I really enjoyed reading your philosophical thoughts on this topic tonight… and I agree with you, distance teaching/learning is not new… only the tools changed. And today it can be done in real-time…

Online or in real-life settings, I support your idea that… “what really matters are the qualities and skills of the teacher and the dedication of the student”…

Below is my philosophical ponderings on this subject based on my experiences of online learning and teaching.

We both know the site, it looked full of promise, and still does at first. It is marketed as a new era in learning, attracting students and teachers in many fields. A vast open community of information sharing, teaching and learning, a breakthrough in distance education and community.

I now look at it and wonder, is it a new era, is it open, does it promote learning.

Distance transmission of useful information has been around for thousands of years. It has existed since humans first found ways of sending information to other humans in order to share information about distant lands and peoples, warfare, technology, opportunity and resources.

There are many instances of messages and information changing the actions and the beliefs of the receivers of messages originating in far off lands. Later we see examples of scholars exchanging letters and views over long distances, often the messages took weeks or months to arrive and formed a lifelong interchange of ideas.

In the last 150 years we have moved into the era of almost instant communication, first the telegraph and then radio and television and now the internet.

Distance education as a formal method of education delivery is also not new, correspondence schools have existed for a long time now.

My neighbors, the New Zealanders started the Correspondence School (Te Kura-a-Tuhi) back in 1922. It is New Zealand’s largest school, with students from early childhood to secondary level. It began with “with 100 primary level students, expanding into secondary education in 1928 with 50 students and into early childhood education in 1976.” (wikipedia)

When the School was first established New Zealand parliamentarians referred to the founding vision as “a school for the benefit of the most isolated children, for example of lighthouse keepers and remote shepherds living upon small islands or in mountainous districts”. (wikipedia)

In Australia the School of the Air began in 1951 using two way radio allowing children in remote areas to participate in classroom activities and interact with teachers. It required students and teachers to add “over” at the end of a message.

It worked, “School classes were conducted via shortwave radio from 1951 through 2002, after which most schools switched to wireless internet technologies to deliver lessons that include live one-way video feeds and clear two-way audio”. (wikipedia)

So why am I talking about all this. It is to make the point that distance education is not new, there are many examples through history and in different parts of the world.

What we are seeing now is not a “revolution” in education but an adaptation of new technology to include formal distance education and mass or communal participation.

It is this latter part that is supposedly new. Is it ? Hmm, well I remember that in the rural town I grew up in, small community organizations existed based around specific interests and hobbies. Their purpose was to share information and they encouraged newcomers and made an effort to make people feel welcome.

We move forward in time to the early stages of the internet, where cooperation and freedom to express opinion abounded. Later, about 15 years ago, I was introduced to the world of the internet community and information sharing. I could ask a technical question late at night in Australia and someone in another part of the world, in another time zone, perhaps early morning, perhaps at midday, would provide a comment or suggestion. This information sharing often almost instantly solved or helped me to solve a technical problem.

Later came the further developments in the search engines and then wikipedia. Search engines are commercial while wikipedia is voluntary, perhaps not so much of a community as a collections of contributions from individuals.

Now we are seeing the rise of the so called educational revolution where information is available to all and can be taught by anyone and delivered to everyone.

Sometimes this occurs in open online communities that cooperate for single objective, such as the development of “open source” software. Those communities are usually are open to discussion and criticism, but they strive for accuracy of content.

Sometimes it is in the form of a religion, with devotees and ideologies and little tolerance for dissent.

The platform Lyne and I experienced was delivered through a company with mixed objectives of providing a quality teaching forum and developing a community. In my view this presents specific problems, particularly the issue teachers with experience and knowledge appearing alongside people who have decided they have something to say and want to have a go at teaching.

I think that both groups have a place online, but they need different forums. If a site has both types of teaching, and does not moderate or classify its teachers, the student has little guidance in selecting quality and experience. Such a site can be an education maze of choice for the student.

Another issue that arises is that the promotion of the site as a community means that many people think that a community online equals free. On such sites people are often reluctant to pay for services.

This contrasts with communities online that work. In my experience the functional online communities are places where people contribute their time and skills and in exchange gain such things as new knowledge and friends.

What about the “commercial” educational community. A company or a business enterprise usually means that the organization is reluctant to tolerate real criticism or real and open discussion of its faults and failures is not acceptable, nor is direct comparison with other similar sites. However, normally a commercial organization will try to fix its faults, if is doesn’t it will go bust. But the community commercial organization is always trying to keep the majority of people happy and in the process quality can suffer in pursuit of mass appeal and an underlying ideology.

It becomes more of a problem when the “commercialism” is interwoven with some sort of post 60’s idealism. In that environment neither a real business model nor a real open community develops. Often the “community” and “education platform” of the site can be so blurred that serious education based subjects are offered alongside the bizarre.

What is a serious teacher to do? In my case run away and find other platforms. What do I lose though taking this approach? The main loss is that I no longer participate in a community that has potential, but at present the community has a long way to go.

However I have been fortunate enough to have contact with several teachers who have had similar experiences and have reached similar conclusions.

So I have returned to finding my own community and expanding my teaching knowledge and finding my own students.

The technologies are new, audio, video and whiteboards online, and they are very useful. But even so the bulk of my teaching of English online to date has been through text chat, a form of fast correspondence.

What does all this mean? I think it means that the ideas behind teaching online are not new, what matters are the qualities and skills of the teacher and the dedication of the student.