Saturday, July 23, 2005

Origins, Part III: Demonstrating Quality in Distance Learning

This post originally appeared in my short-lived blog Truth and Beauty, and was moved to this blog in June, 2007.


Part of what's been going on in my professional life that has led me to this interest in and exploration of Institutional Research and Effectiveness has been an increasing pressure (to some extent self-imposed) to demonstrate quality and effectiveness of distance learning initiatives. Since online teaching and learning is still so new, there seems to be quite a lot of scrutiny. Questions about whether online courses are effective as traditional classroom learning abound.

As a manager of distance learning initiatives, I've struggled to find ways to demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of these programs. I know they're high quality, and I know that the faculty and students involved in them generally find them even more effective than their traditional courses. But how to demonstrate this to the skeptics?

It seems that one direction this has led folks in the field is toward creating frameworks for quality measurement in distance learning. It's interesting to me that rather than doing extensive studies and data gathering about teaching and learning outcomes we've instead decided to create models that help us evaluate the quality of the inputs to distance learning courses. But then, it seems that the history of assessment in higher education is about this balance between evaluating inputs and looking at the outcomes.

More on this in Origins: Part IV.

Friday, July 8, 2005

Origins, Part II: Why "Truth and Beauty"?

This post originally appeared in my short-lived blog Truth and Beauty, and was moved to this blog in June, 2007.


Why call this blog "Truth and Beauty"?

When I was pursuing my Masters at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I cross-registered for a course in System Dynamics at MIT's Sloan School of Management. I had worked with Peter Senge while at PBS and was intrigued by his idea of systems thinking. I thought that the course would help me better understand this concept and the whole idea of organizational learning.

It did indeed give me insights into Senge's ideas. What I didn't know, though, when registering for the course, was that it was going to be highly technical. We would use specialized software (STELLA and iThink) to build complex business models and run simulations of these models to observe how they behaved over time. There was a lot of equation writing and playing with different data inputs. We were tweaking the models to see what it would take to get them to behave in just the way we wanted them to. It was a lot of fun, and an incredible learning experience.

Toward the end of the semester, our instructor included a lecture on "Truth and Beauty." The models that we'd labored over, he warned, were not to be confused with the truth. They may have been beautiful, telling interesting stories and even giving us some insight into decision-making. There were not, however, reality--something far more complex than could ever be modeled.

I'm fascinated by this paradox about data and decision-making. We often treat data as gospel. But usually there are more questions than answers, when we really look close. So are the data pointing us to the truth, or just beautiful possibilities? Or are these the same?

I guess this is what Keats meant when he said "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." (Ode on a Grecian Urn).

All ye need to know, indeed. There's way more I gotta know, and I'm going to keep looking.