Here is a provocative paragraph from a Newsweek article on the growth of online education.
Online offerings these days can sometimes even surpass the classroom experience. Aaron Walsh, a professor at Boston College and a former videogame designer, has pioneered Immersive Education, a method of teaching through virtual worlds. Meeting in Second Life instead of a physical classroom, says Walsh, allows for some feats that gravity renders impossible, like having art-history students fly to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or biology majors to take a Magic Schoolbus–like trip through the human body. Using videos, podcasts, live chats, Webcams, and wikis, educators increasingly see online learning as a way to engage the videogame generation with pedagogy that feels more like entertainment than drudgery. Students in the new homeland-security master’s degree program at the University of Connecticut this fall, for example, will have coursework that resembles Grand Theft Auto: dwelling in a cybercity called San Luis Rey plagued with suicide bombers, biochemical attacks, and other disasters. At Arizona State, students in an Introduction to Parenting class raise a “virtual child.” They have to post the progress of their online charge through all the phases of childhood. “The classes are so much more interactive, and I can log on when I’m most ready to learn,” says Jaquelyn Holleran, a junior majoring in family and human development at ASU. “I like that so much better than having to rush to class or sit through a lecture that’s boring.”
Technology and the distance learning it enables opens up so many possibilities for extending the university, and that is incredibly exciting. The new methodologies and pedagogies it allows, like those listed above, are also reason for educators to rejoice. I certainly have no doubt that online offerings these days can surpass the classroom experience.
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It isn’t always an either or proposition, either. The hybrid course is often the site of the most exciting and innovative teaching. More on that another day.
