{"id":95,"date":"2008-06-11T06:23:19","date_gmt":"2008-06-11T06:23:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=95"},"modified":"2008-06-11T06:23:19","modified_gmt":"2008-06-11T06:23:19","slug":"fear-micromanagement-and-standardization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2008\/06\/fear-micromanagement-and-standardization\/","title":{"rendered":"Fear, Micromanagement and Standardization"},"content":{"rendered":"

We recently concluded the Online Teaching Conference<\/a> at my home campus. I presented on “Enhancing Your Class with Web 2.0<\/a>” (video here<\/a>) and went to a number of presentations. I was struck by the updated atmosphere — so many more people have taught online now, and the approach to doing so is maturing in many ways. No more workshops on coding html or using desktop apps to create things, and no specific sessions on course management systems. And no more fear of online, or defensiveness about online teaching. No need anymore to defend what we do. I didn’t even see much fear about shifting education toward a more student-centered approach (I’d say the ratio on that was about 50% traditional\/50% new wave.) The fear, instead, has shifted.<\/p>\n

Now we seem worried about management. This online education thing is so big, and so good, who’s gonna manage it all? I saw middle management, micro-management, covert management, and mismanagement. Management based on open administrative access to everyone’s online class, and management based on the “many instructors, one course” canned course factory model. In fact, the keynote set the tone with this last one.<\/p>\n

The speaker was Linda Thor<\/a> from Rio Salado College<\/a>, “All Aboard the Digital Express”. While the train analogy ended early, by the end I definitely felt like I’d been run over by a Burlington Northern. Rio Salado has 31 full-time faculty (who each only teach one class) and 1,050 part-timers. The courses, it took me awhile to understand, are canned. Instructors are hired to facilitate, but they do not control any content or design their classes. The courses are designed by a team including an instructional designer and “content expert”. (Anytime someone calls me, a professor of history, a “content expert”, I know something is wrong.) How we design our courses IS teaching — structuring material according to ones own pedagogy is crucial. To limit teaching to interaction with students about someone else’s “content” is to create a tutorial relationship, not a professorial relationship. The response on the part of the audience, though, was astonishment at the scale of the operation, the 50 different start dates. And I noticed that Dr. Thor kept emphasizing customization<\/i> (of their CMS, of their textbooks), which sounded vaguely like a bow to academic freedom, but obviously meant that the administration customizes, but for the faculty all is standardized.<\/p>\n

The best part of the sessions, and the other keynotes, was the opportunity to learn from each other. Participants brought up problems, issues, practical suggestions. Almost all of us, I’m sure, came home with new ideas. But the thread of fear was present in every session. “Horror stories” — students complained that one instructor didn’t answer their emails for ten weeks! (I’ve been reading “Made to Stick<\/a>” by the Heath Brothers, and can tell you that any message with a specific detail like “ten weeks!” will stick better than a vague complaint that he didn’t answer emails often enough). Every anecdote was footnoted with a “we all know we’re<\/i> not that derelict in our duties, but we know some who are”. There were continual veiled accusations against instructors who shirk, who think online is on vacation. At one point, I even bristled when an instructor implied that the good<\/i> instructors answer every<\/i> post in a discussion forum. Amidst the holier-than-they attitude was a sense that someone oughtta do something, make a law, enforce some standards.<\/p>\n

Online education has expanded quickly, like an enterprise. In any enterprise, there are those who might take advantage. And this is no different for college professors who are in a classroom. Some shirk. They use the lectures they wrote in 1972, and mumble them to their classes, or read from the textbook, or give only Scantrons and scores. It can mean incompetence, or teaching the way they were taught, or the perception they hold an easy job, doesn’t matter. The only real difference is that technology makes it easier<\/i> to observe, interfere with, and standardize an online rather than an on-site class. Only a year or two ago, faculty responded to such interference as they would to a classroom invasion: you are welcome to observe my work when I’m being evaluated, but I would expect you to inform me if you were sitting in on my class. Evaluation practices, even those that are annual or semi-draconian, are usually transparent. “Watching” someone’s online class needn’t be.<\/p>\n

Setting standards for online classes, then checking on everyone to make sure the standards are being adhered to, makes good business sense. But education isn’t a business, and when you mess with academic freedom it’s not long before institutional forces control content (as they do at Rio Salado) and instruction itself. And what’s encouraging acceptance of this incursion is a reversal of the argument about the role of online classes. <\/p>\n

It used to be that everyone emphasized that online and on-site classes were the SAME — same curriculum, instructional ideas, transferrability. This was necessary to create acceptance. But now the emphasis (and I noticed this at every session) is on how online is DIFFERENT from on-site face-to-face classes. Of course, as I heard from a session which briefly discussed the book “The No Significant Difference Phenomenon<\/a>“, this simply isn’t true. Teaching, really, is teaching.<\/p>\n

Regardless of the method of “delivery”, college-level teaching is supposed to encourage depth of thought in response to controversial ideas. It’s trendy to call this “critical thinking”. In many ways, deep thinking results from intellectual discomfort, something faculty may be disinclined to encourage from their position under an administrative microscope. College-level teaching is also to some extent an exploration of the subject from the instructor’s viewpoint as an expert (again, not just their “content”, but their viewpoint). <\/p>\n

The concept of academic freedom emerges during times when the pedagogical approaches to content are threatened by a desire of controlling forces to clamp down on controversial ideas, as during the Red Scares. I think it’s time for it to return, before online courses become canned web module sequences, designed according to company-sponsored “research”, managed by administrators, tutored by faculty, and consumed by students in standardized formats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We recently concluded the Online Teaching Conference at my home campus. I presented on “Enhancing Your Class with Web 2.0” (video here) and went to a number of presentations. I was struck by the updated atmosphere — so many more people have taught online now, and the approach to doing so is maturing in many […]<\/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":[3,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences","category-pedagogy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","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=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}