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The use of the Internet has produced a great transformation on people’s lives and on the way that people do things. And although the changes brought about by the use of the Internet have not transformed campus teaching and learning at the same speed as they have transformed everyday life, there is no doubt that it is gradually producing an impact in campus-based education. This impact is especially noticeable in three aspects: access, the definition of classroom space and the implementation of practices that were unusual for placed-based education. This paper relies on the literature and expands on those aspects, and on the implications of introducing online learning in the traditional classroom and how it affects the people (teacher and learner), the processes (teaching and learning), and the organizations involved. Online and traditional campus based education 3 IMPACT OF ONLINE EDUCATION ON TRADITIONAL CAMPUS-BASED EDUCATION The use of the Internet has had an impact on people’s lives and on the way that people do things. It has produced a great transformation in commerce, entertainment, personal communications, learning, and socialization (Ayers, 2004; Ayers & Grisham, 2003; Bates & Poole, 2003; Hsu, 2002; Spector & Teja, 2001). Many everyday things are done differently and referred to differently because of the Internet. If people need to find information about something, they can “google” it; to buy or sell anything, people use “ebay”; people don’t commute to work, they “telecommute”; colleagues or people with similar interests can “meet in a virtual chatroom.” New friends are made over the Web, and single people get into matchmaking Web sites to find a date or a mate; prescription drugs, greeting cards, birthday presents, even flowers can be purchased or delivered online. People go to college without ever physically attending a university campus, pay bills online, and manage their bank accounts without stepping into a bank. This impact is also affecting university campuses. The use of new information technologies has had an impact on faculty life and work, it has “transformed the research and scholarship component of faculty life by easing the process of collegial communication and collaboration”(Baldwin, 1998, p. 11). Through the Web, faculty can check out books from the library, look at the roster of students, and verify that their paychecks have been posted. Technology has become a commodity, and higher education students and professors take it for granted (Ayers & Grisham, 2003; Baldwin, 1998). It would be rare to find a university in the U.S. that has no Internet connection and reasonable technology infrastructure. However, the use of the Internet in classroom Online and traditional campus based education 4 teaching is not as widespread as the use of the Internet for information, entertainment, communication, and research. Impact on campus-based education Although the changes brought about by the use of the Internet have not transformed campus teaching and learning at the same speed as they have transformed everyday life, there is no doubt that it is gradually producing an impact in campus-based education. Because this transformation is under way, the eventual outcome is still to be seen, however, it is not too soon to talk about the effects of online learning on the traditional campus based education. The impact is especially noticeable in three aspects: access, the definition of classroom space and the implementation of practices that were unusual for placed-based education. The first impact that online learning produces in the traditional classroom is immediate access to facts, information, people, services, and live events (Barab, Thomas, & Merrill, 2001;Bates & Poole, 2003; Gillespie, 1998; Harasim, 1990; Paloff & Pratt, 2001). Face-to-face classes can use thousands of educational resources that are available on the Web. Access to information is not limited to class materials, and access to class materials is no longer limited to the class time or to the physical space of the classroom. Online communications facilitate access to the instructor, the students, support staff or administrators, and the class is open twenty-four hours a day. This immediate access has had an impact in campus students’ retention and learning achievement. Virginia Tech, for example, was faced with the high drop out rates in first and second year math, caused by problems in transfer of learning. The Math Department created “The Math Emporium,” a Online and traditional campus based education 5 center that hosts over 500 workstations and is open 24/7. Students can access all the contents and practice of the two first years of math at the Emporium to refresh what they have seen in class, or they can take the class online, in which case they also have tutors as consultants available in person or online to help. Also senior college students can come any time to refresh their knowledge (Bates, 2000, p.31). Also, and perhaps most exciting, online education provides easy access to peers, which allows the establishment of a network of scholars for the purposes of intellectual exchange, collaboration, collective thinking, and socialization (Baldwin, 1998; Harasim, 1990; McDonald, 2002). This has an impact on institutions and faculty professional life. When choosing collaborators, faculty is no longer limited by geographical boundaries. Faculty and adjuncts from a variety of geographical locations can collaborate and teach in a same institution while working and living in another area. On-campus teaching benefits from having access to experts in different disciplines; institutions are forming consortiums by which they share faculty and courses. Faculty benefits because the online environment broadens his opportunity as teacher and researcher in other campuses. The second impact can be seen in the notion of classroom space, which takes a whole different meaning as a synonym of learning space (Burbules, 2005). Online education blurs the line between distance education and traditional, place-based education, primarily because of the opportunity for discussion, collaboration, and the potential for building a sense of community among participants inside and outside of the classroom (Barab et al., 2001; Boetcher & Conrad, 1999; Harasim, 1990; McDonald, 2002; Paloff & Pratt, 1999). Faculty can choose between several available online applications to encourage online interaction via synchronous and/or asynchronous Online and traditional campus based education 6 methods. These methods are used to extend the classroom discussions, to allow for student insights on a new topic, to enhance a lecture, or to discuss readings. Collaboration among students in the same class, or between students and researchers residing in different geographical locations is possible as long as they can all share the virtual collaborative space of the online classroom. Online education represents an “augmented environment for collaborative learning” (Harasim, 1990, p.60). The Web becomes a virtual learning space where knowledge is shared and collaboration happens not only between those who are geographically dispersed, but also among those who work on similar ideas at different times and contribute to that knowledge creation. An early example of this is the “White Papers” of EPS313 (http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/wp). These are documents on different topics that were started in the summer of 1999 as a class project by students who were geographically dispersed. The information in this papers was enhanced and expanded by the students in the same class in subsequent semesters -2000, 2001, 2002, and continues-, resulting in a series of research based documents on different topics that are accessed daily by dozens of hits from campus students and others looking for information on “Credibility and Web Evaluation”, and other themes. Today, new developments, such as shared Web-spaces in which people contribute to a knowledgebased system, are increasing in popularity. Organizations try to capture their collective knowledge in closed, password-protected systems at the same time as open-access sites gather people’s knowledge and information in Web-based encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia—where anyone can create, edit, and access information on many topics. Learning and collaboration in virtual spaces is another impact that online learning is having on classroom education. Online and traditional campus based education 7 The third element considered here as an impact of online learning on classroom education is the implementation of practices that were unusual for placed-based education. Distance education practices have been adopted in the face-to-face classroom affecting the design and implementation of campus-based instruction. Traditionally, distance education was regarded as the “poor and often unwelcome stepchild within the academic community” (Merisotis & Phipps, 1999, p. 4). It was considered as lower quality education, or a poor replica of campus education (Allen & Seaman, 2004). However, distance education turned out to be more and more noticeable as a part of the higher education family because of the uses it makes of educational technologies and new pedagogical strategies that improve the process of teaching and learning. The instructional insights gained in the online distance world produced a transformation that also reached campus-based education. The developments that occurred with the incorporation of the Web into distance education practices—such as synchronous and asynchronous class discussion; extensive peer review of class documents; constant comments and reflections on opinions and answers given by classmates; online collaboration; document and application sharing—were rare or never part of campusbased courses for very practical reasons. In a face-to-face class, document sharing and peer reviews involved printing copies of documents, thus adding costs.
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