Three Interesting Facts from Dr. Saba's Article

I'm picking three per the assignment, but the truth is I learned many more interesting facts than those noted here:

1) Diversity of who "got on board" with distance learning - these groups: the LDS Church, learners interested in agriculture and government officials looking to square up early childhood development opportunities across demographic groups, clearly have different messages, goals and objectives. However, they were all able to see the benefits of distance education and to make strong efforts to use the technologies available to them.

2) The more things change - many of the challenges we face today such as keeping learners' attention, concerns about cheating and the credibility of non-classroom learning have been present since, well, the inception of non-classroom learning. One-way communication and limited options to tailor learning to the needs of individual learners are constant challenges to today's content developers, LMS admins, facilitators and other stakeholders. It turns out content developers in the days of correspondence education and instructional radio faced the same challenges.

3) I found this statement in the article, "What used to be achievable with an ordinary blackboard, a piece of chalk, and a light bulb, is now done with $1500 computers for each student, the Internet, and expensive servers and other gear!", to be eye-opening.

Like others in this class, I've attended seminars, meetings and other professional events where there was advocacy for throwing out rote memorization models to to focus instead on teaching kids collaboration and problem solving in ways that are effective in context of the other learning and entertainment options available. We hear that a lot in our field, and it's getting increasingly difficult to defend the turn-of-previous century model used in most classrooms.

However, to me, this is a new angle: we're spending lots more money, time and other resources, and producing exactly the same. learning. Ouch.

I suspect education is not the only area where more resources are being spent to maintain pre-technology standards and outcomes.

Thanks for reading this far. I welcome your comments and suggestions about my remarks.