… and serendipity! I've just participated in a great AdobeConnect session, run by the university's Centre for e-Learning, on the interfaces between academic publications and social media. It was fun, educational, & thought-provoking & has provided something of a spur to my own thinking about the value** of social media in this particular sphere. (For example, while academics are pressured to publish, & the number & position (journal) of those publications is seen as a measure of their worth, you could well ask what the actual value of the work is if few or no people actually read it. I've got another post lined up about this.)
Anyway, one of the things that I brought into the conversation was the value of Twitter (& Facebook) in terms of finding new information in fields that interest me. (I know that a lot of my recent blog posts have developed from ideas sparked by FB sources.) I'm a fairly recent convert to Twitter but have enjoyed several tweeted conversations about science communication & science education, and I do keep an eye on posts from those I'm 'following' in case something new crops up.
And so it was that when I started following our AdobeConnect host, this popped up:
#Sustainability study @WSSIatASU confirms my findings: #elearning saves 30 tonnes CO2/student/degree https://t.co/E8y8Mx3KrK HT @ecampusnews
— Stephen Harlow (@stephenharlow) April 13, 2015
Stephen's link takes you to this article: net positive valuation of online education. The executive summary makes very interesting reading at a time when 'we' (ie my Faculty) are examining ways to offer our programs to a changing student demographic. It finds that on-line learning as a means of delivering undergraduate programs opens up access for people who don't fit the 'typical traditional undergraduate' profile, such that those people may end up with greater life-time earnings & tax contributions, and reduced use of social services. And using on-line learning pedagogies & technologies seem to result in a reduced environmental footprint for the degrees: the authors estimate that on-line learning delivery of papers saves somewhere between 30 & 70 tonnes of CO2 per degree, because of the reduction in spending both on travel to & from campus, and on bricks & mortar.
There's an excellent infographic here, and I can see why the report would indicate that the institution they surveyed (Arizona State University, ASU) would say that
[i]n the near term, nearly 100 percent of an institution’s courses, both immersive and virtual, will be delivered on the same technology platforms.
However, there are caveats. ASU has obviously got a fairly long history of using e-learning platforms. This is not simply a matter of taking an existing paper (or degree program), making its resources available on-line, & saying 'there! we're doing e-learning'. Because unless the whole thing is properly thought through, the students' learning experiences may not be what their educators would like to think.
In other words, this sort of initiative involves learning for both students and educators – and the educators' learning needs to come first.
** As an aside, here's an example of what could be called 'crowd-sourcing' for an educational resource, via twitter. But the same could easily be done for research.
Ecologists: I'm building a list of core computational competencies for ecological modelers. Thoughts? #EcoModelingSkills — Kezia Manlove (@keziamanlove) April 14, 2015