Getting it all together for real-time interactions

Making real-time conferencing happen successfully, so that students can learn useful concepts and strategies and make progress in their writing, is perhaps the central challenge of this pedagogy. This challenge assumed two dimensions: the first I have discussed elsewhere, and represents the pedagogical strategies for managing group discussions on-line. The second is more mundane but also essential: getting students together with the facilities, abilities, and techniques to conduct successful on-line conferencing.

Napoleon said that an army moves on its stomach; surely the equivalent motto in traditional education has been "teaching and learning is bound by the schedule." At all levels, getting people together so that learning transactions can take place is the primary challenge. Schools and universities were founded so that students could live and study in proximity to each other and to their resources of teachers and books. This model continues to the present and governs how education is organized in public schools, colleges, and universities: we gather in one place, lecture, read, write, discuss, and examine. So the technicalities of gathering assume first priority for most institutions.

There is strong pressure for virtual learning groups--classes--not to gather at all. Asynchronous courses are being promoted as the most desirable commodity in distributed education since their scheduling flexibility is attractive and marketable. But the model this course adopts, and indeed the approach I strongly advocate, requires that students do indeed gather in real time at some point each week. The complications of people's lives have made that increasingly difficult. In our Spring '97 course, the non-traditional students all had children who were involved in a range of activities; most had full-time jobs, some two. Arriving at a time when everyone was available to be on-line at the same time proved difficult, and at no time did we have everyone participating for the whole length of the conference.

One way to keep discussions a vital transactional component of the course was the posting of discussion transcripts. Having the text of the whole conversation available meant that persons who particapted could gp back and think about relevant somments with more time to reflect on them, and persons who were absent could get a good idea of what the class had dealt with.

Another possible solution for the future might be to publish a conference time in the course scheduling materials, so students could plan their weekly obligations farther ahead of time. In spite of the resounding logic of this concept, it may be resisted by distance education administrators as an element that makes the course less attractive in comparison with competing fully-asynchronous offerings.