DL is back like it never went away

I went to a session called “Distance Student Learning: The Addition of Rich Media and an Assessment of Outcomes” by Creighton University about an online pharmacy degree. I nearly left early as it turned out to be about videoing lectures. I am glad I stayed as it was one of the most useful sessions I went to.

I wasn’t that interested in the technical solution, something called Echo 360 that enabled lectures to be streamed to DL students 10 minutes after the lecturer had finished... rather, it was a very honest account of the pressures on universities to respond to external pressures and student demand. The university had a group of students on campus, and a DL group doing the same course. The latter were not performing as well as the former. The teachers tried to go back to Chickering and Gamson and work forward, but the students were not interested in e-tivities and other peripherals, they wanted to see and hear what was going on in the classroom that they didn’t and couldn’t attend. It was the age old DL dilemma – wanting to give the students the best experience possible, but not having the resources to do it with, and the students motivations (pharmacy degree=good job, assessment driven) being hard to align with what teachers would really like to do.

We see it at SHU, there is a market, we must get in there, even if it involves the lowest common denominator. Creighton were getting away with it because of the nature of the subject I felt, some of our DL initiatives fail to take into account the opportunity cost of getting involved in something that may need to scale, and moreover that often has retention problems.