It's not the medium; it's how we use it.   

1.  Classroom teaching can be great with lively, challenging interaction between all participants. 

It can also be terrible as (many of us have experienced) when someone who believes that "telling" is "teaching" drones on and on in lectures, assigns readings and tests only on comprehension of readings and memory of lectures.  If we had any interchanges at all with our fellow students in such classes it is only to complain in the hall.  Just sitting in a room together does not guarantee interaction.

2. The same thing is true of online teaching.   They can be just "correspondence courses on steroids" for large numbers of people (more than would fit into a traditional classroom which increases university profits) ...  or they can be true graduate education with small groups of people interacting with ideas and concepts through live audio/visual media.

I don't know what media Kent State is using,  but I find my small Adobe Connect classes  (using web cams and shared screens) at LSU SLIS  to be at least as effective   and usually better than  some classrooms  ...   because it is not the  passive non-interactive model of online ed being just an automated workbook to accompany the text.

It's not the medium; it's how we use it.   

In my experience (as both a student and a professor at 5 LIS schools),  good distance graduate education allows for geographical freedom.  If it is completely asynchronous it allows a little bit of time shifting.

If it is good education,  online education does not take less time than a good classroom class  for either students or faculty.   If it requires typing thoughts that might otherwise be spoken, it always takes more time.  And that's worth it.

Michelynn McKnight

PS In fact, now that I think of it,  it's wrong for me to tar all "correspondence courses" as mindless.   Back in the day, I took a two mail-based  undergraduate correspondence courses  which illustrate the same issue.  One was simply  " read the text, do the worksheets and take the test".  Another was a terrific  (often handwritten) one-on-one  interaction with  a fine scholar in French literature.   I'm sure that the first was easier for someone to grade;  but I have retained so much more from the second.   Thank you Dr. Shapiro!


--
Michelynn McKnight, PhD, AHIP

 

Michelynn McKnight, PhD, AHIP

Associate Professor

School of Library and Information Science

Louisiana State University

269 Coates Hall

Baton Rouge, LA 70803

 

225-578-7411

 

 

 

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