COMMENT

Technology mediated learning facilitates opportunities for new forms of conversation and engagement with ideas. It is possible to interact on a topic while drawing upon scholarly articles, photographs, graphs and tables, voice recordings, visual art, and a host of other formats for expression. The result is that learning is not limited to pages of text and image; it is full of potential, as rich as all the resources available through the Internet. It is possible to enter an immersive virtual world to explore a topic, for example. A research presentation on an endangered species can be brought to life with a video or even live feed of the animal interacting with its environment in real time. 

As the videos in the first module of this MOOC consider, technologies enable students and instructors to free themselves from limitations of time and space, so that learning can become ubiquitous. It can occur in any setting rather than being limited to a classroom. It can happen at any time; interactions can be meaningful yet hours apart, enabling conversations with fellow students in other time zones around the world. These benefits are particularly noteworthy now, as many students have been isolated by the pandemic and no longer attend on-ground classes with fixed meeting times and locations. 

UPDATE

I am search of what I consider to be a Holy Grail (I am sure there are others, hence the indefinite article) of online learning: technologies that promote meaningful asynchronous collaborative project-based learning. For many years, I taught online for the University of Phoenix, and classes there always had a team project component. The instructor would assign students to teams, and each team would be tasked with figuring out a time to meet online and plan the project. What this always meant was that the group would assemble, divide the project into pieces, and leave one poor student with the burden of taking the contributed pieces and stitching them together into a polished paper or presentation. After the initial meeting, there was no collaboration -- no sense of belonging to a small community of learners. There was only the stress of having to meet, and then the relief when the project came together and students could move on.

Since then, I am excited to report that I have found one learning technology that meets the requirements I have spelled out here. That is the free online app, Tricider, located here: https://www.tricider.com/ And here is a video explaining how Tricider works: 

I teach a course at Ashford University, SCI 207 ("Our Dependence Upon the Environment") that harnesses Tricider to enable students to collaborate on a project without ever having to break out into teams or meet synchronously. Over the course of three weeks, students work together to develop sustainability plans for an imaginary city. The task begins with information provided to the students about the city -- its geography, demographics, etc. Students then go into Tricider to post their ideas for components of each sustinability plan. Students are required not only to post at least two ideas, but also post Pros and Cons about other ideas from their peers. Finally, late in the week, each student votes for what he or she considers the best three ideas. The winning selections become the "official plan" which is then posted in the online classroom.

The amazing thing about this activity, and the technology that enables it, is that it happens almost entirely free of instructor involvement. Students have communicated to the instructor that the activity has spurred them on to do considerable research, in order to propose robust ideas to the group. A sense of community develops as students read and critique each other's proposals. 

I am confident that there are other technologies out there somewhere that allow for similar collaboration without teams having to meet synchronously. If any readers of this post have other recommendations that might work, I am keen to learn more about them. 

Clifford Blizard