Online and blended learning provides opportunities to mitigate Teacher Shortages and Workloads while Optimizing Learning, by:
• Automating transfer of intellectual information (facts, ideas, concepts, principles, and some application and problem solving), so that in classroom face-to-face time with teachers is reduced and/or enriched.
• Automating and/or facilitate course assessment, drastically reducing the teaching time spent to assess many learners, learner by learner, while giving faster formative and summative learning feedback for the benefit of both teachers and learners.
• Evaluating automatically recorded learning statistics, using learning management tools, for big picture down to detailed learning performance to indicate changes needed to continuously improve learning results.
Learners need to learn to learn online. Online learning needs to be more proactively blended into mainstream learning solutions to optimize learner’s familiarity with its utility. “The only man who is educated is the man who has learned how to learn […] how to adapt and change […]. Changingness, a reliance on process rather than upon static knowledge, is the only thing that makes any sense as a goal for education in the modern world.” (Kirschenbaum, 2002, p.304)
REFERENCES
Kirschenbaum, V., & Henderson, L. (2002). The Carl Rogers Reader, chapter 21 “The Interpersonal Relationship in the Facilitation of Learning.” p.304.