online education - some thoughts from the trenches

Online ed is growing as a cash cow all over the place, and why not? From the institutional point of view, there are minimum site costs (no electricity, AC, or maintenance of buildings); the software and support costs are marginal (more about that in a moment); and thus the financial equation is more or less, "is there more tuition revenue coming in than the cost of paying the instructor going out?"

Probably I oversimplify this a bit, but you get the point.

To teach online in my shop, I was required to take a 5-week course in Teaching Online, taught, naturally, online. This is a pretty brilliant move - in making the educators students in the online environment, we got to experience the full range of moronic classmates (yep, even in the rarified world of PhDs); unreliable software/internet; and inconsistent attention from our profs.

In the way that online learning (OLL) is conceptualized at my institution, we should be coldly and critically analytical: for every chunk of knowledge/facts/skills, we should be thinking "why should students need to know this?" and "how will I assess their learning?"

I have some mixed views about this. I am not a fan of instrumentalizing knowledge in this way - yet I see the value of thinking about value of knowlege, not just blindly transmitting "the wisdom of the ages" because someone told us in grad school that this was important stuff.

Along with the "what should they know?" and "how will I know they know it?" comes the so-called paradigm shift from teacher-centered education to student-centered education. Lifers in academe may scoff at this as just another fad in pedagogy, but here again, I see some value, even though, interestingly enough, this approach is about 180 degrees from the prevailing test-and-punish mentality that pervades K-12 in public education.

Teacher-centered education is a leftover from the medieval period, when books were scarce, and university education consisted of having precious books READ to you in lecture halls. (In fact, the word lecture has its roots in the Latin verb "to read." Professors read books to students because books were rare and precious and students didn't have access to them. Thus was knowledge transmitted.

Since Gutenberg, this notion is increasingly antiquated, and now with the electronic age, probably completely superfluous. In the regular "lecture" classroom, instructors either recap what was assigned for the reading, or they strike off in new territory, or some combination. (I regret to say that I've been in the former camp too often, not from a firm belief that it was necessary to recap the readings, but from an uncertainty about what should be done instead. (I am mindful too of advice given by one mentor - there is nothing wrong with reviewing what's in the textbook - students need help understanding it.))

Imagine now online teaching. There is no "you" in the classroom, only documents you put on the website. (Our classroom management software is really lame, but that doesn't really affect the whole CONCEPT of online ed.)