"Online learning is planned, deliberate and thoughtful in the sense that online courses often take months or even years to develop, not days or weeks."
No. No no no.
People who think like this are the ones who are *breaking* online learning.
@Downes Not sure I see your point. I just followed a nice 30 minutes course on some genetics stuff. The teacher had the exercises prepared,he knew what the content of the lesson was going to be and he knew how it fit in the whole course.
I liked that, and wouldn't want him to improvise exercises, and just come up with the next thing to say on the fly. Structure, carefully planned structure, helps a lot
@Downes
I'm saying that I like the teacher to know his stuff and prepare a nice lesson instead of fiddling around improvising.
In an hour I have lesson with my cartography professor. He knows what he is doing, and has prepared exercises and stuff for us.
Did he have a million dollar production? No.
How much do I pay? University here for low income people like me is around 300 euros per year, which I am glad to pay.
Also I took a very nice course on coursera by prof. Mohamed Noor, from the Duke university.
I don't know how much money did it take, I don't think much.
It is free, you can follow it at coursera.org
@arteteco ok I'm thinking you didn't read the post I linked too, only the toot.
Here's what I was responding to:
"I don’t think what is happening right now can be or should be considered online learning or distance education... Online learning is planned, deliberate and thoughtful in the sense that online courses often take months or even years to develop, not days or weeks."
Your professor probably took days or weeks. A skillful presentation of this would include improv elements.
@arteteco it would have included an element of student choice - eg. Design activities, collaborative projects, or even just discussion.
The prof would participate in this, making suggestions, adding comments, recommending project-specific resources.
It's the difference between a heavily produced TV show (even an interactive one like Bandersnatch or You vs Wild) and real interactive & real-time learning, where feedback matters more than production.
@Downes Nope, I did read the post. Let me quote you
> Online learning should be fast, fun, crazy, unplanned, and inspirational.
No it shouldn't. It depends on the online learning. My professor may have taken inputs in, but I've also followed courses where there were just recordings and no interaction. Pretty damn useful too, the person talking knew his shit (I already mentioned Mohamed Noor as an example, but I could provide many more).
If you like that kind of system that is fine. Saying that online learning should just be like that sounds terrible.
@arteteco You're saying you had this one good 30 minute experience, and so all of education should be like that. But this doesn't follow.
You were free to take the class when you wanted. Maybe it was part of a program, but I'm betting it wasn't. Yes the professor was prepared, but did s/he need a million dollar production? Did you pay hundreds of dollars tuition?
*Most* learning is best done cheap, easy and on the fly. The occasional production is nice, but not all the time.