I have heard rumblings that BYU Provo that BYU Provo is showing an increased interest in online learning.
I will confess to mixed feelings, however, which I will admit are totally selfish…
Shortly after I arrived at BYU in 1992, I visited with the late Dwight Laws, the manager of BYU Independent Study at the time. The thrust of the interaction was a discussion of the work I had been doing with the technologies of the day at the Air Force Academy. His response was that they were totally open to doing creative stuff, as long as it could be delivered with paper and ink.
In all fairness to Dwight, it is only now, in
the 15th year of the new century that we can do on a wide scale the sort of things we were doing in 1992 at the Air Force Academy. Even then, what we did was on a very limited scale. A primary
limiting factor of course was the expensive nature of the technologies of the day: The price of each Sony View 3000 videodisc workstation was $8,000, which would be at least $12,000 today. Even then, the limited number of workstations required that we assign two students to each workstation at a time, which explains the two headsets and one mouse seen in the photo. So much for individualized learning.
The primary irritating factor today is my advanced age, which will limit my involvement in a very exciting time for learning: If the technology can do something useful for teaching and learning, don’t waste the teacher’s time doing those things. We know that there are many exciting, interesting, and motivating things the teacher can do that the technology will not, for the foreseeable future be able to accomplish (Star Wars’ C-3PO not withstanding!)
A second irritating factor is that online learning efforts are not yet fully exploiting the tremendous computing power people are carrying around in their pocket.
Perhaps that is about to change?