Supporting Student Autonomy Online

1. The Value of Informal Learning

How much of the value of your formal educational experience came from interactions with other students as opposed to interactions with faculty? Odds are it was much if not most of the value came from interactions with other students outside of class.

• Why can't we just admit this and get around to supporting it online?
• Sometimes students understand the content better than the faculty.
• Students almost always have a significantly greater set of shared experiences with other students than with faculty, making experiences they provide more immediate and powerful.

2. The Possibility of Informal Interaction

Since students never walk past each other in virtual halways on route to class, is it even possible for online students to have outside-of-class interactions with each other? Chances are they're already going to great lengths to (in most cases subversively) do so. But where could the value be? How much could a handful of students know? They're just students after all.

• If you can admit that students can make valuable contributions, next consider the "handful of students" problem.
• Even in a lecture hall of 400 students, any given student's potential collaborators are the eight seated around them -- possibility for interaction isn't just in the number of people. It's also in the affordances of the environment.
• In an online course of 400 s/he have direct connectability to all 399 others - and everything they know.

3. Ronald Coase and Transaction Costs

Economics provides a number of useful ways to think about interaction among students, both on and offline.

• Entering into a partnership with another individual or organization has costs associated with it (contracts, social or political efforts, etc.)
• Whenever consideration an outsourcing-like decision, a rationale agent weighs the costs of doing something in-house with the costs of outsourcing (again, costs may be more than simply monetary)
• When the cost of partnering is less than the cost of going alone, entities partner.
• When the cost of going alone is less than the cost of partnering, entities go it alone. [more]

4. Self-organization

Autonomy doesn't have to mean acting completely alone. It can also be a group acting without external direction. Or any direction for that matter.

• Who is it that organizes, directs, trouble-shoots, and problem-solves on behalf of a colony of ants? No one. And yet complex geometrical calculations are carried out, the appropriate amounts of the appropriate types of work get done, etc. How? [more]
• Self-organization is an extremely powerful process through which intelligent behavior of all kinds can globally emerge from a group of individuals making purely local decisions. [more]
• The mechanisms that enable coherent behavior to emerge from an undirected colony of ants are slightly different from the ones that let birds flock or fish school without leaders. These are all slightly different from the mechanisms I believe allow online groups to self-organize. [more]

5. Game Theory and the Collaborators' Dilemma

Economics has more to tell us about the way people interact in informal (online learning) groups.

• Prisoner's Dilemma - cooperate or defect, according to the payoff table [more]
• One shot games versus iterated games and defection vs cooperation as strategies [more]
• Stable identities in online groups make interaction in online environments iterated games, encouraging cooperation instead of defection
• Payoffs can be objective (karma, kudos, etc.) or otherwise (reputation)
• Punishments can be, too (account revocation, loss of karma, etc.) or otherwise (reputation)

• Stable identities
  • User accounts with real names or stable pseudonyms (Cf. posts at the bottom of this page made by Anonymous Coward)
• Payoffs
  • Reputation management systems
    • OLS's kudos
    • Slashdot's karma
    • Ebay's colored stars
  • Additional system privileges
    • Slashdot moderating privileges
• Punishments
  • Reputation management systems
    • Slashdot's karma
    • Ebay's colored stars
  • Loss of system privileges (like account termination)

6. But does it really support learning?

Can students autonomously get together (without a teacher) to effectively support one another's learning? Absolutely. A few teacher-free examples of informal groups of people learning online: OLS, Slashdot, Perlmonks, Mathforum.

Realize that learning can and does happen without expert faculty members making assignments.

7. Learning objects and student autonomy

Content is the seed crystal on which all these interactions accumulate. People don't discuss nothing (unless they're politicians) - they discuss something. In the cases above, they discuss math, writing software code, and configuraing computers. By all accounts, difficult things to do. And yet these groups of people provide ample support and solutions without extrinsic motivation or compulsion. How did these people find each other? Because they knew these sites were about a specific content area, frequently included new content in the area, and also allowed discussion of the content. As I pursue my own personal interest in open sustainable learning, autonomy is a key issue. We are reaching the point where there is a large body of high quality, free content in the world (wikipedia, MIT/OCW, Connexions, etc.). But free and open content isn't free and open education - else libraries would never have evolved into universities. Content needs social interaction wrapped around it. And since there aren't enough teachers to go around in the world, supporting students' autonomy (alone and in groups) is our only shot at taking all the learning objects in the world and making something like an educational experience from them.

Realize that student autonomy is coming, and begin supporting it now.