Cooperative learning at a commute school and its implications for distance education

摘要

A variety of social, economic and technological factors are converging to create increased demand for distance education. Consequently, enormous challenges are facing today's educational institutions, to reduce costs, improve access, and cater to a changing population more interested in life long learning using distance education. This societal change promises to have a profound impact on the traditional university system. Schools have responded by spawning a variety of methods and technologies for delivering distance education. This is in turn transforming how knowledge is delivered to students. Not only does the instructor need to learn how to use the new technologies, the nature and style of delivery of the course content itself has to be adapted to the new medium of delivery. It has become axiomatic that teamwork and cooperative learning are essential ingredients in Engineering and Engineering Technology education. Most approaches to cooperative learning however are geared to the traditional residential school with 18-22 year-old students living in dormitories or in close proximity to the school campus. Cooperative learning becomes a challenge in a commuter school where the students are widely dispersed throughout the community and many of whom have significant out-of school commitments including work and families. This paper describes strategies that were followed to promote cooperative learning at an urban commuter school where these challenges are a given. The lessons learnt from this approach also have important implications for distance learning classes where the students are not just dispersed around a local community but may in fact be hundreds if not thousands of miles apart. The author's experiences in adapting cooperative learning techniques to web-enhanced classes, as well as live 2-way interactive television classes, with reflections on lessons learnt, will also be given.