Last Comments for Teachers

• The technology questions are complex and important. Current development is sometimes too much driven by technology instead of by pedagogical goals. We should not, as a reaction, disregard the technological issues. Instead the challenge is to reach a deep understanding of the relationship between technological, or even technical, choices and teaching/learning processes. Especially, we want to emphasize here that there is still a need for developing new technology that supports specific pedagogical functions (e.g. group regulation).
• Social gaps can be larger than physical distance. In several EU countries, the educational system is still structured on historical distinctions, for instance between state schools and catholic schools, where religious freedom is mostly used as an alibi for social discrimination. In a similar way, the distinction between different forms of secondary schools (general, technical, professional,...) do less reflect career directions than social layers. On those days when Swedish teenagers may interact with Chinese children, Internet should also serve as a medium to break the walls inside our society, to smoothen the transition between clusters of educational systems. This move is already visible in practices where the Internet is used to bridge the gap between schools and workplaces and the gap between schools and families (e.g. offering the parents to use the school Net in the evenings).
• What distance education offers is not only the possibility of access for people located far away from any school, but, for those who live close to an University, the possibility to choose - under legal and financial constraints - which school they want to attend to. Several new companies that offer on-line university degrees have appeared on the market. Students are not any more a captive audience, a Geneva student will soon be able to pick up a course wherever he/she wants. This phenomenon appeared at the University level, but will influence sooner or later the school system upstream. This new form of competition opens a controversial political debate. It is however a matter of fact that this competition will increase and that teachers - and the school system- have to be prepared for it.
•  Time is a critical factor. Space is a central concept in this document, but empirically speaking, time has a stronger impact on what works and what does not. If time is a critical factor in virtual learning environments, it has to be represented explicitly.We have already addressed two timing issues: synchronous versus asynchronous communication (cf. 2.3.1); increasing flexibility is often more crucial than decreasing distance (cf. 1.6) In our virtual campus, we see two other factors.

1. Time is the bottleneck. Although traditional computer-based teaching has been proved to reduce the time for learning, this is - empirically - not true with Internet-based training. The ratio between the workload and our students’ availability remains the most critical feature in designing curricula. Time is also a very rare resource for teachers who spend a huge amount of time to set up Internet-based activities.
2. Activity timing is as critical as activity design.  When we move learning activities from presential to distance settings, tuning the timing is a critical factor. For instance, in a discovery learning environment, we increased the delay between the discovery phase and the debriefing phase. The delay wasone coffee break in the presential setting and one week in the distance setting. Doing this, we lost most of the dynamics we usually got in the debriefing phase. Tuning the flow of discussion groups, i.e. the number of message per day.