First of all, creating a relationship with your students is the primary consideration. If your connection with the class is robotic and impersonal I think kids just get turned off. The great feature of online learning is that personalization, and differentiation is required. You're dealing with kids one on one for every assessment and through email, blogs and discussion posts. Through in some face to face interactions and I think online learning can be every bit as fun and engaging as the physical classroom. That being said, if you're a bad teacher going online won't by itself work miracles. After all you can't make chicken soup out of chicken....OK, I'm not going there.
I also think online learning loses credibility if it's a freaking joke. If kids just copy and paste from wikipedia or ask.com into electronic worksheets no learning takes place. The class needs to be challenging as well as fun and rewarding. Again, that's up to the teacher and course design.
Finally--the cheating thing. We must find ways to not only identify cheating, plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty, but we also must engage kids in ways that they won't feel the need to do that. How can we trigger their motivation to honestly engage in challenging work?
I think many assignments can be designed in a way that makes cheating next to impossible, especially in language arts. If students must show their own thought processes and give highly individualized responses, it will be much harder for them to cheat or plagiarize. This is extremely important with students who have learned to view education as simply getting assignments turned in and that cheating doesn't matter, as long as you get the points. For many students, this will be a difficult adjustment, but in the virtual classroom, it may be easier for the students who prefer deep, self-reflective learning to model their skills for the less experienced.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how to change the culture of cheating and point accumulation. If I were emperor, I'd just do away with grades and go to a portfolio/skill-based assessment system. You can't copy and paste a portfolio or speech or interview.
ReplyDeleteAcedemic integrity is MAJOR concern of mine dealing with this type of education. MAJOR!!!!!
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