Food for Thought:
Experimental Pedagogy and the Electronic Classroom
Are we freezing experimentation out of the electronic classroom? If so, are we doing so to soon?
The living classroom in which we teach students face to face has a history that can be traced back to Plato and Socrates, but has remained a locus of experimentation ever since. Printed books, one of the most successful innovations to affect the classroom in the interim, are over 550 years old but continue to change as a robust publishing industry competes and we learn more about the ways in which students learn. The same can be said for many technologies that have entered the face to face classroom, including light shows, films, recordings, overhead projectors, personal computers, and even testing technologies. The face to face classroom is, for many of us, a scene of active pedagogical experimentation.
We all know (at least we hope we know) there is no one right way to teach in a college classroom. We change our approach based on the size of the class, the level of the students (lower division undergraduate, upper division undergraduate, graduate), the content of the class (theory, research, practice) and the much harder to define "personality" that every class seems to have. We experiment with different approaches to teaching and, where possible, new technologies that may aid our teaching. The face to face classroom is a living thing and we continue to feed it with our innovations.
The electronic classroom, the idea of teaching people through a computer, is barely thirty years old. One of the earliest discussions of computer-mediated classrooms, in Hiltz and Turoff's (1978) "The Network Nation", documented limited experimental use of computer conferencing as a supplement to classroom learning. We have done an incredible amount of experimentation in the thirty years since. Entire classes were conducted online within a few years of that seminal text. Entire online curricula were developed in less than a decade. Adaptations of Turoff's software soon gave way to other experimental online environments. Most campuses have serving faculty who have been experimented with and developed software for the purposes of online learning.
It is only in the last ten years that we have started to see campus-wide adoption of standard virtual learning environments like the widely used Blackboard and WebCT (recently acquired by Blackboard) on many campuses. This is, in many ways, a good thing. An increasing number of teachers who conduct classes in the electronic classroom are less interested in experimenting with technological possibilities than they are in running effective classrooms that students will feel comfortable in and content can be readily ported from both from conventional face to face classrooms and from one semester's electronic classes to the next.
Blackboard and WebCT, which have emerged as the most commonly adopted commercial platforms, certainly provide an virtual classroom that meets these needs. They include a usable, if somewhat low speed discussion system, a functional gradebook, a means of presenting material to students, a way for students to submit assignments to professors, tools for conducting tests and surveys, and a range of other classroom features. Because the system can be used piecemeal, it is easy for teachers to use parts of Blackboard in conjunction with regular classes and build up in stages to the point where they feel comfortable teaching an entire course online. Because it is an integrated classroom, many teachers can conduct an entire virtual class within its confines.
There is, moreover, lots of room for experimentation within the confines of the tools that Blackboard and other licensed virtual classroom environments. There are many ways to mix presentation, discussion, programmed learning, and other pedagogies within the context of Blackboard and similar systems, and enterprising Blackboard users can even extend Blackboard with "building blocks" that add additional tools to their classrooms.
It remains, however, that we are a long way from having fully explored the possibilities associated with the electronic classroom. Open source classroom management systems have attracted hundreds of volunteer developers. Experiments in online pedagogy like Learning by Doing's high speed interactive discussion environment and virtual classrooms in Second Life continue to be developed. Podcasting technologies have has only recently been developed to a level where it is relatively easy to integrated video presentations and content into virtual classrooms. Wikis, instant messaging, Blogs, have all been adopted, to varying degrees, by professors seeking new ways to reach students.
All of which makes the increasingly restrictive Information Technology environments on many campuses problematic. In the post-9/11 world, many campuses have made it difficult or impossible for professors to run the servers that they might do experimentation on. While these restrictions don't exist everywhere, it remains that many campuses formally ban faculty operated servers and formally restrict the amount and kinds of content that can be placed on campus-operated web server. Web pages are OK, but web applications (e.g. pedagogical software) frequently is not. In some cases these constraints represent strong budget and support constraints, but the specter of 9/11 is all to often raised as a justification for banning faculty from using campus resources in support of experiments with non-standard online pedagogical tools.
Adoption of a commercial platform like Blackboard can lead to other kinds of constraints. Campuses that have adopted these platforms have shown an increasing willingness to discourage the use of other platforms, in part in fear of the cost of supporting additional platforms and in part because they want to encourage use of the often costly commercial platform. The combination of platform cost, security concerns, and limited budgets leads an increasing number of campuses to discourage experimentation with new pedagogical software using campus resources.
There are alternatives. Many publishers offer online learning platforms free of charge to professors who adopt their texts. In some cases their tools are fairly competitive with standard commercial software like Blackboard. Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace and other providers offer advertiser supported online resources that can be useful in teaching online. Their offerings remain piecemeal, but it remains possible to set up online communities for continuing interaction with students using their tools.
More comprehensive experimentation can be done using relatively inexpensive web service providers. You can, for as little as $5 a month, operate your own web site on a shared use Internet server. These sites usually give you the ability to install and run applications in a limited number of web programming languages, usually including Perl, JavaScript, and PHP. Most offer a limited set of preconfigured tools that can be useful in your online pedagogy. Larger monthly expenditures will provide access to more programming languages and less restrictive rules. There are sites that will allow you to run dedicated server for about a hundred bucks a month.
It remains that I, for one, find the increasingly constrained information technology environment of many of the campuses I have worked on recently frustrating. I want to try push the boundaries of online pedagogy and find that difficult to do within the constraints of the standard campus software suites I have used. I want to set up alternatives like Moodle and see what they have to offer my classes. I want to customize the software I use to try new things and, at times, write new software that does things existing software doesn't allow. I want, in short, to be able to experiment in my electronic classroom the same way I experiment in my conventional face to face classroom, but campus rules increasingly constrain me from doing so.
Food for thought.
Davis Foulger
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Do you have a response to Davis’s pundits? Have something you would like to ponder in this column? Please submit your responses or Food for thought to Rodney or Shannon.