How suitable is online learning? Harvard researchers conducted a study to find answers.
The education industry has undergone a slew of changes over the years and the latest is the boom in online learning options. Many centers have now opened up that provide students the flexibility to take up courses online. Many institutes have also started offering students online lectures with short tests. This has given rise to the question - How suitable is online learning since it is surrounded by distractions like email, the Internet, and television.
Daniel Schacter, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology and Karl Szpunar, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology, conducted a study to find an answer to this question.
"What we hope this research does is show that we can use very strong, experimentally sound techniques to describe what works in online education and what doesn't," Szpunar said. "The question, basically, is how do we optimize students' time when they're at home, trying to learn from online lectures? How do we help them most efficiently extract the information they need?"
He said the students he spoke to said they take up to four hours to complete an online lecture that should only take them an hour because they have to continuously resist the temptation of browsing the Internet, visiting their social networking profiles or watching videos online. Szpunar recommends giving students incentives to finish online projects in time. This is one of the ways teachers and parents can handle the problem of distractions while students complete online lectures and projects.
According to the findings of the study, while online classes have become very popular, there is very little scientific data about how students learn in the virtual classroom.
"A lot of people have ideas about what techniques are effective," Szpunar said. "There's a general folk wisdom that says lessons should be short and engaging, but there's an absence of rigorous testing to back that up."
Szpunar said he hopes the findings help to lay out a blueprint that can ensure students get the most out of such studies.
"At the very least, what this says is that it's not enough to break up lectures into smaller segments, or to fill that break with some activity," he said. "What we really need to do is instill in students the expectation that they will need to express what they've learned at some later point. I think it's going to be a very sobering thought for a lot of people to think that students aren't paying attention almost half the time, but this is one way we can help them get more out of these online lectures."
