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for sheer economic reasons we teachers realised a few years ago that bums on seats and the old chalk’n'talk just wouldn’t cover it anymore (and our jobs were at risk - how right we were):

Here in Brisbane (Australia) we have have a population of 1.3 million and with a specialist line like multimedia (think design, graphics, storyboards, drawing, etc and tools like Photoshop, Flash, Director, et al) there came a point where there just weren’t enough people comming thru the doors. Online learning wasn’t ramped up and the business suffered, laying off lots of staff (me included).

Both the University of Southern Queenland (based in Toowoomba, pop.100,000) and University of New England (Armidale pop 25,000) are much larger learning institutions than the bricks’n'morter required in such small towns - thanks to their large online learning capabilities. Without distance education both quality and quantity would suffer.

With Australia being larger than the whole of Europe and less than 20 million people, the tyrany of distance is all too common. We *need* this.

>> more and more students are cutting class, which doesn’t sit well with their professors

Big deal! I had a few students who I rarely saw but corrosponded via email. I understood why: they were graphics designers (eye-candy types) and I was teaching dull boring programming and databases. I suspect that these lecturers making these complaints are lazy and disorganised handing out vital information or instructions for assessment in lectures instead of being up-front and pre-planned. In the “shoe’s on the other foot camp” I’m planing to further my own qualifications - while working - and I’ll be buggered if I’m going to waste my (precious working) time in some duff lecture by some teacher that’s 10 years behind the times. Gimmie the course materials, the assessment details and an email address to the tutor. The rest you can keep.

Everyone has their own preferred learning methods. It’s the results that matter and if the student can pass (with proof that it’s their own work, that is) without going to a single lecture or using online materials/video instead then good on ‘em.

If they pull it off they’ll be developing modern skills where this may be the only on-the-job training they could ever have (and they’ll have to find their own online learning materials, and probably in their own time). I’m seeing this already as working web developers (programmers) are using online forums/email lists, articles, blogs, breezo’s, etc to develop OO skills and understanding java-inspired design patterns as they drag their skill-set into the 21st century: stuff that most have *never* been taught (or in another example upgrading their ASP classic to ASP.NET skills)

Where it gets hairy is when students fail to pass. Those online resources and instructions better survive review and auditing. If the lecturer is NOT consistant between online and face-to-face then there’ll be hell to pay…

…and if the lecturer *is* consistant and does a good job in structuring their online materials and the students *still* fail then, they were going to do so either way…(a teacher has to respect the students right to fail)

to lecturers: embrace this new technology as new toolsets to do a better job. If it annoys you that students are skipping class, then swallow some ego and accept it. the whole point is the education of students, not filling lecture halls..

eh, my 2c only

More links: Abandoned robotic dogs, Pixar history, massively multiplayer dancing, and more… lots of links I found this week while searching technology-related discussions, that are just too interesting to close out of my browser windows…….

When I was sitting in a lecture hall for too many of my undergrad classes, a grad student would enter the hall at the appropriate time, insert a video tape into a VCR, start the machine and walk out. We watched pre-recorded lectures for a large number of classes.

We never saw the professor except on tape or by some chance meeting in the hallway. “Appointments” with the professor were usually handled by grad students as well.

Skipping lectures or just arranging for someone to audio record the lecture for later review became routine, after all, you could almost never have a dialogue with the professor during class anyway.

I suspect that the various colleges and universities have discovered they don’t need the professors beyond the initial course preparation. After that, they can recycle the recordings over-and-over and use a lower paid employee to shuffle and grade student papers.

The empty classrooms must make for challenging contract negotiations for professors.

like having a hangova from the night b4…..