Yes, we can certainly avoid the obvious jokes, but POT means Program for Online Teaching, the faculty volunteer program I\u2019ve been directing since 2005. We began as a group of online instructors frustrated with the \u201ctraining\u201d being provided to those starting to teach online. These trainings mostly consisted of teaching faculty how to use technologies the college had purchased (later the LMS) and plug things into it. We wanted to have faculty consider their pedagogy first, then make the technology work for them.<\/p>\n
We began by offering workshops through our college\u2019s own professional development program, and gradually these expanded into full workshop days. We also created a website<\/a>, and posted videos and materials from our workshops there. Faculty have found the site useful, but I\u2019ve been maintaining it pretty much singlehandedly for the last few years. All of us who work as POT are college instructors with large responsibilities for teaching, departmental work, and disciplinary study. Many have joined us from outside our home college. Since 2010, we have offered the POT Certificate Class<\/a>, an online course mentored and moderated by like-minded experts and teachers from around the globe. The class, too, has taken much time and yet no one has ever been paid to help. (Many of us are of the \u201csure, I\u2019ll help you move if you feed me pizza\u201d model of social responsibility.)<\/p>\n In the meantime, the field has changed. Since 2005, \u201cinstructional design\u201d and \u201ceducational technology\u201d have become their own disciplines, offering PhDs all over the place. Sponsored companies have been founded to host online courses on proprietary platforms. Administrative careers have sprung up in deploying and managing stables of online instructors at for-profit universities, offering \u201cteam-created\u201d courses where the faculty member is only a \u201cdiscipline expert\u201d. \u201cBest practices\u201d have been promoted based on principles derived from the research of these new doctorates (many of whom used small sample sizes, creating their principles of whole cloth).<\/p>\n It is a world in which POT now appears anachronistic, encouraging what I call \u201cartisan\u201d courses, built as creative endeavors by individual instructors trying to translate their teaching strengths into the online environment. These courses are pedagogically and philosophically the opposite of the canned, instant-feedback, publisher-created \u201cpackages\u201d and team-built classes and MOOCs that are now pervasive. Like artisan breads and hand-made cabinetry, these courses require more work to make and are individual in design. Their quality cannot be determined by a list of \u201cbest practices\u201d, but by the love and attention that goes into their creation, and the passion and dedication of the teachers who are teaching within their own design.<\/p>\n We have watched these artisan principles undermined not only by forces beyond the institution, but by faculty new to online, who have been encouraged to think along cookie-cutter course lines. Classes where most of the content comes from a publisher course cartridge are being held up as models, locally and statewide, as online initiatives are developed to create more standardization and “accountability”. Faculty now come to POT hoping for \u201chow to\u201d workshops (\u201chow do I get this to work in Blackboard?\u201d) rather than approaching us with pedagogy they want to develop online. The POT Cert Class, which is free, global, and at the moment unsustainable, is being used by some to assure \u201ctraining\u201d rather than pedagogical preparation. We find ourselves in the position of providing a free service rather than a model, a service which surely should be funded by the state if \u201ctraining\u201d is so important.<\/p>\n My colleague Jim Sullivan and I have decided that the answer to all this training, standardization, and dependency is primarily journalistic. With all the information out there on \u201chow to\u201d, and all the institutional and administrative backing for training and standardization, it is important that we share, publicly and convincingly, the meaning and methods behind our \u201cpedagogy first\u201d approach. So we are changing the POT website, always in WordPress\u2019 blog format anyway, into the Pedagogy First blog. Here we hope to invite the people for whom “pedagogy first” is the natural approach, to write and discuss. We will ask many of the wonderful people who have mentored and moderated our POT Certificate. We will ask folks to share their talents and techniques as well as their perspectives.<\/p>\n Because when mechanization encroaches on creative endeavor, it is important for artisans to articulate why their way is better, what value is added by their efforts.<\/p>\n Artisans unite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yes, we can certainly avoid the obvious jokes, but POT means Program for Online Teaching, the faculty volunteer program I\u2019ve been directing since 2005. We began as a group of online instructors frustrated with the \u201ctraining\u201d being provided to those starting to teach online. These trainings mostly consisted of teaching faculty how to use technologies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,13,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","category-pedagogy","category-program-for-online-teaching"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}