After reading the articles, I deeply agree with the understanding of Vaughan, N. D., Garrison, D. R., & Cleveland-Innes, M. (2013) that high level education is benefited by online communication because online communcations can maintain the communcation between teachers and students or just students, which gives students enough time to reflect and think deeply. Thats very true because compare with online communication, face to face teaching class is too short and too easy to be forgot, online communcations can maintain students’ memory of knowledge and learning process, also create a platform of reflect and discussion, so students can keep focusing or partly focusing on the class they were taught, they will have chance to rethink about the topic and discuss with the teacher or classmates. The most important benefit of this is students are possible to form their own view on the topic, not memorize the textbook but try to explain the topic with own’s thinking, I think thats the most significant advantage of blended learning.
However, even though the article mentioned that the blended learning leads “significant administrative advantages”, I think blended learning can also cause the teaching efficiency drops if teachers can not control the online learning and discussion speed. For example, when using social medias like discord, teachers are not able to check students’s learning state, it’s hard to tell if she or he is playing tiktok or thinking hard to figure out a question, the efficency of learning will hugely dpend on students themselves, their autonomy. If a student has this kind of problem, I believe teachers are almost impossible to increase his or her learning progress, I think that is the possbile problem that every students will reflect during online communcation, teachers can not control the efficency of students’ utilization of online communication time. If that can not be solved, online communcations will become the source of extra administrative cost, both etachers and students’ time is wasted during this situation.
My question is, how can teachers make sure students use their online communication time wisely? Otherwise it’s just a meaningless work. Is there any way to really solve the problem or it can just be relieved.
Reference:
Vaughan, N. D., Garrison, D. R., & Cleveland-Innes, M. (2013). Teaching in blended learning environments: Creating and sustaining communities of inquiry. AU Press.