Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

1 – Emerging Technologies in E-learning
User-created content
Learners will not only have the opportunity to add value
to structured courses through the use of emerging technologies
such as blogs and wikis; many of them will create
their own content which can be massaged and
developed through group participation. Ordinary people
will become creators and producers. Learners will truly
begin to take control. Examples can be seen at the website
called Wifi Cafés, where Internet users can add the
locations of their favourite Internet cafe to an open list,
and Current TV, where people—mostly nonprofessionals—create
television segments and shows.
Similarly, students, parents, teachers, and others will
continue to create and disseminate educational content
on a large scale. Instructors will require students to create
content to share with their peers.
User-created content provides a challenge, in that it
will be difficult to verify the accuracy of each educational
resource. Educators often comment that Wikipedia, while
very useful, is made by experts and non-experts alike,
potentially decreasing its credibility. While research conducted
by Nature magazine determined that Wikipedia
comes close to the Encyclopedia Britannica in terms of
accuracy of science entries (Giles, 2005), it also shows
that collaborative approaches to knowledge sharing require
facilitation and editing. No matter what printbased
or online source students use to substantiate their
course work, they should use multiple sources to check
the validity, reliability, and potential bias of information.
To counter this problem, educators will adopt a practice
used by eBay and other commercial websites (see
the description of similar rating systems in Intelligent
Searching above). Namely, people can rate individual
pieces of educational content. Users who share educational
content will have a dynamic profile that changes
each time someone rates their contributions. For example,
someone with high ratings would have the title of
“trusted content provider”. Experts would have an equal
opportunity to check the accuracy of user-created content.
The “Long Tail”
In October 2004, Chris Anderson of Wired magazine
published an article outlining the long tail of business.
The term “long tail” refers to a statistical concept of the
very low part of a distribution where the population
“tails off.” The long tail marketing idea is that the Internet
is capable of reaching tiny markets, which were previously
ignored by marketers because they were too
expensive to reach. Online companies can use the Web
to sell a vast range of products from mainstream popular
items right down to the singularity of one unique unit
(Anderson, 2004). Statistically, the sum of the less popular
items can outnumber the sum of the popular items.
This “long tail” will also apply to learning. More resources—commercial,
instructor- and user-created—are
already increasingly available for learners who have, up
to now, been somewhat marginalized. English as a second
language, international learners, gifted, learning
disabled, and physically challenged students, and people
with behavioural disorders will all benefit. For example,
a website that offers resources for learning disabled students
is http://www.npin.org. An excellent site for gifted
students is http://www.hoagiesgifted.org.
In general, more user-created educational content
becomes available every day. Of course, these usercreated
resources will draw fewer learners than popular
websites like Discovery School or the Exploratorium.
However, the accumulated total of learners who use the
less popular educational resources—the long tail—will
outnumber the learners who visit the popular sites.
FACILITATING INTERACTIVITY
How instructors approach the design of their courses is
profoundly affected by their teaching styles (Indiana
State University, 2005). The lecture-based approach to
teaching is most often used in on-campus courses, and it
is what instructors are most familiar with. Findings from
research have shown that the lecture-based approach
often fails to engage students in online courses (Ally,
2004; Conrad, 2004; Gulati, 2004). Instructors unfamiliar
with other instructional strategies need time to explore
them while conceptualizing how they will design
their online course.
The opportunity to design, develop, and teach in a
new medium opens the door to learning new pedagogies.
Applying new approaches may affect how instructors
perceive their teaching role. In distance
education this role shift is often described as a transition
from a lecturer to a facilitator (Brown, Myers & Roy,
2003; Collison, Elbaum, Haavind & Tinker, 2000;
Conrad, 2004; Maor & Zariski, 2003; Young, Cantrell &
Shaw, 2001). This transition is a process that takes time
and support, and often it isn’t considered when instructors
are asked to develop an online course. During
the development process, instructors are often surprised
at how much is involved in course development and in
conceptualizing their role and how they will teach. If the
design of the support infrastructure takes this transitional
process into consideration, it can positively influence
how instructors view their role and, subsequently,
how they design their course. This in turn may also affect
student success rates in online courses.
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