Making Online Learners

     Here in STKIP, students are facilitated with laptop, a device which can connect them with world wide web: it is a great access to knowledge, reference, network, and others. It is a pity if this great facility is not followed by  great effort by both students and teachers. Surely, this requires teachers and students to do many activities with technology. And this issue leads us to having online class as a necessity. Then I read a good article about  ‘How I became a Convert to Online Learning’ by Nick Kremer (He is a language arts teacher at Oakland Junior High School and a doctoral student at the University of Missouri–Columbia)  which enlighten me to have a new perspective of teaching.

     Nick Kremer, the writer, argues that on line class or virtual education refers to instruction in a learning environment where teacher and student are separated by time or space, or both. The teacher provides course content through the use of methods, such as course management applications, multimedia resources, the internet, and videoconferencing, whereas the students receive the content and communicate with the teacher via the same technologies. Indeed, for teachers it is very helpful for them to have online classroom because the procedure and requirement are quite simple. However, he claimed that during the implementation of on line class there lie some pitfalls and ways how to overcome them.

No.	Pitfalls	Solution
1.	In online class the attendance cannot be regulated well because they work at their own pace. In fact, students’ attendance in every meeting is considered important since it is to retain knowledge and skills.	Allotting a certain time for the students to spend learning and create various and more assignments for online class in order to demand the learners work more in online lessons.
2.	On line classroom provide lack of meaningful interaction.	It can become a challenge for developing community interaction by raising a certain interesting topic in online class. Teachers can assign his students to have peer revision and ask a transcript of their discussion.
3.	Online class enlarges the opportunity for students to cheat	-         taking major tests in person (with ID). -          soliciting frequent writing samples from students. -          beginning with an enrollment essay to check for consistency in their work, and designing personal, in-depth assignments.
4.	A paradigm: ‘online class is discriminatory: online class is almost impossible for the students who do not have computer  and internet access (not in our institution for sure) and skills to operate it’	-          Enabling media center lab or in public library. -          Providing an easy-accessing  guiding program.

     Regarding to the Kremer’s opinion, actually there is no big deal in applying online class in school since although there are pitfalls; there still are the solutions for them. However, when the discussion goes to the implementation of online class in Indonesia, I would say that for the time being, on line class is unlikely applicable.

      The corrupt system of government especially in education affair makes the fund distribution from central government to regions ruined. Consequently, this causes many crucial problems. One of them is that regions cannot have fund to buy the means which makes regional students cannot feel the benefit of technology.  May be for those students who study in cities or ‘expensive’ private schools would have no problems in using online class, yet, the students from the lower economy background fill meet difficulty in using it.  

     Indeed, I do not say that this is expression of pessimism, rather to focus on ways how this can be dealt with. Of course, seminars, workshops, and campaigns about using on line class would be useless without good system of the government. For instance, the initial action to take will be to create supporting and conducive situation for it. Due to the fact that students nowadays are digital natives, actually it would not be that difficult to introduce the students how to use online class. As long as the teachers, whom most of them are digital immigrants, are eager to learn something new about technology. Otherwise, that would be another problem. At least one of the first steps is to form a good system of the government so that the fund distribution will be well managed (meaning no corruption), and not only the uptown students can feel the technology, but also regional students as well. If such condition can exist, I am optimistic about on line class will be successfully implemented in Indonesia. Wallahu a’lam bi al shawab.

Inspired from Article:  ‘How I became a Convert to Online Learning’ by Nick Kremer  (http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/feb11/vol68/num05/How-I-Became-a-Convert-to-Online-Learning.aspx)