Online education in the era of the “social web”

Now compare that to online education the way we do it in IE: a student sends a message to the online forum, taking the time to write it down and think about it. The professor can wither reply right away or send the question back to the forum for other students to build on it, and, if she decides to finally reply, will have plenty of information to do so, anything that her mouse can reach. The dialogue can be much richer, diverse, involve more participants and build more knowledge, perhaps generating collateral questions or lessons that would create new threads. In the end, when it comes to grading, everything is there, in the forum or digital dropbox, waiting to be evaluated. The difference, obviously, is the higher richness of the digital medium, something that can really make a difference given the special characteristics of executive education, where students generally don’t have to memorize formulas or equations, but use - and educate - their common sense.

This type of education has been working amazingly well at IE for  number of years. However, recently, we realized it wasn’t enough, With the advent of the so called “Web 2.0”, “the Web of the people” or “the social web”, students find powerful tools to also enrich their educational experience. And whilst is probably not necessary for the school to provide such tools  - we are, in most cases, dealing with free tools where anyone can open an account with just a valid e-mail address - it is required to understand their powers and possibilities.

These tools are basically collaboration and communication ones. What happens, for instance, when students can see each others in real meetings on the web? Besides being a challenge for schools like us, where each member of the team can be anywhere in the world, when it comes to find a good timing for a meeting, it generates the need to respond to that. Some sessions, particularly those with guest speakers from companies, become interactive, in real time, via Breeze or similar tools. Many professors use Skype actively, give their username to students so they can ask questions anytime if they see the professor connected, or use Gtalk or other instant messaging tools to interact. Besides that, they encourage the use of social bookmarks, del.icio.us being the most popular one, where the students or the professor can collect links, tag them and make them available to document the sessions, provide additional documentation, etc. and even see what’s being more popular or what type of references have other users saved in connection to a certain topic. Also, imagine the potential of something like Google Docs: instead of using the old, fat Office, Google Docs provides students with a true collaboration suite, where several users can be connected concurrently in the same document or spreadsheet, and watch what other users are typing in real time whilst talking or IM’ing at the same time in a separate window. That pretty much conveys the meaning of online collaboration.

But obviously, with these tools we are still scratching the surface of the social web. Think about blogs: now every student can create a blog, put their assignments or reflect on issues there, and ask her professor to go there to check it out. And while doing so, they can also be building their online presence, generating “Google juice”, achieving visibility or even buying keywords for the companies they would like to work for as soon as they get in the job market! Imagine a page where a student can introduce herself, put videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr, presentations in SlideShare, and season it with the proper, formal curricular info... that is some killer resume 2.0 these days! Then, imagine the power of ping-based or RSS-based search engines like Technorati or Google BlogSearch when it comes to research companies or materials, and the whole plethora of RSS readers - Google Reader, Bloglines, Netvibes and many others - when it comes to organizing sources of information, newspapers, magazines and their favorite gurus’ blogs... There are many tools out there, many possibilities, students have their preferences on ones or the others, and that’s the way it should be: preparing our students for an extremely diverse web, with plenty of tools, and where information can flow, independently of its format constraints, across tools of all kinds. Right now, as a professor, I feel I’m giving the most of myself and being able to cover more materials and topics in the online masters versus the traditional ones. I still enjoy in-class interaction truly a lot, and that’s why I tend to prefer bended courses versus pure online ones, and, most of all, I think we are in a new, exciting  frontier, where theories are yet to be written.

Enrique Dans is Professor of Information Technologies and Systems at Instituto de Empresa in Madrid

www.ie.edu

www.enriquedans.com