This paper defines and examines three generations of distance education pedagogy. Unlike earlier classifications of distance education based on the technology used, this analysis focuses on the pedagogy that defines the learning experiences encapsulated in the learning design. The three generations of cognitive-behaviourist, social constructivist, and connectivist pedagogy are examined, using the familiar community of inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) with its focus on social, cognitive, and teaching presences. Although this typology of pedagogies could also be usefully applied to campus-based education, the need for and practice of openness and explicitness in distance education content and process makes the work especially relevant to distance education designers, teachers, and developers. The article concludes that high-quality distance education exploits all three generations as determined by the learning content, context, and learning expectations.
It is fruitless to talk of smart learning environments unless we know what is meant by those that are not smart. All environments influence behaviour and, by and large, are in turn influenced by the behaviour of the agents of which they are at least partially comprised. If there were such thing as a neutral learning environment it would support all forms of learning of any skill or knowledge equally well which, manifestly, none do. In this paper, I will argue that most in-person learning environments tend to encourage some kinds of counter-productive behaviours and are thus, at a systems level, positively stupid. While we may, with care, time, and ingenuity in our teaching, overcome some of the worst consequences, the costs and stresses caused by doing so are high. Much of the skill of contemporary teaching, and of the smart learning environments we create, is concerned with compensating for problems that are almost entirely caused by the environments in which we teach. Our online learning environments have often replicated and even magnified such stupidity, mainly through focusing on the contingent trappings of in-person teaching rather than the problems that those trappings were originally designed to solve. I go on to consider smartness as an emergent attribute arising out of the interplay of structural and dynamic elements in a learning environment, the most significant of which (especially in an online context) being its creative, independent, and motivated human participants. I will discuss ways in which we can orchestrate systems to create the conditions for (but not necessarily to entail) learning environments that can truly be described as 'smart'.
This paper presents a case study that describes and discusses the problems encountered during the design and implementation of a blended learning course, largely taught online through a web-based learning environment. Based on Moore's theory of transactional distance, the course was explicitly designed to have dialogue at its heart. However, the reality of systemic behaviours caused by delivering such a course within a group of conventional further and higher educational institutions has led to an entirely unanticipated reversion to structure, with unpleasant consequences for both quality and quantity of dialogue. The paper looks at some of the reasons for this drift, and suggests that some of the disappointing results (in particular in terms of the quality of the students' experience and associated poor retention) can be attributed to the lack of dialogue, and consequent increase in transactional distance. It concludes with a description and evaluation of steps currently being taken to correct this behaviour
This theoretical paper elucidates the nature of educational technology and, in the process, sheds light on a number of phenomena in educational systems, from the no-significantdifference phenomenon to the singular lack of replication in studies of educational technologies. Its central thesis is that we are not just users of technologies but coparticipants in them. Our participant roles may range from pressing power switches to designing digital learning systems to performing calculations in our heads. Some technologies may demand our participation only in order to enact fixed, predesigned orchestrations correctly. Other technologies leave gaps that we can or must fill with novel orchestrations, that we may perform more or less well. Most are a mix of the two, and the mix varies according to context, participant, and use. This participative orchestration is highly distributed: in educational systems, coparticipants include the learner, the teacher, and many others, from textbook authors to LMS programmers, as well as the tools and methods they use and create. From this 2 perspective, all learners and teachers are educational technologists. The technologies of education are seen to be deeply, fundamentally, and irreducibly human, complex, situated and social in their constitution, their form, and their purpose, and as ungeneralizable in their effects as the choice of paintbrush is to the production of great art.
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