Social media and different types of digital communication, such as blogs, have created an alternative method for transmitting information. Formerly, information was directed to us in a one-way fashion. We stood in front of the information delivery, be it television, radio, books, newspapers, teachers, or whatever. That information stream came to us in a one-way direction.

Now it’s a different ballgame. With blogs, articles, or information posts to Facebook, it is significantly different.  Not only do you get the original writers perspective, but you get the comments, both pro and con, from various readers. Because you are provided with comments on different sides of an argument you have the opportunity to consider multiple facets of someone’s perspective. The ability to simultaneously hold both sides of an argument is a method that helps an individual develop critical thinking skills.

Consequently, we might even be at a point where we can encourage and enhance the development of critical thinking skills even more effectively than before. However, that is highly dependent on whether or not people spend time reading and considering this content material at a sufficient depth. It is also dependent on whether or not our teachers can encourage us to think about the various different facets of an issue. We will have to shift to a new paradigm about information and learning. No longer can learning be viewed as an acquisition of the “right” information. We must see it as a process of constantly building and breaking down different knowledge structures. This will be a giant challenge for those of us schooled under the old models but having to teach people in these new models.

Multimedia presentation is one area where e-learning can offer a significant advantage over the traditional classroom delivery structure. There is no question that you can produce a great live multimedia presentation with lecture and accompanying visual aids- especially if you are a good live presenter. However, one of the great challenges is that once the lecture is over, the students don’t have it to go back to for further study. That’s why so many of them are so frantic to write down everything that is said during the presentation. Many students tape record lectures and this is a great advantage for audio playback, but that misses the important visual aids that are an important part of explaining important concepts.

A well-constructed (and this is crucial) e-learning presentation that includes audio and visuals can be an excellent learning tool because the student can go back to the same original presentation over and over until the concepts have really been absorbed. Research has shown a greater degree of retention and knowledge transfer with high quality multimedia presentations, so I think this learning strategy holds great promise. Our big challenge now is to get people to learn what a high quality multimedia presentation entails and how to produce one.

One topic that is also talked about in the debate about distance education is the quality of the assessment strategies. Web technologies have made it very easy to create simple multiple choice and true/false assessments. Many people who deploy online learning (e-learning) simply transfer material from a lecture type class (or in a worst case scenario, simply put a bunch of written text online) and then offer a multiple choice test at the end. This is not always bad if you are just trying to get people to memorize information, but hopefully the goals for most educators go beyond simple rote memorization.

In his book, Educative Assessment, Grant Wiggins states that assessment should be more than just a means to attempt documentation of learning. The assessment should be a learning process in and of itself. When designing tests or evaluations, I have always tried to keep that in mind.

I have been spending the last several days working on a comprehensive evaluation for our orthopedic massage certification program. I have become intrigued with the possibilities of the adaptive mode for test questions that is built into Moodle, our learning management system. When a student takes the exam and answers a question correctly they can immediately see that they got the question correct. Immediate feedback like this helps reinforce the learning process. When a question is answered incorrectly there is an opportunity to do the question again for a lower amount of credit and, if desired, see feedback on why the question was wrong. This ability to get immediate feedback about errors has great potential for using the assessment process for enhancing learning and not just measuring it. That kind of immediate feedback and grading option is not possible in a paper-based classroom evaluation test.

We had a number of people in this group, and as in any group, a wide variety of perspectives represented. I was curious to note that there was some strong opposition to allowing distance education to be used in a massage therapy education setting. The argument made was that massage is different than any other subject and is something that can’t be taught by distance education. Yet, nobody in the group was advocating that the hands-on techniques of massage would be taught in this environment. The distance education component would only cover those subjects such as business, anatomy, theory, etc., which involved non-hands-on instruction.

The policy eventually passed but one of the primary arguments against allowing distance education had been that it would require much greater oversight than the traditional face-to-face education programs. It was argued that the NCBTMB would have to use much greater scrutiny of these courses to make sure they were up to a certain quality. This is where the double standard comes in.

There is no current evaluation of the quality of face-to-face educational programs approved by the NCBTMB for continuing education. Yet, some believe a much higher degree of scrutiny of distance education programs is required. It is certainly true that the emergence of distance education has brought a whole host of new continuing education programs into existence, and many of them are poor quality. But, let’s be serious… there’s lots of workshops out there with the NCBTMB seal of approval on them that are really poor. If we are going to evaluate programs for their educational quality, then let’s do it. But let’s make sure that all programs are being evaluated on the same criteria.

I was having a discussion with a colleague yesterday about another aspect of change that both of us see in our work each day. This change has to do with distance education and the discomfort and resistance that many people have with it.

Distance education is clearly here to stay and how people are reacting to it in various ways is certainly interesting. The field of massage therapy is an interesting example. By nature of what we learn in this field it is clear that a big portion of our work involves psychomotor skills and is best taught in a face-to-face environment. However, much of what we learn or study is primarily cognitive and requires deeper types of thinking and not just rote movement. Distance education is clearly effective for addressing these issues.

What we were both remarking at is that there is acceptance of distance education for continuing education, but a strong resistance to it in entry level education. While training in continuing education may not be as intense as that in entry-level programs, it seems odd that a method of delivery for course work would be acceptable at the continuing education level and not in entry level programs. I’ll explore the reasons for this discrepancy in future posts.