Selecting Distance Learning Technologies

Example 2: Interactive Tours

A high school history teacher, located on the west coast of the United States, wants to showcase to her students new exhibits being held at two prominent New York City museums. The teacher wants her students to take a "tour" of the museums and be able to interact with the museum curators, as well as see the art work on display. Afterward, the teacher would like to choose two pieces of artwork from each exhibit and have the students participate in a group critique of the individual work of art. As a novice of distance learning and distance learning technologies, the teacher turned to the school district’s instructional designer for assistance. In the role of the instructional designer, what distance learning technologies would you suggest the teacher use to provide the best learning experience for her students?


In the multimedia program “The Technology of Distance Education” it listed and defined five pieces of technology that could be used for distance education:

1. Podcasts
2. Discussion Technologies
3. Blogs
4. Concept Maps
5. Media Sharing Sites

I believe for this particular example, three of the technologies would be needed: podcasts, discussion, and media sharing. The media sharing would not be sites, but the ability to share media on the Course Management System (CMS) that was chosen by the teacher. The teacher needed three main functions, touring the museum with curator assistance, view pictures of the artwork, and discuss/critique the artwork chosen.

There would be two options for using the podcast, using still pictures in a slideshow format or a video-recording of the museum. Each were defined in the definitions from the multimedia program.

Discussion area could be used to speak with the curator and/or hold the critique session with the students. The other option for the curator would be having a chat session during the tour of the museum, and if that is too confusing or distracting, using a podcast will be able to record an audio of the curator giving the tour.

To view the critiqued pieces of art for all students, the media sharing feature of a CMS would help to have a more accessible and closer view of the artwork then what would be available on the podcast for the tour.

There were two CMSs that I looked at for this example and feel that would help to supply the teacher with her/his needs, Moodle (moodle.org) and Haiku Learning (www.haikulearning.com). One of the major differences between Moodle and Haiku is that with Moodle you would need to download software to operate and a lot of people (with good reason) are leery of that procedure. According to Mcafee Security, “malware has exploded this year [2009], with almost as much unique malware in the first half of 2009 as in all of 2008” (retrieved from http://us.mcafee.com/en-us/local/docs/Mapping_Mal_Web.pdf ). The plus side for Moodle is that it is more of a global CMS reaching “210 countries” and “78 languages” (retrieved from moodle.org).

Moodle has been applauded by its users for numerous reasons. Thomas Robb, a faculty member at Kyoto (Japan) Sangyo University, spoke praise in his article “Moodle: A Virtual Learning Environment for the Rest of Us” with the following accolades, “After having taught online courses for a number of years using WebCT and Blackboard, I fell in love with Moodle at first sight… [t]he best feature of Moodle is that it can easily have every feature you want as long as there is someone around willing to program it.” (Retrieved from http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume8/ej30/ej30m2/ ).

Although Haiku Learning is not as well-known as Moodle, it still has had success for the educational community. I will admit that going to the source is kind of biased, but it is easier to find the success and people usually go into more detail. For example, in an interview with Ann Hostetler, who teaches at Goshen College in Indiana, she was asked “how Haiku LMS has affected her teaching.” She responded “I have found Haiku to be a flexible, user-friendly, and invaluable tool for organizing resources for my students. With Haiku, I can put files, web links, course information, images, videos, and mp3 files all in one organized, accessible space” (retrieved from http://www.haikulearning.com/interview/ann-hostetler ).

With two user-friendly CMSs to choose from, creating a course to help students learn more about the art in New York will not only be easy for the teacher but the student as well.