"socrates was not a content provider"

david noble, who made the wry observation about socrates quoted above, has led the protest against everything that courselets stand for. his fiery rhetoric is always entertaining and sometimes on target. along with others, he has performed a valuable service by pointing out the perils of post-cottage education.

noble sees a future characterized by "digital diploma mills," in which technology replaces expensive human beings wherever possible and turns the rest, inevitably, into wage slaves. courselets do, in fact, create just such a possibility. from the faculty perspective, a stand-alone, self-grading course with content tailored to standards and accessible on a 24/7 basis definitely looks threatening. john henry never beats the steam hammer.

how does it look from the learner's point of view? the idea of an educational system devoid of human interaction and confined to courselets on a crt is pretty grim. on the other hand, an educational system consisting primarily of large lecture courses and overworked graduate students isn't all that different. besides, with market forces freely at work for the first time ever in american education, ineffective courselets might be weeded out, allowing the superior ones to prevail.

the upside for students is obviously convenience, and to some extent, quality. industrially-produced learning resources can be more costly and sophisticated than cottage industry materials because the development expense can be amortized over a much greater number of students. typical courselets available today, for example, contain a significant number of items that are costly to produce, such as animations, or audio and video clips, which are beyond the means of a single faculty member or even most academic departments.

however, critics of distance education, such as john seely brown and paul duguid, michael margolis, and noble would never equate higher production values with quality. distance and any form of mediation means less human interaction. learning, in this view, is inherently a social experience, which depends upon immediate collaboration and interaction. to david noble, socrates is the perfect exemplification of learning as an active interchange between mentor and student.

the actual information exchanged is not the point of a socratic dialogue. it is the living experience that matters. courselets are the opposite. they are content-driven and focus exclusively on the delivery of information.

awareness

publishers, faculty and instructional designers all have a crucial role to play if couselets are to lead to more effective instruction. the pitfalls and dangers are clear. but what is the path that will direct us all toward more engaging learning experiences for students?

as an emerging phenomenon, courselets need to be properly introduced to university faculty. rather than heralding them as a way to create an online course in a matter of minutes, they should be represented as a resource to be drawn upon in support of a design already developed by the instructor, perhaps in cooperation with an instructional designer. furthermore, faculty members need to be made aware of the structures that exist within the university to assist them in making the most out of the courselets available in their subject area, both for online and traditional face-to-face courses.

publishers and their representatives also have a role to play in creating awareness. these companies maintain records of textbooks in use at each university, records that can be cross-referenced to courses supported by courselets. with this information, there is no reason for instructors to be unaware of such additional resources. universities might even make this process more efficient by inviting multiple publishers to show their courselets to the entire faculty at annual or semi-annual technology expositions.

an event of this nature recently conducted at utah state university had representatives of seven major publishing companies in attendance for the express purpose of exposing courselets to faculty members.

finally, most colleges and universities have created impressive faculty development centers, meant to empower teachers by training them in the use of technology. as a part of their educational mission, these centers typically conduct workshops and seminars in the course management software adopted by their university. by adding courselets as a component of the overall training process, availability and benefits of publisher-supplied materials can be efficiently transmitted to a self-selecting audience that is presumably ready to hear the message.

from development to design

the role of faculty development centers in ensuring the appropriate utilization of courselets goes well beyond creating awareness. originally launched in many cases to help faculty become digital producers, they have often had the opposite effect of shifting the locus of control for online development from the faculty to the center. now they are expected to keep the cottage industry spirit alive, when it is in the process of being overwhelmed by well-funded high-tech private competitors. as developers, both faculty and their centers cannot possibly keep up and should not waste their precious resources attempting to do so any longer.

getting out of the cottage-scale development business is not a tragic loss -- it is a wonderful opportunity. it means that faculty development centers and the faculty itself can focus on design and teaching. it means that instead of becoming "instant courses," courselets be seen as a repository of learning objects for the instructor to use selectively, within the framework of an overall instructional design.

courselets in and of themselves are nothing more than information presented in a variety of media. and in the frequently quoted words of dr. david merrill:

information is not instruction

the meaning of this phrase is identical to noble's point about socrates. clearly, instruction has something to with information. but for learning to take place, it is best for the information to be embedded in an engaging experience. furthermore, the experience needs certain characteristics to ensure maximum effectiveness -- it should be an active experience, with problems to solve and skills to apply, as well as a human experience, with coaching and demonstrations.

a systematic process

creating such experiences is what instructional designers and faculty members should be working toward, in partnership. despite the protestations of those who believe that distance and technology must come at the expense of interaction, it may be that the shift from development to design will allow us to create human connections among more learners than ever before.

however, partnerships between faculty and instructional designers need to be guided by procedures and supported by preparation by both sides or these benefits will not occur. to the extent that faculty are seeking to enrich courses they have already taught many times, their objectives and content breakdown may already be known, at least implicitly. they need to make this curriculum analysis explicit and then bring it to the partnership, along with clear indications of the level of interaction they feel is required at each important point in the material.

for their part, instructional designers need to be equally well prepared regarding instructional strategies, as well as elements within available courselets that can support those strategies. it is the designer's responsibility to evaluate courselets and to frame this analysis within a consistent template, which can then serve others within the university. armed with a working knowledge of courselet resources and pedagogical techniques for creating student interaction, designers can match their tools up with well-articulated faculty objectives.

this process of linking faculty needs to sophisticated designs at the micro level can proceed on a step-by-step basis through an entire course. such an approach can help ensure that distributed learning means more than merely absorbing content. panels, discussions, debates, role playing simulations -- these and many other learning activities can be used to breathe life into online courses.

quality instruction on a global scale

attractive a model as it may be, plato's idyllic academy model could never serve a significant number of the residents of planet earth. internet-based collaborative tools, used in conjunction with content delivery vehicles such as courselets, may preserve the dialogue and the teacher-student relationship, while making the experience available to more people than socrates spoke with in his life.

critics will point out that this sort of engaging, involving instruction is not the norm at this time by any means. as is generally the case with a new medium, we are looking first at its predecessors and attempting to copy the old onto the new. in specific, this means shoveling lecture notes onto html pages as rapidly as possible and pretending that these boring page-turners are the real thing.

courselets are the logical extension of this approach. they may go beyond mere text on a page, but they are most frequently not interactive and they miss the social dimension of learning entirely. however, we should not extrapolate from this early phase and assume that the online learning future has to be devoid of everything that makes instruction meaningful.

we need to stop looking at the past for our models. what we used to call a course within the confines of a classroom may not be what courses will look like at all in the distributed learning environments of the not-too-distant future. there will be an important role for courselets in the new online formats we develop -- in fact they might lead the way to online academies that socrates would be proud to teach in, academies in which developers develop, designers design, and teachers teach.