Although I have stepped back quite a bit from my reading and research in online education, I still have a Google Alert set, and still receive and examine recent articles, when I can stomach it.
The dictatorial tone of both articles in my inbox today is the subject here.
The first, The Necessary Knowledge for Online Education: Teaching and Learning to Produce Knowledge (Ferreira et al), did a study of 27 educators, all in the field of Education, to determine what knowledge (this sort of article usually says “skills”) are needed to teach online. What struck me was the premise, stated in the abstract:
Online education requires pedagogical mediation and the skills and competencies to work with technological resources which promote interaction, collaboration, and co-learning.
Well, that’s just not true. Online education does not require an emphasis on collaboration – rather it is one possible approach. It is also entirely possible to create online education that personalizes the class through different kinds of approaches to content, or emphasizes at every step the learner’s relationship with the material rather than through colleagues and “co-learning”. I understand that the current phase in online education pushes the collaborative approach, but it certainly is not “required”.
The second article, Online Continuing and Professional Education: Current Varieties and Best Practices (Schroeder, et al), features this idea:
Teaching online requires a team, not just an individual. While face-to-face teaching may be a singular effort, online teaching includes a multitude of technical, pedagogical, environmental, and associated considerations that requires a team of experts.
That’s not true either. I have never had a “team”, but rather developed not only my own pedagogical and technological skills, but helped design a “Pedagogy First” paradigm wherein the individual instructor’s strengths were basic to course design. I realize that these days there are more resources (among them instructional designers with advanced degrees and research articles produced by candidates for PhDs in Education), but those do not, by some reverse design, indicate that these things are required.
As the literature has developed over the last decade, much of it written by people who are not teachers and have not taught online, the “options” have become “requirements”, and the possibilities have narrowed into “best practices” (best for whom?) and necessary elements. This creates downward pressure on the creativity of teaching online, stultifying the field and cookie-cuttering our courses. Faculty who want students to focus on content are forced to develop “interactions” which oppose their own pedagogy, common sense, and experience. Helpless in a context they did not create, and for which they are pedagogically unsuited, they are told that not only is the social learning method “required”, but that a team is “required” to help them.
Did I mention I’d stepped back from reading the newest in online ed? There’s a reason for that.
If I were Princess of the Universe, schools of education wouldn’t exist at all. They are the worst demonstration of the phenomenon of preaching what one does not practice (or in some cases, what they don’t even know how to practice.)
Would any of the sciences be influenced by people who have never done science–never run experiments, never collected data, never worked in a lab? Would the art world take seriously the opinions of people who had never studied art and never tried to create it? Why is pedagogy presented by people who don’t, in fact, teach?
Why are the best teachers those with degrees in the subjects they’re teaching, and experience researching the stuff they’re teaching others to research?
Orwell would weep.
It’s so awkward, because on the one hand I do appreciate the study of pedagogy, and the idea behind studying education, gathering data, engendering discussion. To make it a field separate from actual practice, however, I still find bizarre.