With a few beautiful borrowed words from The Manifesto for Teaching Online. I have heard, many times this year, that online education is dead. It’s hardly worth telling you that I don’t agree — that learning online is too powerful, too important, too beautiful to die.
I so want you to be right. Two things I agree with wholeheartedly 1) remote learning is still a thing tgat has so much value 2) security has been a long running illusion.
To survive the assurance apocalypse, remote learning will have to be rethought just as much as face to face, and we should not expect that the solutions, when we find them, will be the same.
Thanks, Colin - I agree and I truly hope that we take the path of relational teaching, rather than tech invigilation theatre.
Online education programs are far, far too often cold, cookie-cutter modules with pages of "self-paced content" and tumbleweeds in the discussion boards. It's an industry that has historically been callous and mean with its staffing, relying too much on sessional teachers who don't care very much because they simply can't afford to.
I've seen a lot of that. Heck, I've designed a lot of it. As always, it comes down to whether the "assurance crisis" bets on tech solutions, or on people. The idealist in me still suspects they'll bet against people, but that we'll go find another place to be there for each other.
My political take: Regardless of mode, if teaching is adequately resourced, then verification comes easily from the long-term interpersonal engagement between students and educators. If it's not, it doesn't matter how many slices of Swiss cheese we layer on, because students we don't know will bypass them all.
I so want you to be right. Two things I agree with wholeheartedly 1) remote learning is still a thing tgat has so much value 2) security has been a long running illusion.
To survive the assurance apocalypse, remote learning will have to be rethought just as much as face to face, and we should not expect that the solutions, when we find them, will be the same.
Thanks, Colin - I agree and I truly hope that we take the path of relational teaching, rather than tech invigilation theatre.
Online education programs are far, far too often cold, cookie-cutter modules with pages of "self-paced content" and tumbleweeds in the discussion boards. It's an industry that has historically been callous and mean with its staffing, relying too much on sessional teachers who don't care very much because they simply can't afford to.
I've seen a lot of that. Heck, I've designed a lot of it. As always, it comes down to whether the "assurance crisis" bets on tech solutions, or on people. The idealist in me still suspects they'll bet against people, but that we'll go find another place to be there for each other.
My political take: Regardless of mode, if teaching is adequately resourced, then verification comes easily from the long-term interpersonal engagement between students and educators. If it's not, it doesn't matter how many slices of Swiss cheese we layer on, because students we don't know will bypass them all.