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Students' Participation via Multiple Interactive Media Chris Dede and Audrey L. Kremer |
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© Copyright 1998-99 by Chris Dede (cdede@gmu.edu) and Audrey L. Kremer (kremer@mitretek.org) . The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author. |
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Section Two: In spring 1998, Chris’s course on learning across distance used six media:
Our study of each of these media was conducted in that medium (e.g., we met in a text-based virtual world to discuss learning in shared virtual environments). The class met six times face-to-face and all other times via distance interactions. The first four of these interactive media are synchronous, the next is asynchronous, and the last a mixture of both. This wide range of media enabled distributed learning that incorporates the complementary strengths of face-to-face instruction, virtual synchronous interaction, and asynchronous expression and communication. Participants were able to contrast the amount of effort required to master the rhetoric of each medium, the instructional design strategies effective in each, and the ways each shaped individual cognitive and affective experiences, as well as group interactions. By utilizing "freeware" and technology provided by GMU (videoconferencing and the threaded discussion site), access to these media created no additional costs for the instructor and students. In spring 1998, thirty-one graduate students in instructional technology completed the course. Most were in the 25-45 year old age range and employed full-time. The students had years or decades of professional experience in various aspects of education and training (e.g., public school teachers, instructional designers for industry, training managers for government, college faculty and administrators). Many had no prior experience with several of the media used in the course; however, as majors in instructional technology they became literate in each medium more rapidly than would a typical university student. While this group is not representative of most learners, the students are typical of professionals in many fields seeking in-service development to further their career goals. Their ability to rapidly gain fluency in new media is also characteristic of the next generation of university students. That spring, EDIT 611 students had a choice of three out of six possible assignments. Some of these assignments involved extended experience with a particular type of distributed learning (e.g., telementoring and teleapprenticeships), then writing a reflective paper comparing their experience to claims in the research literature and to similar experiences by other students selecting this assignment. Other assignments involved preparing evaluations of existing distance education courses, full distance education programs, and devices and applications available through vendors. Course readings and learning interactions were sequenced to develop students’ capabilities to complete these assignments. Specifically, educational experiences and students’ assignments in the course were designed to maximize participants’ reflective usage of all five distance media, building both their technical fluency and their insights into the rhetoric and affordances of each medium. Chris modeled effective instructional design by selecting interactive media based on the nature of the learning experience (e.g., groupware for collaborative design, threaded discussion for debate). Links to research on the educational usage of each interactive medium provided a comparative context for each learner’s individual experiences and responses. For more details about instructional design and educational resources, please see the Spring, 1999 syllabus at http://www.virtual.gmu.edu/EDIT611/syllabus.htm Next Section: Insights: More Students Found a Voice Previous Section: Vision: Emerging Interactive Media and Distributed Learning |