Anyways, enjoy this piece if you can, and have a lovely day! See you tomorrow at eight AM for more, assumably.
Distance Education by Mackinley Clevinger, May 1, 2016
At times a school may not have the facilities to properly teach a subject to interested students, or perhaps so few are looking into that field that it would be a waste of resources to hire a teacher and get materials together for one or two students a semester. In such cases, a Distance Ed course is often employed if that course is available, allowing those few students to take a class that wouldn’t have been available otherwise.
A Distance-Ed course works as thus: You have a certain number of assignments and tests to complete by the end of the semester, and several units of prepared material to read through before you should attempt the assignments and tests, all provided to you on a website through the internet. The class is basically self-taught, as if you were handed one of those ‘For Dummies’ books and told that you would be given tests every once in a while.
Now, there aren’t the hard-deadlines that you would see in a more typical class. Instead you’re told to have it done by the end of the semester, and theoretically you could do nothing for the entire semester and then pull some serious work at the last week before it was due, and you could technically get an A in that class.
An important aspect of much of this manner of class as well is that they, completely and entirely, open book, even allowing you to have a separate tab open on your computer to google any questions you may have or even any questions that may be on the test. In a sense, what you get away from these classes is how much you’re willing to put in, making it quite popular among High School seniors who wish to have an easy class in their last year where they mostly just entertain themselves.
There are two ‘teachers’ involved in the teaching process: a local facilitator, and the course’s online teacher. The local facilitator serves as the provider of test passwords, forbidding students from taking the tests at their leisure at home, while the online teacher serves as the grader of assignments and the person to which you should go if you need help. They do not directly teach, unless further understanding is needed on a subject, or if you wish to argue why your assignment’s grade should be higher than they thought it should be.
It does seem to be a system designed against googling for answers on tests, as you cannot simply highlight, copy, and paste the questions, but there is no one watching or caring if you were to type it out by hand into google and look for answers there. Additionally, the chat interface is disabled so that you may not talk to other students or your online teacher, but if someone sitting beside you happens to have already completed that work, nothing is in place to stop them from helping you.
The system has made a half-hearted attempt at stopping you from being able to ‘cheat’ on a test, but outside of the simple work-arounds for the few things they did to stop the students, you still have full access to the associated units to that test, so you can look through the material you were expected to learn/memorize and scan the pages for the question they’re asking. It seems that the minimum effort was made to be keeping in line with typical class values, while a very real observation was made about Distance Ed classes was made.
They are not normal classes. Many classes in school, besides teaching you the material as expected, also teach you how to learn, and a Distance Ed class is doing the exact same thing. Yes, you are there to learn Computer Science or Algebra, but you’re also there to develop the skills to learn something when there is no one around to teach it to you, and that kind of learning is one that is not bound by social expectations of being able to regurgitate memorized responses, but by having numerous tools at your disposal to use at both your leisure and expense.
We live in a world with Google, Wikipedia, and so many people doing so many things that it’s more likely that someone has tried something already and written down their experiences on the internet than that you’re doing something original. With no one around to impress, or whose expectations won’t be met by you pulling out your phone to search something, a different method of learning and goal-accomplishing is available in all its convenience and damaging short-cuts.
On the one hand, the convenience of google, technology, and walking a well-worn path means that you don’t need the same advanced skills that would be necessary if you were venturing into the unknown with a vague idea of what you were trying to accomplish. Simply put, it’s easier; and when your grade is dependent on the outcome and not how you got there, this means that Distance Ed courses should be, basically, easy A’s.
However, the mad dash towards getting an A can leave the most important aspect of Education in the lurch: the part where you actually learn something. The modern tools of today in the accessibility of information are useful, but they are not absolute in any way. A power outage, the loss of a satellite, or just having it taken away from you can and will leave you purely to your own devices, and it’s at that time that not having googled all the answers to your MacGyver test would’ve come in handy.
These considerations have been made in regards to regular classes, and as such we have the common class-ambience of no phones or notes out during tests, and that studying is needed to pass the class; but in a different kind of class, one where the student is, basically, self-taught, a very different kind of ambience comes into play, where the availability of technology is more pronounced.
School prepares us for the real-world in a variety of ways, and one of those ways is attitude. In a typical classroom, we have to act and work to the tune of the teacher in a way that makes them happy and gives us a passing mark. This attitude works well with having an immediate manager at work to whom we must answer to and follow the will of, else we will face the consequences of being reprimanded or being fired.
But a Distance-Ed course teaches something else entirely. Yes, at the end of the day we have to turn in work to a faceless being on the other side of the computer, but how we get there is entirely up to us, the student. We have the control in this environment, choosing how much we put into our learning and how much effort we put into our work with no one immediately watching us, and the only consequences for our actions are the results of our work, not the social aspect of our appearance in doing it.
A typical classroom teaches us to work as a cog in the machine, but a Distance-Ed course teaches us about having the freedom to make choices. Yes, sometimes we’ll choose the wrong thing, but that will be our mistake to learn from, not something manufactured into a learning experience by someone else, and the largest part of being able to make our own choices is simply having options open to us in how we get results.
A normal classroom demands a single course of action from us, but Distance-Ed gives us all the room and space we need to go where we want at our own pace. Taking away the core aspects of a Distance-Ed class: the use of the internet, talking to the people around us, or reviewing material mid-test, would be turning this very different kind of learning back into the same, single path expected of students in a typical schoolroom, and take away the individuality that is, for now at least, being allowed to grow in at least one class at school.