It's hard to imagine a college without any faculty but that doesn't stop a whole lot of people from trying.
One of my students asked me yesterday when we're going to put all our "course content" online so that they can stop coming to classes and start saving money, because online education must of course be so much less costly than face-to-face classes. He'd heard a rumor about a wholesale movement toward online learning, and all I wanted to say was, "You don't absorb ninety percent of what I tell you in class but you're willing to stake your future on some random rumor?" But that's not the point. The point is that this student thinks education would be so much cheaper and more efficient if we took contact with faculty out of the equation.
It's a tempting thought. If our job is to introduce students to a certain body of knowledge, why not just put that body of knowledge online and allow them to access it at their own pace? The problem is that this vision of education fails to distinguish between faculty members and machines or between teachers and scholars.
Certainly online teaching can be effective; I've seen it and I am in awe of those who can do it well. However, effective online teaching requires more than simply dumping a pile of content into a course management system and allowing students to access at their leisure. Online pedagogy is different from face-to-face pedagogy, but it still requires teachers to carefully design activities to help students master skills and content. What if some of our tried-and-true methods don't translate well to the online environment? Well, then we would need training to help us master online pedagogy, and we would need IT support to deal with the inevitable glitches. Those things cost money. Switching to online teaching might be a cost-saving venture in the long term, but in the short term it would require significant investment in training and technical support, which is neither free nor easy.
And then who says putting classes online will take faculty out of the picture? Someone still needs to read and grade and assess and trouble-shoot and provide the kind of hand-holding our students have come to expect, and that's more than anyone can ask of a course management system. The vending-machine model of education, in which students insert money into the slot and press the right buttons so it can spit out a diploma, fails to consider the importance of human interaction. The machine isn't going to spend office hours doing one-on-one tutoring with a student struggling with a difficult concept. That's what teachers do.
And that's not all that teachers do. Those who think that our only responsibility is to pass a big body of knowledge to the students fail to consider our role as scholars. We don't just draw on the existing body of knowledge--we add to it. We write and do research and create art and performances that add to human understanding. A vending machine knows how to dispense a can of soda but cannot engage in the process of creating new types of soda or imagining a world beyond the realm of soda. That's what scholars do, and that kind of activity can't be confined to a box.
Every time this topic comes up I feel as if I'm once again being called on to defend my right to exist, which is exhausting, but if I object, I'm accused of being stuck in the past and resistant to change. But you know what? I'm okay with that. I've tried online teaching and I did a pretty good job of it, but I know how much I had to rely on our instructional technologist and how many more of her we'd have to hire if a whole bunch of us switched to online teaching, and I also remember how much time and effort I had to devote to trying to prevent and punish online cheating. When the institution makes the kind of commitment to online teaching that would solve those problems, I'll be happy to make whatever changes are required. Meanwhile, I'll keep being the kind of teacher and scholar who can't be automated or confined to a box.
Now hand me a can of soda, because my students aren't going to teach themselves.
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