There are several issues that will ethically need to be addressed in online learning courses that I have yet to uncover in very much of the existing research. Here are a couple of scenarios: You are rushed to the hospital with a life threatening appendix that has ruptured, and you find out that your surgeon has gained his medical license online. How will you react? Or, as has been discussed in class, the fact that universities loathe the idea of online courses in some respects because the class sizes must be smaller and less revenue is generated while more resources are being used. What if they alleviated the problem by running advertisements from businesses and corporations within the framework of the course being taught? After all, corporations would love to get their word out to a captive, target audience and would be willing to pay for that privilege.
If anyone thinks that these two scenarios are impossible, think again. I have an acquaintance who recently earned his nursing license online. He took the coursework online, and then he had to do a three-day, real-life practicum--that he failed the first time around--but he eventually received his license and is now working at a local hospital. In many ways I find it unsettling.
Should we treat an online composition class with any less diligence or ethical consideration? In the field of technical writing there is a whole branch of studies that deal with nothing but ethics. There are many benefits to learning with technology, but I see some problems coming down the road that very few people have paid much attention to. We make a big deal out of plagiarism in the physical university and then tell students to collaborate on projects using the WWW (which stands for "the Wild, Wild, West). We know the difference but students seldom do.
Other considerations are how we deal with students who are struggling with composition in the virtual world. Do we take their money and leave them "flapping in the wind" when they struggle to keep up? It somehow becomes easier to do that in cyberspace. One study I read, states that the rate of students who do not finish an online course is much higher than in a face-to-face course. Much of this may be blamed on students who are not self-disciplined enough to follow online instruction, but I somehow feel that the mode instruction, along with the instructor's diligence, plays a role.
Thirty years ago there was no such field as bioethics in medicine. In the future I see a field of technology pedagogical practice ethics emerging. We have only scratched the surface with current research.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Tim,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, it really sounds like you have found a very rich, interesting area on which to write your own thesis. It seems that the ethics of online pedagogy present a lot of opportunity for a scholar.
My thesis wound up being 169 pages, not counting the required preliminary pages, the works cited, the works consulted, or my appendices. My topic (Instructor Response to Student Writing) was very broad and ambitious. I wish I had narrowed my topic considerably. I also wish I had used Word 2007's Table of Contents function so that it updated the page numbering in the TOC every time I changed something. I had to manually check my TOC a couple times. The Graduate College is very picky about formatting. Its website has some helpful information, including a Thesis Guide (which mandates the formatting to be followed) and a power-point on writing a thesis. Among other things, I wish I had referenced the Thesis Guide throughout the process instead of at the very beginning and the very end. If you have any other questions, let me know. I'm sure I can tell you a few things not to do!