I was talking yesterday about some of the difficulties in acceptance of distance education in the massage therapy community. One of those difficulties relates to a double standard of evaluation. This double standard became evident to me when I was working on the National Certification Board (NCBTMB) Distance Education Task Force that was considering allowing a certain percentage of hours in entry-level programs to be earned in a distance education format.
We had a number of people in this group, and as in any group, a wide variety of perspectives represented. I was curious to note that there was some strong opposition to allowing distance education to be used in a massage therapy education setting. The argument made was that massage is different than any other subject and is something that can’t be taught by distance education. Yet, nobody in the group was advocating that the hands-on techniques of massage would be taught in this environment. The distance education component would only cover those subjects such as business, anatomy, theory, etc., which involved non-hands-on instruction.
The policy eventually passed but one of the primary arguments against allowing distance education had been that it would require much greater oversight than the traditional face-to-face education programs. It was argued that the NCBTMB would have to use much greater scrutiny of these courses to make sure they were up to a certain quality. This is where the double standard comes in.
There is no current evaluation of the quality of face-to-face educational programs approved by the NCBTMB for continuing education. Yet, some believe a much higher degree of scrutiny of distance education programs is required. It is certainly true that the emergence of distance education has brought a whole host of new continuing education programs into existence, and many of them are poor quality. But, let’s be serious… there’s lots of workshops out there with the NCBTMB seal of approval on them that are really poor. If we are going to evaluate programs for their educational quality, then let’s do it. But let’s make sure that all programs are being evaluated on the same criteria.
Whitney–thanks for your comments. I too have noticed the “double standard” with regard to online education and I teach at a university. These assumptions come from my colleagues and take two different forms.
One is that students in online courses won’t and can’t possibly learn as much as students in face-to-face classrooms. Why? Because an instructor isn’t there to “make sure they do the work and attend lectures and turn in papers.” This is wrong for lots of reasons. That is not my role in the classroom–whether online or in person. But those who “evaluate” whether or not courses should be offered online seem to think we have to be more rigid because the environment allows for more flexibility. And the assumption is that students will take advantage of that flexibility by not doing the work and not learning. And they make this assumption in spite of the fact that students in both formats turn in the same research papers with the same amount of preparation and the quality of the work is generally pretty similar.
Another thing I think traditional educators have in common is believing that their subject is special and doesn’t lend itself to an online format. Every subject has its own challenges when instructors are translating it to an online format, but another kind of double standard is to say, well, that’s alright for them, but it would never do for us. Come on folks, we need a little self-analysis here!
By: Judith on November 21, 2008
at 2:50 pm
Hear, Hear to both Whitney and Judith. The key point I think is that until we establish a clear and consistent way to evaluate the “learning experience” – not just what information the students come away with- we really can’t say whether face-to-face or distance learning is “better”. More importantly – why should we compare one to the other. As long as the learning objectives distinguish knowledge from skills – we can easily assess accordingly that students “got it”.
By: Pat on November 25, 2008
at 4:42 pm