Week 6: Project 2 Proposal

Concept: E-learning
Our video will be about distant education, a very common form of e-learning.

Working Hypothesis
Our podcast will reflect on a common practice today; distant education. The question we will raise in this video is: "does such way of learning really give students an advantage? Will students actually be able to learn?" We want to tell viewers that although it may seem to many students that learning on the Internet is very advantageous because they do not have to sit through boring lectures, this form of learning may become problematic in the future. First, we will act out the benefits of distant education. For example, we will show a student reading lecture notes on the computer at home and being really happy about not having to go to school. We will then go into another scene and show a disadvantage, which for example, will show the student rushing through her notes on the night before an exam because of not keeping up with her online readings. Because there are no lectures, most students will slack off and not be able to keep up with the course. Throughout the video, we will jump back and forth showing pros and cons. If possible, we may actually have interview with University professors regarding their opinion on E-learning and distant education. This way, our messages will be backed up by professionals, making our podcast much more reliable.

Research
Our research approach will be based upon information extracted from the web sites, surveys and interviews relevant to students’ personal opinions about e-learning and experts’ opinions to such advanced technological tool for educational use. These sources will be used for references and as we gather all those data and surveys, we will be able to analyze further the advantages and disadvantages that e-learning bring us.

Links to initial research work:
http://www.elearningontario.ca/eng/
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?topic=198
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ahc-asc/activit/marketsoc/tools-outils/index_e.html

These web sites contain information that is helpful to our investigation. We will analyze the web sites and develop our next approach of this project.

Treatment
Our main topic for this project is E-learning. We will be focusing on different aspects that e-learning will lead us. Since E-learning relates to us as students, therefore, our opinions will also be included in the video. Also, in order to deliver a clear story about E-learning, we will include short interviews or opinions of some students who have adopted the E-learning tool within their school years. For a more entertaining purpose, we would include footages of role plays which would demonstrate the possibility of reducing the original work of the students who take online courses. Furthermore, light background music will be used when interviews are proceeding to eliminate the silence of the video. We will also include footages of professionals’ opinions about E-learning if possible. In order to emphasize our thesis or working hypothesis, we will include information about the normal educational courses, such as students attending lectures and doing exams in the classrooms (actual location, instead of web space). We will have interviews about those students’ thoughts and personal opinions that actually go to lectures. We will then compare their thoughts and personal experiences to have a better understanding of how different are those two educational methods. To further strengthen our thesis, we can use those collected information and analyze how much students can really learn through online courses compare to the normal courses they have. Our main hypothesis is that students will probably learn a lot less than those who are willing to attend lectures physically due to the limited supervisions and responsibilities they have.