[PN] E-learning and Online Education (10 March 2004)

[waoe@mail.goo.ne.jp]

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E-learning and Online Education in the Foreign Language Teaching Field
                           by Steve McCarty

In mid-February of 2004 I taught an intensive graduate course 
on online education at the national University of Tsukuba near Tokyo. 
Audioconferences and chat with mentors abroad were what convinced 
the graduate students that it was actually online education that was 
taking place with the instructor in the (networked) classroom.

There is much data in English and Japanese including sound files
particularly from a voice BBS, so I can only mention the course 
in passing before I move to Osaka Jogakuin College in mid-March.

Also in mid-February on the JALTTALK discussion list of the Japan
Association for Language Teaching, e-learning concepts were being 
asked about. Like bilingualism, e-learning and online education
are not readily grasped by common sense, so there are many
misconceptions, hence this brief article at this time.

Greg Matheson in Taiwan wrote, "what is the difference
between e-learning and CAI? Is it the same as the difference
between the NETEACH-L and TESLCA-L?" (2/22/04).

NETEACH by definition would be for online education in the L2 area
and TESLCA would be for CALL and its reinventions in networked
computer labs, such as JALTCALL (Japan), APACALL (Asia-Pacific)
and other such discussion lists.

Charles Adamson in Japan answered Greg Matheson in Taiwan: 
"Try typing 'define: e-learning' in Google. You will get a page of 
definitions with the citation and they almost all involve networks. 
If you then type in "define: CAI", you will get another page of 
definitions that involve using the power of the computer. The 
difference is quite clear but with a little fuzzy area of overlap" (2/23/04).

I did include that approach in Tsukuba, but the glossary and academic
or business entries would not qualify as definitions, since they were
all so different. It is a new field, and people are looking at their own corner of it; there does not seem to be a consensus about what
many of the basic terms mean, or which is the overarching concept,
such as e-learning, under which other terms might be presumed to be
subsets. Nevertheless, on the authority of my six years as President
of the World Association for Online Education, I could have fed
answers to the graduate students in Tsukuba, but instead I tried 
more student-centered approaches such as having them brainstorm
the differences and relationships among the relevant concepts at:
http://www.kagawa-jc.ac.jp/~steve/concepts.html

Although it seemed to require a lot of steering, and some
misconceptions still remained at the end, the process of
discovery was probably worth it, especially given their
reported experience with teachers as authority figures.
They enjoyed discussions in a circle as much as online,
and informal discussions with me over lunch. The other
professors taught about English all in Japanese, they reported
plaintively, and were remote (talk about distance education! --
the gulf from a podium to a large class can be more unbridgeable
than virtual learning environments with many tools for interaction).

Moreover, I increasingly felt that universal or abstract
definitions were not necessarily better or worse than 
ones that were context-embedded. Thus, for example, a 
literal definition of a term like CAI misses the disciplinary
aspects where CAI arose during a certain era with
certain technologies, with the (human-computer interface)
interaction mainly between individual and machine, like 
the Japanese juku cram schools that call their approach 
CAI as a selling point.

Especially a new field has undeveloped areas and some that
are developed into disciplines with a community of practice
and a body of literature written during a certain era. In the
foreign language teaching field, CALL and online learning,
or what Mark Warchauer has called Network-Based Language
Learning, could each be definitive of an era, with the latter
still dawning.

Greg Matheson also wrote about a colleague taking "a course
about setting up e-learning programs, at the end of which he was
going to get some kind of certificate. He said [e-learning] is
distance education over networks, e.g., the Internet."

If one asks what the "e" in e-learning is, it is electronic,
as opposed to electric, such as appliances that cannot be 
used for learning. But in practice the "e" tends to refer
to digital technologies, i.e., excluding analog TV, radio,
two-way short-wave (such as Australia's School of the Air),
satellite-based systems and dedicated teleconferencing systems 
(such as the World Bank's) that do not use the Internet.

Networked computers are what characterize online education,
and even in m-learning with mobile phones there are networked
computers (servers and their routers, etc.) somewhere down
the line. So the "line" in online and offline is both literal 
in terms of networks and figurative in terms of connectivity.

In that connection I asked the Tsukuba graduate students to think 
of where data was going in our activities involving virtual learning 
environments based in Oregon, California and Australia. For example, 
on the first morning of the course, to add photos to their student
home pages in WebCT, I had them take mobile phone photos of
each other and attach them to e-mails sent to my Web mail based
in the U.S., which I could then funnel to them by WebCT mail or on
a 3.5 inch FD.

It is important to consider, as I alluded at the start, that online
education is not necessarily distance education; it is all the
better insofar as an instructor or mentor can be there with 
the students. But they must have access to networked computers 
at least part of the time for it to be online education. An 
in-company Intranet and the like is also online, but there should 
be access to the WWW to be online education in a fuller sense.

In a disciplinary sense, distance education has been predominantly
correspondence education, and remains a matter of mailing paper
in most parts of the world. In a country like Japan where the
technology is readily available to change to online education,
a business model is needed to get away from selling paper.
If consumers are somewhat materialistic and need a sense 
that they are receiving some goods for their money, then a
paradigm shift in their thinking is needed. People
increasingly pay for experiences as well as material
goods, and learning is of inestimable value. 

Online education is therefore not a subset of distance 
education; it is rather rendering distance irrelevant as 
people adjust psychologically to remote communication. 
The adjustment may be more difficult in cultures that
emphasize face and f2f rituals in communication. In 
disciplinary terms again, online education is diverging
from distance education as increasingly incomparable.

Finally, e-learning, distance education and online education
do overlap, but none is a subset of the others. While 
distance education claims the most participants because 
of correspondence education, e-learning seems the 
broadest notion in application, because it encompasses 
computers and other digital information appliances 
whether used for learning offline or online. Learning
is also broader than education, because most learning 
is informal, whereas education involves institutional 
accreditation for certification of learning.

I hope these considerations have clarified some of the issues 
at the intersection of foreign language teaching with
e-learning, distance education, and online education.

Steve McCarty is a Professor at Kagawa Junior College and,
from April 2004, at Osaka Jogakuin College. He has been the
President of the World Association for Online Education (WAOE)
-- http://www.waoe.org/ -- since 1998. He also edits the e-mail 
newsletter Papyrus News for language teaching and technology:
https://maillists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/papyrus-news
which welcomes announcements, to: mccarty@mail.goo.ne.jp
His online library of publications is an Asian Studies WWW
Virtual Library 4-star site:
http://www.kagawa-jc.ac.jp/~steve_mc/epublist.html