As teachers most of us are interested in how we can get students to come away from our courses with the things we really want them to learn. Yet the emphasis in so many courses is on gathering information that will be needed to achieve a higher score on the exit testing. I’ve watched students in class spend so much time trying to write down everything the instructor says that they miss the opportunity to absorb the overall meaning of the discussion/lecture.

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.

There is no doubt that some things are better taught in a traditional classroom environment and some are better taught in distance education environments. And, of course, many topics that can be taught well in either environment. In most cases it is far more important to consider the instructional design method used for the course than the medium of course delivery. If the instructional design fits properly you can make a good educational experience in many different subject areas.

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.

I was talking yesterday about some of the difficulties in acceptance of distance education in the massage therapy community. One of those difficulties relates to a double standard of evaluation. This double standard became evident to me when I was working on the National Certification Board (NCBTMB) Distance Education Task Force that was considering allowing a certain percentage of hours in entry-level programs to be earned in a distance education format.

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.