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Tarmo Toikkanen

What is the Future of Teaching? - 0 views

  • According to the New York Times Bits blog, a recent study funded by the US Department of Education (PDF) found that on the whole, online learning environments actually led to higher tested performance than face-to-face learning environments.
  • “In many of the studies showing an advantage for online learning, the online and classroom conditions differed in terms of time spent, curriculum and pedagogy. It was the combination of elements in the treatment conditions (which was likely to have included additional learning time and materials as well as additional opportunities for collaboration) that produced the observed learning advantages,” writes the authors of the report (emphasis theirs). “At the same time, one should note that online learning is much more conducive to the expansion of learning time than is face-to-face instruction.”
  • We can conclude that those in online learning environments tested better, but not necessarily why.
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  • Researchers warned that “various online learning implementation practices may have differing effectiveness for K–12 learners than they do for older students,” which seems plausible.
  • The word education, after all, comes from the Latin educare, which means, “to lead out.” I.e., think Socrates. Anyone can absorb information from a book or video, but good teachers will always be necessary to draw out that knowledge and help students develop the skills needed to think critically about the information they consume. In other words, online learning tools are just like any other tools in a teacher’s bag of tricks: what matters is how they’re applied. The instruction of good teachers will be made better by the proper application of web tools, while bad teachers won’t necessarily be made better by utilizing online education methods.
  • It comes down to knowing how to best use the tools at your disposal to maximize the impact of education for students, which has always been what separates good teachers from bad ones. The major difference between teachers of today and teachers of the future is that in the future educators will have better online tools and will require better specialized training to learn how to utilize them properly.
    • Tarmo Toikkanen
       
      Exactly. The tools are not the point, it's the learning results that matter. And they stem from the learning activities, which in turn are supported by the tools that are employed.
  • Teachers will certainly need to adapt in order to use new tools and methods, but that’s nothing new. Online education may never completely replace face-to-face learning, though as the Department of Education study shows, with enough time and under the guidance of a good teacher, online learning environments can produce results that are just as good or better than classroom learning. Online learning is likely to be used more often to enhance face-to-face learning in the future, however, and in communities where classroom learning is infeasible due to lack of funds, online learning is an adequate stand-in.
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    Hyvin tiivistettyä ajatusta opetuksen tulevaisuudesta.
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    Good analysis on the impact of new tools, and the need for great teachers.
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