“Pedagogy is unfazed by numbers; it is never outweighed by scale. Good pedagogy can be enacted in a room with one or two students, or in an online environment with thousands. This is because pedagogy is responsive, able to grow to the space it must inhabit, and its goal is a shift in thinking, which is spreadable by a single learner or by ten or tens of hundreds.” From Hybrid Pedagogy. Posting for discussion – because it’s a good academic argument but makes many assumptions. It is rare I find something on this fantastic site I don’t agree with, but since I think instructor presence is the first and most important component in any online course, and there are certain learners that need more attention from that presence than others, there seem to be many assumptions (implicit) made here. That the learners are all very self-directed, that they will support each other in a peer to peer environment, that they are ready (re: self directed learning scale) to learn, etc.
P.S. Fantastic discussion with the original author and other practitioners here on Google Plus.
New Images of Education 