The biggest obvious flaw with online education, from what I can tell, is that it’s harder to keep people motivated when they’re doing their work from their living room, and/or aren’t literally surrounded by peers working on the same projects, and don’t have as personal a connection with their teacher.
What existing tools do we have to combat this and how well do they work, and are there alternatives in development?
I’m no Peter Norvig, but this is the discussion section after all....
One tool that may or may not have a place in online education is gamification. To put a long story short, the gaming industry has gotten plenty of practice motivating people to keep going, even at tasks that wouldn’t necessarily be the most interesting. Other industries have finally noticed this, and started trying it out to see which concepts from gaming carry over well to other fields. I don’t personally know of any research specific to education, but would be interested if anything relevant was found
Perhaps it would be good to remind people that “learning online” is not a synonym for “learning alone”. There are a few ways to learn together. The difficult part is to find people who want to learn the same thing at the same time.
1) People can watch the online lessons together; literally in the same room, looking at the same computer screen. If the computer gives you questions, first write your answers on a piece of paper, and when everyone has an answer written, show each other your answers, optionally discuss, and then write some result on a computer.
2) People can agree to do one lesson online alone, then meet and discuss that one lesson together. Or they can have one meeting per N lessons, or simply meet when necessary—but at least once, at the end of the course. (You could use a Google spreadsheet to write who has completed which lessons, and who wants to discuss which lesson.)
For small children, parents can do (1) with them, or arrange (2) with other parents.
The biggest obvious flaw with online education, from what I can tell, is that it’s harder to keep people motivated when they’re doing their work from their living room, and/or aren’t literally surrounded by peers working on the same projects, and don’t have as personal a connection with their teacher.
What existing tools do we have to combat this and how well do they work, and are there alternatives in development?
I’m no Peter Norvig, but this is the discussion section after all....
One tool that may or may not have a place in online education is gamification. To put a long story short, the gaming industry has gotten plenty of practice motivating people to keep going, even at tasks that wouldn’t necessarily be the most interesting. Other industries have finally noticed this, and started trying it out to see which concepts from gaming carry over well to other fields. I don’t personally know of any research specific to education, but would be interested if anything relevant was found
An enthusiastic, low-level introduction to gamifying education: http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/gamifying-education
Perhaps it would be good to remind people that “learning online” is not a synonym for “learning alone”. There are a few ways to learn together. The difficult part is to find people who want to learn the same thing at the same time.
1) People can watch the online lessons together; literally in the same room, looking at the same computer screen. If the computer gives you questions, first write your answers on a piece of paper, and when everyone has an answer written, show each other your answers, optionally discuss, and then write some result on a computer.
2) People can agree to do one lesson online alone, then meet and discuss that one lesson together. Or they can have one meeting per N lessons, or simply meet when necessary—but at least once, at the end of the course. (You could use a Google spreadsheet to write who has completed which lessons, and who wants to discuss which lesson.)
For small children, parents can do (1) with them, or arrange (2) with other parents.