I have written a number of times about the standardisation imposed as part of the neoliberal regime of control.
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We see this playing out in the way teaching is currently being shaped.
Much of this shaping began with the development of MOOCS (the Massive Open Online Course movement that aims to offer web-based learning to huge audiences). The MOOC movement is based on the assumption that it is not necessary to have humans interacting with students online – rather the assumption is that learning sites can be developed using appropriate technological design.
Thus it is possible to “teach” enormous classes economically because the computer does the teaching and the only human input is in identifying the necessary context (an academic job) and creating a whiz-bang website (the responsibility of computer experts and learning designers).
Much of the research on learning theory indicates that this approach is not particularly effective. While there are some students who manage to complete MOOCs, the drop-out rate is enormous (which doesn’t matter to the owners as there is no difference in cost to offer a MOOC to 100 students or to 10,000).
However, research suggests that teacher presence is a key element in student learning in online education, and the quality of that interaction is crucial. Using constructivist theories of learning, teacher-student and student-student interactions create an online, collaborative learning community.
This is achieved through a variety of strategies that are not aimed at reproducing the traditional face-to-face system of lectures and tutorials. Rather, they aim to use the affordances of technology to create many and different ways to interact, in dyads and in groups.
Recording tutorials for viewing asynchronously does not capture the teacher-student and student-student interactions found so necessary for quality online learning.
These strategies include using media-rich communication, responding to individual student questions using each as an opportunity to scaffold further learning, and using discussion boards, blogs, Wikis, and video conferencing to explore course content, prompt student reflection and explore different understandings.
One of the key advantages for online learners is the opportunity to engage in these interactions asynchronously. Rather than have to organise their lives in order to be available at a specific time every week throughout the teaching period, students can engage in these interactions at times and places suitable for them. I have even had students engage in a forum online when working on a laptop sitting beside their child’s hospital bed.
The flexibility of this asynchronous interaction is one of the reasons many off-campus students chose to study online. This flexibility is significantly impaired when managers using neoliberal standardisation arguments position the delivery of recorded lectures and regularly scheduled synchronous tutorials as the only (officially recognised) way to teach online.
Recording tutorials for viewing asynchronously does not capture the teacher-student and student-student interactions found so necessary for quality online learning. In fact, research suggests recorded lectures and tutorials are particularly ineffective as they reflect the worst of the information transmission model of teaching and none of the benefits of the constructivist approach.
Despite the plethora of research indicating that online teaching and learning should not duplicate what is offered in the face-to-face context (and despite the research that also suggests the traditional lecture/tutorial model is not even the best approach in the face-to-face context), we find ourselves in a world where the economics underpinning MOOCs, and the neoliberal reification of standardisation, push us more and more into an online mode of delivery that is well-known to be ineffective and poor quality.
Online teaching is increasingly becoming human-teacher-free. Do our online students deserve a second-class education?
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