The argument that distance education is as effective as classroom based education is backed up by research studies that compared the effectiveness of the two types of education based on grades, test scores, retention and job performance. The authors point out that research that compares achievement has been conducted for over 50 years. They go on to conclude that: evidence does not weigh more favorably to classroom instruction, that distance education can be equally effective at bringing about learning, that absence of person to person contact is not singly detrimental to learning and that course design, delivery and method are better gauges of effectiveness.
Overall, the authors conclude that learner achievement in distance education courses vs. face to face education courses is not significantly different. The research cited by the authors in chapter four compared the various distance education delivery methods (teleconferencing, correspondence study, computer-mediated communication, videoconferencing, and audioteleconferencing ) to face to face delivery. Students using a distance education delivery achieved to the same level as classroom taught learners, and in some cases they actually did better.
In examining media effectiveness and teaching strategies as they relate to distance education, I selected two research studies that focused on the use of the Internet to use a collaborative teaching strategy. The first paper, Collaborative learning and the Internet, http://tecfa.unige.ch/tecfa/research/CMC/colla/iccai95_1.html was mainly a review of the literature to provide some guidelines for developing successful collaborative learning tasks. The second was a research study, Educational Application of the Internet: International Joint Teleclass. http://info.isoc.org/HMP/PAPER/021/html/paper.html This study examined the effects of intercultural exchange and technology on in a collaborative writing class delivered to a group of American students in Hawaii and a group of Japanese students.
The first paper addresses two of the areas of research of interest to Moore and Kearsley. In this case, media effectiveness and teaching strategies are addressed in an examination of using the Internet as a medium for collaborative learning. The author proposes that in order to successfully use the Internet and the associated groupware that has developed for collaborative learning, educators must step back from the technology and examine the cognitive processes that collaborative learning strategies use and the difference in the environmental factors of face to face vs. distance collaboration.
A large part of the paper looks at the mechanisms of collaborative learning. The authors examines eight mechanisms ranging from conflict to social grounding and how these mechanisms play out in face to face collaborative groups. His purpose is to expose them as important aspects of collaborative learning that should exist in distance collaboration as well as face to face collaboration. Along with exposing these mechanisms, they show how effective the Internet is at allowing these mechanisms to occur. In some cases there can be major problems.
For example, the paper addresses two of the interesting mechanisms that are factors in this distance education course: speaker change costs and display costs. Speaker change costs refer to how turn taking in a conversation is an important convention. We almost all abide by the rule where only one speaker can have the floor. I see this addressed by new conventions established to help Internet based learners know when to speak. A great example of this is the convention of leaving a chat with a "bye". An embedded software example is the First Class chat feature that alerts users of invitations and the comings and goings of chat participants.
Display costs are those aspects of communication that deal with non-verbals that act as clues to show that a misunderstanding is getting in the way or that more or different information is needed by the collaborators. The best examples of how we deal with this in text-based exchanges are our textual displays of emotion such as ":)" to indicate a smile.
I believe the display costs are the hardest to cope with, especially in asynchronous situations where identifying misunderstandings and addressing them to everyone's satisfaction can take several attempts and waste valuable time. A coping strategy might be to make certain group members are aware of this and present some tips for dealing with this potential problem. In the authors words: " our conclusion is that the only way to achieve partial control of learning effects is monitoring closely the interactions and check whether they offer a potential for at least some of the mechanisms that we have presented."
How would the authors of our text view this examination of the effectiveness of the Internet for collaboration in distance education? It does a good job of evaluating the media by showing both the weaknesses and the strengths the Internet holds for this teaching strategy. Moore and Kearsley are critical of distance education research that does not rely on a theoretical framework. The authors of Collaborative Learning and the Internet make a point of looking at previous research on collaborative learning apart from the technology they infer to. Two thumbs up from Moore and Kearsley.
The second research study I reviewed was on using the internet for collaborative writing among two groups of international students based in Hawaii and Japan. The study was undertaken because very little research was available on the intercultural collaboration, and the researchers were interested to learn what the effects of culture, language and technology related skills would be in a collaborative writing project.
They began by talking about cultural barriers, and pointed out that aside from the problems you would expect from speaking different languages and having a different background, there was some basis for expecting that this would be minimized. Microcultures often develop among groups who communicate over the Internet, and both the U. S. and Japan have unique Internet microcultures.
One of the major issues with this project was that of technology. To minimize this problem, the class began with training to equalize the entry point for the students. Unfortunately the collaborators had problems with access to computers once the class got going. Less than one third had computers at home, so UNIX based e-mail had to be used to allow the use of computer labs at the universities. Another problem for students was that they often had to wait to access a computer and that once at a computer, the mail system was unavailable.
Interesting design features were built in to the class to allow the researchers to examine their effects on interaction. For the first part of the class, students worked asynchronously through e-mail and newsgroups. During the second half of the course, synchronous chat was introduced to see if interaction increased. For the Japanese students the synchronous communication was more difficult and did not help because English was their second language and they could not type fast enough to keep a conversation going.
Half of the students were able to make introductions by videoconferencing at the start of class. As a result of this interaction, the e-mail activity for this group was much lower and their satisfaction with the process and their group collaboration was higher than individuals who communicated by e-mail and had no video conferencing.
The researchers were surprised to find that a microculture did not develop among the groups. They attributed this mainly to the fact that the Japanese students were using a second language throughout the process, so the American culture dominated the process and also the fact that the nature of the assignments left little time for socioemotional communication.
Again, Moore and Kearsley would probably view this research as a positive contribution to the distance education literature. The topics deal with media effectiveness and a teaching strategy. The theoretical background that concerns Moore and Kearsley is also built into the research design. Multiple technologies were used and their effects on the learning outcome were examined independently. Also, the class was designed for distance education using many of the guideline presented in the text.