The biggest institutional obstacle in my opinion is the when technology is not consistence\up and running for the students. The students have place their confidence into the institutional technology and when the system is not available when they have set time aside to complete assignments, participate in discussion or take exams this become a huge obstacle for students as well as the instructor. This inconsistency of the institutional technology can become very discouraging and inconvenience to the online learner.
Shundra Mosby
eric,
You are "preaching to the choir" here! So often students want it just handed to them without difficulty but often this comes from their prior experiences. Too bad.
Renee Shaffer
Hi Mrs.Shaffer
The biggest institutional obstacle is the critical thinking student believes and expects textbook and teacher will tell what them what to say and to do without any difficulty
Eric Andre
Technology , the ability to have an efficient and use friendly environment which is easily understood and easy to utilize. During my educational training for my doctoral degree, I had an opportunity to utilize online technology in some of my classes. It was a learning curve for me , too a few weeks for me to be comfortable and understanding the web-study forums and the different navigation tools. After the bumps it was exciting to use online learning tools. The biggest challenge from my perspective was to be able to utilize this environment without any prior verbal explanation from a single instructor. In the classroom setting you automatically recognize you instructor and connect right away, virtual learning has a slow introduction process in my opinion.
Ben,
Very true. We hope more instructors are becoming student centered but I run into many who are not.
Renee Shaffer
I think that the future holds very little for us teachers. Soon, schools will be paying one teacher to "run" 8-10 online classes and the rest of us will be on Food Stamps and looking for work.
Teachers are getting laid off and we should be hiring more teachers now than ever and "beefing up" our unions again. Teacher unions used to be great and now they are all working for the schools best interest instead of yours, it seems.
The biggest obstacle is the fact that Active Learning is to be done face-to-face with students--not by communicating via laptop.
Teachers who are not student-centered and instead curriculum centered are usually the issue.
While the technology for instant communication on a mass scale is in itself an amazing collection of software and hardware tools, there are still those moments when issues arise with sound or video transmission, software incompatibilities that render what should be a smooth presentation to learners into a potential nightmare. Like this run-on sentence,we tend to anticipate issues with the broadcast aspects of live online presentations, and so we try to get it all in – before an issue occurs that prevents us from doing so.
The more "human" aspect that can often create a "problem" is attendance to the lectures by students since there is no mandate to compel them to attend, as would be the case in an on-ground classroom scenario. It will be interesting to witness how much schools will change in the future.
