Hi Patrick,
Thanks again for sharing this valuable resources.I will add it to the "Resource" section of our session.
Both articles refer to the online courses in a more generic way. As you can guess from the title, one focuses exclusively on interactions. Interactions here are understood by Battalio in a wider sense, as interventions of instructors but also a peer collaboration. He analysis a “collaborative group interaction” including technology, teachers and students. You managed to extract in your post an essence of both papers, however I would like to quote a few interesting points that grabbed my attention.
Interactions in a narrower sense
As we talk in this forum about synchronous e-learning it might be worth exploring interactions in a more specific sense, connected only to the synchronous-learning. Following this digression, I would like to propose you for reading a part of the book “The New Classroom” by Ruth Clark and Ann Kwinn (See the resource section for our session). The title of this chapter is “Make it Active: Planning Interactions in the New Virtual Classroom” and give some practical hints how to plan and embed interactions into an online classroom.
No specific time and space
“ The point is that our mental model of the Internet does not envision a specific place and time, and does not have the physical restrictions associated with a traditional classroom”
It brings me back again to an aspect of synchronous e-learning, contrasting with the statement above, which actually has a specific, real-time as an distinctive feature, as recapitulated here.
e-teacher, e-tutor different and changing role
I like Battalio expression, which he takes from Volery, that a teacher should be a Learning catalyst helping students to “discover their own learning”. E-teacher has to cover different roles, needs to be sometimes a content, meta-cognition and/or process facilitator, advisor, assessor, technologist, resource provider, manager (administrator), designer, co-learner, researcher (Denis, 2004). A “learning catalyst” grabs some of aspects and puts them properly together. However what Battalio also highlights nowadays people need less technical facilitation, as "most of interfaces now function seamlessly" and that "issues related with technology faded into the background", even though "implementation of technology" and "connectivity speed" have not. It is worth to think about it when designing an online course.
Integrate work and learning
As you summarized nicely
“Very generally, both studies showed that students valued flexibility and convenience most in online learning.”
The reality is that the learning experience has to be "integrated into the learners daily schedules" (Battalio), it sounds even more true if we talk about learning professionals. Here is a lengthy quotation from one of my favourite sociologist Z. Bauman (and not because he is Polish...:)). Sorry for a clumsy translation from Italian (google translate can really speed up things!)
“The ability to last long is not anymore consider a quality. Things and the bonds are assumed to be useful only for a "limited time" and are reduced in shreds and otherwise deleted when no longer needed. Thus, it 'necessary to avoid having goods, especially durable ones of which' hard to get rid of. Today's consumption does not affect the accumulation of things, but their extraordinary use. Why, then, "the Baggage of knowledge" built in the school banks, college, should be excluded from this universal law? This is the first challenge that pedagogy must support, in fact, a type of knowledge ready for immediate use and, subsequently, for its immediate elimination, such as that offered by software programs (more and more quickly updated and, therefore, replaced), is shows much more 'attractive than what is offered by a firm and structured education.”
[Zygmunt Bauman. Intervista sull’educazione. Sfide pedagogiche e modernita’ liquida by A. Porcheddu, 2005, p. 59]
Simplifying what Bauman repeats in his papers is that we need to be prepared to walk on a 'quicksand' and be able to handle changes immediately, and in this interview he focuses in particular on how the instruction should consider it as well. In order to support "a (need for) quick update", we need immediate and flexible tools.
In the resource section you can find a scan of this chapter, unfortunately only in Italian.
As Battalio says "Autonomous learners can identify their learning needs", but at the same time some students "need an reinforcement that comes from a meeting face-to-face". So it seems that there is still space for video/web-conferencing, which can partly accommodate this need?
Maja