Online teaching and evaluation
I’ve just read a very interesting article about evaluation in online education, written by Alex Fernando Teixeira Primo. Primo compares the empiricist vision of education, where the teacher is seen as the person who has all the knowledge and transfers it on to the students (that will reproduce it), to a vision that sees knowledge as the result of imbalance, of questioning and of the active search for solutions. Evaluation will stop caring only about the content itself and the result. The teacher, as part of his educational/teaching growth follows the whole educational process of the students. The type of education that we still see happening in schools is referred to as oppressing (mentioned by Paulo Freire in his book “Pedagogy of the oppressor”): the teacher talks while the students passively listen to it.
Students learn in different ways. When thinking of a student who learns better by questioning things than by reproducing what he hears from the teacher, and when the school system privileges the latter, evaluation itself will show some distorted results.
The author transports this traditional forms of education onto online education where behaviorism is mostly used. We tend to call interaction in distance learning to a mere click “next”or “previous”. We are basically promoting learning in the same way as in school: the teacher/facilitator tells the story, the student listens/sees it. This is what the author calls “reactive interaction”. This kind of interaction promotes repetition: the same outputs to the same inputs. Even the tests “check your knowledge” that the students find at the end of an online learning unit are only meant for him to reproduce what he’s just read. There’s no questioning, no active knowledge construction involved. The student does not create anything. The student repeats.
Piaget sees learning from a different perspective: the learners need to create and to re-construct. Paulo Freire thinks in a similar way: teaching is creating possibilities to produce or construct knowledge. He suggests the adoption of a kind of education that revolves around the way the students look at the world; the need of problematising, questioning. This education by problem-solving works differently to traditional education: the exercising happens before discussing the content.
In this case, evaluation must change: it needs to start focusing on the process; it should be done during the whole course, following the constructive process of the students.
Group tasks and cooperative work are also taken into account. In online education there’s plenty of room for this type of interaction: forums, MSN, blogs, wikis, Facebook, twitter and so on. The teacher should promote discussions and debates in order to help the online students to learn from and with each other, to construct their knowledge, to keep them motivated. Their success depends on this relationship and interaction. This can be done by debates, thematic discussions, chats, work groups, case studies, simulations and working on the theory within a project. This way the student learns by confronting ideas and reflecting about the value of his own ideas when compared to what the colleagues say.
The student also needs to discover, to search, to pose questions and search for an answer himself, without just reacting to problems or activities.
Another interesting idea is that the online course should start with an empty “library” that the students should build up.
While reading this article, I thought about all the online courses I tried to finish so far and that I couldn’t, exactly because of this kind of E-Learning: the movie, the text, the button that has “next” on it, and the questions in the end. It works, if they are short ( 2 to 3 minutes max.) and if you need them to try to solve a quick question or learn about a specific issue very briefly. But these online programs never kept me engaged or motivated to re-start or follow the next unit the morning after.
I am experiencing now an E-Learning course where interaction is the main word. It was actually my main requirement when looking for E-learning courses to continue my studies in E-Learning. I didn’t want the merely solitary home study. I wanted to discuss ideas, to meet people that would make me think in a different direction, to go on a way I haven’t thought yet. And let me tell you it was a great choice so far!
The use of blogs, the use of wikis where we can work together, the debates and the fun that they can be (especially when we are confronting ideas) are fruitful and help us building our own learning path. But not alone.
Reference:
PRIMO, Alex (2006) “Avaliação em processos de educação problematizadora online”. In: Marco Silva; Edméa Santos. (Org.). Avaliação da aprendizagem em educação online. São Paulo: Loyola, v. , p. 38-49. http://www6.ufrgs.br/limc/PDFs/EAD5.pdf
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