Rob Wall

Online learning is a significant and increasingly utilized means of delivering instruction. Many universities offer classes, if not whole programs, via the Internet; the University of Victoria Department of Social Work, for example, offers a Distance B.S.W. The provincial department of education in Saskatchewan and local boards of education also offer classes online. There are a variety of course management systems available to aid in the online deployment of courses, including well-established systems like WebCT (http://www.webct.com) and Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com). There are even thoroughly developed and actively supported open source course management systems such as Moodle (http://www.moodle.org). Tools designed specifically for putting classes online are available for all scales of implementation, that meet needs ranging from those of individual teachers to large universities or corporate training departments.

Divid Wiley (2004) points out that replicating a classroom online makes as much sense as playing polo on horses using the same strategies and plays that are used in water polo. Education in schools and universities is organized into classes because that discrete unit has been found to be effective for organizing face to face learning with a much larger number of students than instructors. Duplication of this organizational unit, however, will not necessarily be the most effective use of the Internet as an instructional medium.

Thus although the Internet has been used extensively in distance education as a communication medium for discussion, which, it has been argued, can support critical thinking skills and deep learning, this too replicates the traditional classroom model and misses opportunities for distance educators to benefit from the Internet's unique attributes in the learning process (Kanuka, 2002, p.71).

Perhaps before we strap the scuba gear onto the horses, we should spend some time thinking about how the process of learning is altered when we place it in a different context.

Ah - choices. The start of the ToK essay journey.

And perhaps a daunting one, if your goal is to produce a quality essay (which I'm hoping it is). It's a little different from choosing essay topics/questions in other classes; for those, you probably have a good idea what the final essay will be about before you even start out.

The ToK essay, however, is a bit of a different beast. So selecting the title becomes a more nuanced and longer term endeavour.

The tried-and-true approach, which you might have gone through in class, is to analyze all the titles, underline the key terms, then write out what those terms might mean in different contexts.

And that works.

But let's use the three ToK Café fundamentals of a good ToK essay to guide the choice a little differently: Curiosity, Clarity, and Coherence.

Maybe these can lead you toward an essay that's engaging to write, stimulating to think about, and genuinely delightful for your examiner to read.