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Talk examines implications of online instruction

Feb. 17, 2010

KALAMAZOO--The growth of online instruction and what it means for higher education will come into sharper focus during a presentation Tuesday, Feb. 23, at Western Michigan University.

Drs. Paul Farber and Dennis Metro-Roland, WMU professor and assistant professor, respectively, of teaching, learning and educational studies, will speak at 4 p.m. in Room 211 of the Bernhard Center. Their presentation, titled "The Ethics of Online Instruction and its Implications for Higher Education," is free and open to the public.

Farber and Metro-Roland will draw from their work on issues of teaching in higher education and the emergence of online instruction. Both have taught courses online as well as in the more typical, face-to-face manner of a traditional classroom instruction.

"Online instruction is a rapidly growing phenomenon in higher education," Farber says. "It's an emerging dimension that is quite new and rapidly changing."

Farber and Metro-Roland will use their work as a starting point for discussion on the impact and implications of online instruction, whether it makes a difference in which format the instruction is delivered and how well online learning fulfills the mission of institutions of higher education.

Students in either case read the same material and fulfill the same course requirements. But online students access the information and do the work in their own time at different locations, never coming together in the same classroom.

"What we want to discuss is, is that a difference that makes a difference?" Farber says.

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Media contact: Mark Schwerin, (269) 387-8400, mark.schwerin@wmich.edu

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