Q&A talks about online education at UConn’s Neag School of Education with Jae-Eun Joo, the school’s new director of online programs.
Q: You are the new director of online programs at UConn’s Neag School of Education. How extensive is UConn’s online offerings in education?
A: The Neag School of Education currently offers three online programs with integrated face-to-face components that have attracted a wide range of graduate students, and professionals such as K-12 educators and directors of college-level disability services. At the university level, the newly established eCampus serves as the gateway for more than 100 online undergraduate and graduate courses, certificates, and programs at UConn.
Q: Your role is to create interactive online learning environments that follow best practices. What are some best practices?
A: In addition to leading online program development and faculty support, I also teach and research about emerging online learning theories and best practices.
One exciting pilot project is to work with several local school districts where iPads are distributed as a teaching and learning tool to teachers and students. The challenge is that these districts were able to secure funding to buy the iPads but then face the hurdle to find time and resources for teacher professional development. If the teachers are not ready to fully integrate iPads into their everyday instructions, our students would not get the optimal benefits of having them at their hands.
So, I’m working with teachers and school/district leaders to design and conduct a series of professional development workshops, starting from a blended format (a mixture of face-to-face and online) and moving toward an online format.
Q: Have there been studies on the efficacy of online vs. in-classroom learning?
A: An analysis and review of online learning studies report by the U.S. Department of Education in 2010 found, “students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction,” and “learning outcomes for students who engaged in online learning exceeded those of students receiving face-to-face instruction.”
This report also identified that the blended mode of online instruction had the most positive effect on student learning outcomes, compared to the purely face-to-face or online instructions, although it highlighted the significant lack of rigorous research studies on the effectiveness of online learning especially for K-12 students.
Considering this is still a rapidly emerging field of study in education, I can share one example from my own experience that shows the positive response online education has received. Before joining UConn, I was a founding member of WIDE (Wide-scale Interactive Development for Educators) World, a global online professional development program for K-12 educators at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 1999, WIDE World started with only 20 classroom teachers funded by a grant. After 10 years, WIDE World became a multi-million dollar self-sustaining program by providing high quality professional development opportunities for over 25,000 K-12 teachers and leaders around the world.
What made this particular program successful was its robust inquiry-based online instruction and continuous improvement based on the research data, where the online content was relevant and useful to the participants’ daily work. Course assignments and discussions were also deeply engaging, and the online learning environment allowed both local and international professional learning communities.
Q: One of the benefits of online teaching is it provides people with open access and flexible schedules to overcome physical disabilities, transportation issues and other challenges to earn a degree. Are there cost advantages as well?
A: The main focus here is not so much about how much we will save or how many online courses we will offer. Rather, we want to understand who would benefit the most and what kinds of effective learning outcomes we could achieve in the form of online education by reaching out to people who couldn’t be regular UConn students on campus.
