The Controversy Over On-line Instruction

A Report on the Annual Conference of the Society for Computers in Psychology

By Craig Henderson, Research and Statistical Support Services Consultant

I attended a very informative conference this past November and would like to take the opportunity to share with you some of what I learned. I want to apologize for the content being biased toward psychology, but I think that the majority of the principles are general enough to be applied to different fields. A great deal of emphasis was placed on Web-based courses, and it seems like the researchers in this field are going beyond asking the question, "Do students report that they are satisfied with the format of the courses" to "Does technology actually help students learn" and "Why do students not take full advantage of the technology that is offered?". By and large, the research presented at the meeting indicated that students are generally satisfied with the addition of technological resources; however, whether students that take advantage of the technology learn better is a much more complex question. Research into this area is preliminary at this point, and none of the sessions I attended presented clear answers. I would point interested readers to the work of William S. Maki, Roman Taraban, and Kimberly Rynearson; Christopher Koch and Kevin Hall; and Tom Buchanon.

A Common Complaint

A common complaint that was voiced by the instructors at the meeting was that they found that their students did not take full advantage of the technological opportunities that were offered. No research was presented on the reasons students declined to use educationally relevant technology, and this seems to be a promising line of research. A word of caution was expressed in the presidential address, "Distance Education: Has Technology Become a Threat to Academy?" The title of this address implies that the talk warned against the woes that were sure to come with distance education; however, this was not the case. It must be kept in mind that the address was given to a technologically literate audience, who could be assumed to be "gung ho" about new educationally relevant technological advances. Therefore, in my mind, the address was to encourage professors to consider both sides of technological advances. True, the advances are quite cool, and they promise to make our jobs easy for us; however, there is a downside to technology as well that we cannot forget. For example, Jung warned us early in this century, that technology can drive us away from some of the essence of our humanity, and some of the zealot advocates of distance education blatantly call for the end of the university system. (I will be receiving a copy of the conference proceedings in the mail shortly and would be glad to make a copy of this address available to anyone that is interested.)

Practical Applications

Other speakers presented material that was much more practical in nature. For example, I went to one talk in which a professor had completely automated his grading procedure for homework assignments and exams. Students access the system as a Web page, print out the assignments, and enter the answers in a form on a Web page. The server generating the assignment then grades it, updates the grade book in a database, and returns the answer key to the student. If you are interested in this system, the speaker mentioned that he is making the material available free at his Website, http://www.psychstat.smsu.edu.

Two developments that were especially exciting for me was the National Undergraduate Research Clearinghouse and PsychExperiments, a virtual cognitive psychology laboratory. The National Undergraduate Research Clearinghouse is a Website dedicated to undergraduate research. It provides a means for quality undergraduate research to gain national and international exposure. For more information, see http://www.clearinghouse.mwsc.edu.

PsychExperiments also promises to be an exciting development. It is an on-line virtual cognitive psychology laboratory developed to address problems of cost and periodic obsolescence of equipment and software in undergraduate psychology laboratories. Furthermore, all data are archived, thereby increasing the amount of data gathered from a single experiment. Again, for more information, visit their Website, http://www.olemiss.edu/PsychExps.

For More Information

As always, I would be glad to talk with you in more detail about these issues. If you are interested, please call me at 565-2140 or E-mail craigh@unt.edu. Let me also put in a short blurb for WebCT if you are interested in developing on-line courses. According to this month's WWW@UNT.EDU, it is now the only product UNT supports for the delivery of Web-based classes. The contact person for WebCT here at UNT is Kim Crawford, kimc@unt.edu, or see the Center for Distributed Learning Website, http://www.unt.edu/cdl.