Distance education connects learners with distributed educational resources when the instructor and learners or the learners themselves are separate by time and/or place. Interaction between the instructor and learner or among learners usually occurs through some sort of media.
White and Bridwell identify 4 principles central to the design of distance educational offerings:
1. Recognizing the diversity of learners, their learning needs, their learning contexts and their modes of learning.
2. Acknowledging the rights and responsibilities for learners, providers and “those charged with the oversight of learning.”
3. Designing learning experiences that support interaction and social learning through the development of learning communities.
4. Recognizing the changes required in roles, responsibilities, strategies and activities necessary to develop a learning society.
Educational service providers should be focused on promoting learning and persistence, and bringing the knowledge and skills of all participants together in a learning environment.
Application: The Working Out Loud circle process typically consists of twelve weekly, synchronous, small group meetings. These meetings encourage incremental progress and persistence, provide peer support and build community. For the “Working Out Loud: Building Networks for Resilience” learning experience, our learners are mostly military families service providers who live and work across the globe and struggle with accessing online technologies due to Department of Defense (DoD) firewalls. In order to support these learners asynchronously, we will produce weekly podcasts that encourage incremental progress and persistence. To provide peer support and build community, we will use VoiceThread, an online tool where people can respond to media by commenting using video, audio or text. Users can contribute audio by calling in by phone, so DoD firewalls will not be a barrier. We will pose questions as prompts in each podcast and post the prompt in VoiceThread. We will also utilize the audio from VoiceThread into future podcasts, so learner comments can be a source of peer support and act as bids for connection.
Assessment: Audio Check-in
Each week, we will ask learners to record an audio check-in. The idea of a check-in comes from Kristen Cobble’s thoughts on getting a meeting started. Cobble sees check-ins as a way to get participants to focus on the topic of the meeting and each other. She also finds check-ins as effective in getting people who may be hesitant to contribute to start talking (Cobble, 2014).
Recording audio for formative assessment has been used in musical performance, language instruction and other domains. We think audio recording has distinct advantages for reflection and charting incremental process. Unlike video, recorded audio has a distinct intimacy that can deepen the reflection when a learner listens back to their own voice. Because of the resonance of our skulls, our recorded voice sounds different from what we hear in our own heads when we speak. This gives our recorded voices a “that’s me but not me” quality that can create concurrent feelings of objective distance and personal connection. Finally, voice recording offers learners the ability to self-correct and restate as they think which gets closer to a learner’s actual thoughts and feelings than reflections mediated through the writing process.
Learners will be asked to record a weekly check-in in whatever manner works best for them. They could post their check-in on VoiceThread, which will be available to other learners, or they could upload their check-in to Google Drive or email it to one of the co-facilitators. Facilitators will be able to use the check-ins to adjust future podcasts and consider additional learning opportunities.
References
Cobble, Kristin. (April 11, 2014). How to Start a Meeting. Time. Retrieved from http://time.com/56823/how-to-start-a-meeting/.
White, Barbara A., & Bridwell, Cathy (2004). Distance Learning Techniques. In Michael W. Galbraith (Eds.), Adult Learning Methods: A Guide for Effective Instruction (3rd Ed.) (273-288). Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company.