The future in online education looks exciting. It has the potential to open information and knowledge to people in a way unprecedented historically. It offers learners the power to learn when they want and learn how they want. Online access learning offers educators and learners a new realm to explore that may bring great achievements but runs many risks. Open online education will need to address and meet the realities of the K-12 student if it hopes to succeed. It will need to address at what level corporate interests can and should take part in the knowledge that is delivered.

Corporations & Education

Corporations getting involved in education could have some terrible ramifications and should be closely watched. There very easily could become a multi-tiered education system based on wealth and access. Furthermore, if not regulated, corporations could endorse beliefs that help them but not necessarily their students and have a hard bias. This needs to be watched closely to make sure that ethics requirements are being met and people are not being duped into bad or misleading education.

Current and Likely Future K-12 Educational Realities

Open online learning sounds great for the post secondary level but I’m not sure it meets the reality of the K-12 education system or the abilities of most students. Non-traditional learning methods, such as flipped classrooms, require students to be disciplined enough to do learning outside the classroom. I have not seen that discipline in most of my students. I have experimented with self paced learning with high school students as well and have discovered the, again, most students cannot regulate their time if there is not a strict deadline and will perpetually procrastinate if they think they can, much to my frustration. Perhaps with practice this habit could be broken but it would take a lot of work.

A concern of flipped classrooms and similar methods of education is that students need the time outside of school to socialize, work, and participate in other activities that are not school related. This is a personal belief, but I do not feel students should be getting a lot of homework from their classes. If a student receives 20-30 minutes of homework from 4 classes that is 1.5-2 hours of homework a night. This is time that should be spent developing social skills and trying activities outside school. If I tried to “flip” my classroom and have them watch a 5-minute video at home to be better prepared for the next day, I can almost guarantee that we as a class would have to watch that video together as many students would not take the time to do it. And what can I do? Not play the video for them?

Future of Online Learning

The applications listed in Future Technology Infrastructure for Learning by Siemens, Gasevic, & Dawson (2015) and the technology described by Downes (2019) in A Look at the Future of Open Educational Resources, show an exciting push to open education to learners of all types and backgrounds. ProSolo sounds like a promising educational system out of the many listed. It appears to address my concerns of giving students all the information they need to be successful. As these new technologies and methods are refined and find greater acceptance it may very well change the face of some educational forms as we see them. There are some limitations that I think should be noted. Learning a subject, such as woodwork, cannot be done well and realistically by students using a strictly online setting. A centralized location would likely still need to be used to offer all students the same tools and equipment.

Reading:

Siemens, G., Gašević, D., & Dawson, S. (2015). Preparing for the Digital University: A Review of the History and Current State of Distance, Blended, and Online Learning. Retrieved from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation website: http://linkresearchlab.org/PreparingDigitalUniversity.pdf   * Please read pages 199-230, Future Technology Infrastructures for Learning

Downes, S. (2019). A Look at the Future of Open Educational Resources. International Journal of Open Educational Resources, 1(2). Retrieved from https://www.ijoer.org/a-lookat-the-future-of-open-educational-resources/

Virtually Connecting. Accessed October 17, 2019. http://virtuallyconnecting.org/virtually-connecting-manifesto/