Teaching with Technology

I have been researching questions about distance education (DE) for several years as part of my role in supporting online education in The Volgenau School of IT & Engineering at George Mason University. While some of my questions have involved the selection of systems to support distance learning, most have been in response to queries from our faculty to which I wanted to cite academic research to justify my responses.

As an example, several faculty members were convinced that they had to use a video camera and transmit an image of them delivering the lecture for a successful distance learning experience. Although I suspected that this was an inaccurate assumption, I needed to find some supporting documents. After searching using multiple key words, I was able to locate documents supporting my theory. The research showed that having a video transmission of the professor delivering the lecture induced the students to enter a passive mode akin to watching a television program while lectures delivered without the video forced the students to watch the lecture slides and become more engaged. Other questions have been about lecture length in asynchronous delivery models and the impact of online students in a live classroom setting.

As I was doing this research, I noticed that the “American Journal of Distance Education” (AJDE) consistently appeared in my searches and I started to peruse the journal issues looking for articles of interest. The journal has been published for over 20 years with the same editor, Michael Moore, and this has produced a journal with a consistency of purpose not found in many other scholarly journals.  I have also enjoyed reading the editorials as many have broken new ground in distance education theory. One major breakthrough, which has been expanded by several others writing in the field, discusses the importance of interactions between different elements such as learner-teacher or learner-learner.

Another aspect I appreciate about reading AJDE is that the articles seem focused more on learning and people issues than on technology. Many articles I have read in other journals seem to be more focused on the technology than on the student or on the learning process. I perceive technology as a tool and am much more interested in ways to use those tools to further the educational process. Thus, a discussion of the learner-software interaction is of more interest to me than a discussion of how efficient a software package may be at transmitting information. My primary interest is in learning ways that distance learning techniques can help students become more engaged with the subject – and how those methods might also be integrated into a normal “live” classroom.

Thus, I intend to highlight and review selected articles from the “American Journal of Distance Education” this semester. I hope to find articles that will remove some of the concerns I have heard about distance education and demonstrate how this type of education can be beneficial to the learning process in ways that go beyond the normal discussions about campus resource utilization and student access.

Jonathan G.