits." This is being done to help increase graduation rates and avoid federal sanctions. I don't believe that online courses should be any easier than face-to-face. If online courses require less work for the same credit it is problematic and hurts the credibility of online learning.

They also talk about how students are cheating in online courses. They give an example of a student who copied a paper from Wikipedia. I don't think that is a problem with online learning. The same thing happens in face-to-face.

I don't see any of these problems as problems with online learning but problems with policy and instruction. As the student population becomes more diverse the less cost effective it will be. Traditionally online students have been self-motivated who need less contact. However, as students who are less motivated are required to take online courses the time teachers need to spend with on learner-instructor interaction will increase along with the cost.

Interaction models

I was thinking how I could represent the human interactions by their types and purpose of interactions. The yellow circle represents instructors' interactions, the blue circle represents parents' interactions, the red circle represents students' interactions, and the gray circle in the middle represents interactions focused on content. I identified 13 different combinations.

L-L-S=learner-learner-social
I-I-S=instructor-instructor-social
P-P-S=parent-parent-social

L-I-S=learner-instructor-social
L-P-S=learner-parent-social
P-I-S=parent-instructor-social

L-L-C=learner-learner-content
I-I-C=instructor-instructor-content
P-P-C=parent-parent-content

L-I-C=learner-instructor-content
L-P-C=learner-parent-content
P-I-C=parent-instructor-content

L-P-I=learner-parent-instructor

There are a few things that I don' t like about this representation. First, it is not complete because it only includes social and content interactions and not procedural/administrative. (I could figure out how I could add the third.) Second, the learner-parent-instructor is just in the content circle. Also, this includes interactions that I am not sure would exist and if they did they wouldn't really have a large affect on student learning. For instance parent-parent-content. Would parents get together and talk about content? They would talk about social and procedural.administrative topics in a parent organization but I don't see them talking about the American Revolutionary War.

This is a representation that fits Anderson's (2004) categories of interactions. This reaffirms that he was complete in his identification. However, I am still not sure how important some of them are.