Online teaching: methods, challenges, and effectiveness

Online Teaching

Technology advancements have made a lot of improvements in every walk of life. The field of education has also been blessed by the technology and the concept of online education has emerged.

Online learning has become the most popular mode of learning in a very short span of time. The reason for its fame is unlimited, however, being cost effective and suited to the demands of the learners are some of the most common reasons of its popularity.

Ironically, online teaching is one of the most controversial modes of teaching. The reason of the controversy is due to the fact that it rejects the educational philosophies which have the central role of a teacher. In contrast, online education has no role of a teacher.

This paper sheds light upon the element of social presence which is a prerequisite in the online learning environment as analyzed by Benjamin Kehrwald in his article namely 'Understanding social presence in text-based online learning environment'. This article tries to understand the importance and presence of social presence in the online learning environments. The main aim of this article is to develop a uniform definition of social presence in order to improve the instructional effectiveness and to understand how the students experience this phenomenon while learning in a virtual environment. In order to understand all these factors that are present in an online environment, the writer employed the research methods to collect data and to reach on a valid conclusion. The main aim of these methods was to gather enough data in order to validate the hypothesis of social presence in the online learning environment. The study involved gathering data from a group of experienced students who had al long history of using online learning for educational purposes. The definition of social presence was developed by gathering the research data. The main crust of the information gathered was that social presence being felt by the students was when there was some sort of feedback or reaction they received from other students. One very important finding of the study was that the process of interaction between students that takes places between online learning makes the whole learning experience richer and more positive for the learner. However, the limitation to this point is that it cannot be generalized because not every online learning offers interaction between students.

The writer held the idea that the component of social presence is present in the online environment, as much as it is present in the real life classroom. Even though the articles has a strong hold of the belief that social presence do exist in online environment, the author fails to provide a single idea can be uniformly applied throughout.

One more important factor that was discussed in the literature review of the article was learning is very much contingent on the learner willingness to learn. Though the medium of learning is vital and plays an important part, the attitude of the learner is also very important in successful learning. No matter how strong the educational medium is, if there is an urge from the side of learner, the result can be positive or vice versa.

The writer believed that the ambiguous definition of social presence is much due to the lack of having a uniform and solid definition of this concept. He writer discussed that even that there is no concrete definition of social presence for the instructors to get help from.

When it comes to limitations of the study, there are few that needed to be pointed out. The first and the most important limitation was that in order to confirm the finding of the hypothesis that there exists social presence in the online learning environment, the writer took samples from the students who were very used to online learning environment. In order to get the valid and complete feedback, the writer should have included both the experienced as well as novice students in this study. The reason is that experienced students may not be able to point out the real problems as compared to novice students, who are much more aware of their surrounding and notice things more. The correct approach would have been to take feedback from both the experienced as well as the new student, in order to synthesize the correct result. Choosing old student would not make this research very authenticated. One more thing that is worth point out is that social presence can be felt by student if they experience any feedback from fellow students, but in case of online education which does not contain interaction between students, so how will social presence be judged there.

The concept discussed in this article reflects the work of many well-known educationalists. For example, the idea of social presence in learning was also presented by Dewey when he called education as a 'social continuity of life' (Dewey, 1930). For him the process of education starts from the day the child is born and ends when his or her life ends. From this meaning of education, it is much clear that there is a strong connection between social life, society as well as education. Similarly the concept of online education is quite similar to the concept presented by Kirkpatrick, in which he believed that a teacher should act as a guide, not as a leader or a commander, the whole concept of online education reflected this concept in which the teacher has a role of acting as an instructor and a guide, which in total contrast to the conventional class room environment.

The need for a teacher during learning is prominent in almost each and every theory ever proposed by the educationalists. Whether it is Plato who wanted children to be raised by the state rather than by their mother, or Aristotle, who wanted a teacher to lead the children in the process of learning. However, in case of online learning, all of these theories and philosophies have been challenged. Though these theories are important, the validity of these theories which need a teacher for the process of effective learning is still yet to be confirmed.