OLDaily

Virtual Education Platform Emulates Face-to-Face Interactions
Rhea Kelly, Campus Technology, 2020/10/30

Something fun you can do is copy clips from press releases and do a Google search on them to find publications rerunning PR as news. Or, conversely, as I did in this case, you can copy the clip from the publication and search for the press release that prompted it. Here's the one for this article. Even the quote from Benjamin Ola. Akande, Champlain's President, comes from the press release. Now I thought the story was interesting, especially in light of the Tony Bates article. And I don't think I've covered   InSpace before (update: I have mentioned it briefly). So it's worth a link. But I wish online publications would add more value - at the very least, they could delete the unnecessary adjectives used in PR-speak. Anyhow, InSpace works on the same sort of principle as Gather.Town, which I discussed a few weeks ago.

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Why, ‘logically’, online learning is superior to face-to-face teaching
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2020/10/30

The argument is simply this: "there are benefits of online learning that do not exist in face-to-face teaching, whereas there are no benefits in face-to-face teaching that could not exist in online teaching." But what about in practice, where we can actually do more things in person than online? Sure. "You can do online learning well or badly." But the fact that we currently do it badly doesn't make it inherently worse. So we have to ask, then, do "the affordances of being in the same place physically and at the same time... justify the inconvenience and cost?" Now Bates does admit that "there is an added emotional element to a live event that we should not underestimate" but I think he would conclude - as do I - that in many faces, the face-to-face experience does not justify the cost. Certainly, as Bates says, "it is not online learning that now needs to justify itself, but face-to-face teaching."

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