The impact of altered realties: implications of online delivery for learners' interactions, expectations, and learning skills.

Although research consistently demonstrates that students learn content in online classes as well as their campus based counterparts and are equally satisfied with the quality of their learning, more information is needed that describes how the learning experiences themselves may vary. A traditional group of students was compared with an online group taking the same graduate class in research methods using the same materials and with the same instructor. Data representing learning outcomes, attitudes toward coursework, and beliefs about the nature of their experiences were gathered and compared. Both groups scored equally on the pre and postquantitative measures of learning outcomes and satisfaction, but described decidedly different learning experiences. They valued different kinds of interactions, held different expectations for the courses, and described development of contrasting learning skills and strategies that led toward success in the course. Online learning was revealed as a distinctly different experience than face-to-face learning, offering insight into better understanding the nature of the experience of online learning and suggesting that online course designers focus their attention on particular elements that support the unique experiences of student who select this delivery mode.

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The proliferation of higher education distance learning in the last decade has provided access for an underserved group of individuals (Bickle & Carrol, 2003; Granger & Bowman, 2003; King, 2002; Leasure, Davis, & Thievon, 2000) in part because of the flexibility it affords learners (Billings, Connors, & Skiba, 2001). Online delivery, in particular, can be a solution for a variety of issues and problems such as time availability, distance, and restricted course offering in traditional settings (Perreault, Walman, & Zhao, 2002). Whether or not this mode delivers the same quality as face-to-face settings, however, continues to be a concern (Bernard et al., 2004).

The online environment drastically alters the structural elements of the learning landscape. Learners and teachers are in a "fundamentally different starting situation" (Peters, 2003, p. 87), creating essentially different "learning spaces" (Peters, p. 89) that are completely unlike those in traditional learning settings. Distance learning, therefore, involves more than geography. It is a completely different environmental context; learners and teachers are distanced from their previous expectations of the education process (Lally & Barrett, 1999). This view holds that the online delivery medium dictates the course's structural elements (e.g., the way the course is organized), the kinds of interactions among members of the learning community, the learners' expectations for the course, and the modes they use to facilitate learning.

More than the technologies of distance learning, however, may drive this distancing from previous educational expectations held by learners. Chappell, Rhodes, Solomon, Tennant, and Yates (2003) offered that the need for personal change fuels and organizes the structure of adult learning. In this view, the technology that facilitates learning would not merely be its delivery method (e.g., online) but the learner's "technologies of the self" (p. 2) such as self-knowledge, self-control, self-care, and self-creation used to promote change. Implicit in this position is the notion that adult learners are likely to prefer learning environments, online or traditional, that they perceive will assist them with their personal identity development and provide a good fit with and/or development of their self-technologies such as ways of managing time.

Elements of Online Learning

Structure. Effective online teaching is not simply a matter of adapting the structure and attendant modes of interaction of the traditional classroom environment to this online environment. Cognitive expectations, pedagogical choices, and supportive practices need to be carefully reconsidered, with recognition of the complexity of the issues (Peters, 2003). The medium of online delivery itself has the potential to alter learning experiences in important, and sometimes unforeseen, ways; therefore online teaching requires "different sets of technical and pedagogical competencies to engage in superior teaching practices" (Bernard, et al., 2004, p. 409). Structure includes good organization, clear procedures and expectations, clear timelines, understandable texts, helpful supplementary materials, and quickly accessible technical support (Paloff & Pratt 2001).