Multilitteratus Incognitus
Traversing the path of the doctoral degree
Is "online learning" the new "community college"?
13-05-2020, 10:44 communityCollege, COVID, onlineLearning, remoteLearning, undergraduate Permalink![]() |
Me, pondering |
When I was in high school (mid-to-late 90s) the advertised (or expected) path after high school seemed pretty clear to me: go to college. There were really no "buts" about it, and there were no gap years considered (those were luxuries that well-off people had since they had money to burn). It was an expectation, from guidance counselors, from teachers, from parents, maybe even from society. Higher education was the path to a good middle-class life, and people were willing to take out loans to go to their dream school in order to achieve this goal. This was a pretty important goal for my parents considering that neither one of them made it to university and I'd be the first in the family (maybe even my broader family) to do this. No pressure, eh? ;-)
One thing that seemed like an underlying current was how dismissive some (many?) people were about community colleges at the time. I had never really thought of community college as an option because of jokes like this one:
You better do well in __(subject)__ otherwise, you'll be attending Cape Cod Community College!
I don't know why CCCC was the butt of the joke for this particular teacher in high school, but the frequency of such jokes (and the virality of them between students) definitely left an impression of community college being a consolation prize, rather than a fantastic (and comparatively cheaper) educational resource! Imagine how much money would be saved if students decided to complete the first two years of their higher education studies at a CC and then transfer into another school! Or graduate from CC and then go into university with advanced standing. From what I know, in my local context, CCs were (and are) commuter schools. You don't live on-campus at a CC. Compare that to some big-name school in Cambridge (Massachusetts) that my folks wanted me to apply to that required first-year student to stay in the dorms if they wanted to attend that school.
Anyway, I diverge from my point I started with. The main idea here is that CC, although valuable, was constantly dismissed. Fast forward to our current pandemic-world. Students are suing universities for the return of their tuition and fee costs. Nevermind that some of these law firm pitches sound a lot like ambulance chasers, let's dive down to the core: Universities have been pitched as a place where people go to explore subjects and topics; a type of free-range learning. This is true for both undergraduate and graduate education.
In recent years, what you saw in university advertising tended to be anything but the learning. Learning objectives? Snore! learning outcomes? yawn! Rooms with lavish wood paneling? Noice! Parties? Awesome! Spring fling dances and cookouts? I'm there! When you consider the marketing message of the modern university which focuses on amenities, it's not hard to see why people are pushing back against the price tag. If you paid for a Cruise in the Bahamas, why would you "settle" for the Holodeck?
What's hiding behind those amenities is the promise of a free-range learning environment where you too can learn and be inspired by the greats! The reality, though, is that you aren't really in a free-range learning environment. When your tuition and fees cost $60,000 per year (or more), a wise student would do a reality check and see that it's not free-range learning, but rather a prix-fixe menu (in many cases), and students pick X-many courses from column A, Y-many from column B, and Z-many from column C to graduate as soon as possible. The longer you stay, the bigger your bill!
Conversely, in online learning, where you don't have the striking visuals of campus life and all the non-academic distractions you are forced to start with the learning outcomes. You need to assess programs based on the outcomes, and you need to advertise based on the transformative experience of the learning and what sorts of careers you are prepared for, not the extracurriculars. However, it seems, that prospective students (and their parents) don't have metrics by which to assess programs on their learning outcomes, so lacking the social visuals or metrics offered by a campus experience, they dismiss online education; much like how CC education was dismissed by the relevant authority figures in my teenage life. I think that for-profit schools also have not helped with the reputation of online learning, but talking about "zoom university" and framing educational costs as an all or nothing is also not very productive. Education is valuable. I would argue that education at $60k/year was never valuable to people like me, first-generation students, but I hope that more people are teasing out what matters in education. I hope the medium doesn't impact the message in this case. And I hope that dual-mode universities finally put some support behind their online offerings beyond the classroom.
Your thoughts? Do you see a connection between online learning and the community college in how they are talked about?
~AK
Comments
Synchronous, online learning, and "remote" learning
01-05-2020, 11:32 distanceLearning, MOOC, onlineLearning, remoteLearning, soapBox, studentServices, synchronous conferencing PermalinkThe question of synchronous sessions in online learning has been swirling in my head over the past few weeks. So has the term "remote" instruction (🙄). I usually tend to sit on the sidelines these days, maybe throwing a few potshots on twitter here and there when I have time, but this article on IHE today was one where my eyes rolled too hard, and there was an audible grunt in the room...
First of all, I guess I should explain my aversion to the term "remote" instruction. Our field, distance education, has many terms to describe learning at a distance that actually mean something, and have actually had decades of research behind them! Because the existing terms mean something, and usually have legalistic implications, it's like administrators are using a synonym for "distance" in order to avoid any sorts of contractual agreements that they have made. For instance, at my institution, if a faculty member develops an online course from scratch (for the first time), they are entitled to a development stipend. There is a process behind this stipend, which includes working with an instructional designer and getting a Bootcamp version of the skills one needs to teach online, but it exists, and it takes time. In the times of COVID19, timelines are compacted, and such processes are too long, and money is often too short. So, instead of calling these classes online, they euphemistically call them "remote" in order to avoid paying any stipend. The "right" course of action would be to negotiate with the faculty union about this.
The second issue that I have with the designation "remote" is that it seems to denote a "less-than" term for distance education. It's OK that this course stinks because it's a "remote" course. I wholeheartedly disagree. I think the correct term for a rushed course is an emergency online course, not a remote course. Online courses can stink. And, some do! But to claim that we don't want to call what we do classify what we do in an emergency online learning context as online learning because that's not what online learning is,...well, that's just silly IMO. We did start off with emergency remote teaching when this started, and why we picked the wrong word - picking remote over emergency - is beyond me. The word emergency should be enough to denote that what's happening is not necessarily the most fully fleshed out, but it is the best we can do in with the time and resources we have at hand. Furthermore, emergency remote/online/distance learning is perfectly fine when you have one week to make the pivot. Come September, if we're all still quarantined in place, distance learning should not be emergency anything! We should use the summer to plan for good online learning and to build out student supports that may be lacking at the moment!
Finally, there is an aspect of synchronous often tied with the affinity of using the term remote learning. Many people decided to just move their lectures into zoom. Hey, a 45-minute live session might be OK three-times per week for one class; multiply that by 4 courses for a full-time student. However, sitting in front of a computer for 9 hours per week on zoom sessions that might not be needed, and then being in front of your computer for all assignment (plus all the distractions and poor internet that you might have at home) and it doesn't make for a conducive learning environment. That said, we do have the option for synchronous online meetings. Online courses aren't designed to be strictly asynchronous or self-paced. Furthermore, just because mixed-mode institutions have ignored their online learners for the past decade doesn't mean that online or distance learning is inflexible and doesn't adapt to the changing needs of learners. It doesn't mean that there is a lack of community, and it doesn't mean that distance education cannot create co-curricular opportunities. Just because you have ignored some or all of these possibilities doesn't mean that they don't exist, and it doesn't require that you create a new term to describe them.
In the end, what I am seeing with remote learning is the same thing we saw in the 2012-2014 MOOC Craze years, where what we knew about online and distance education was summarily ignored due to the new shiny. Did we not learn anything from that experience? ❓
Your thoughts?
First of all, I guess I should explain my aversion to the term "remote" instruction. Our field, distance education, has many terms to describe learning at a distance that actually mean something, and have actually had decades of research behind them! Because the existing terms mean something, and usually have legalistic implications, it's like administrators are using a synonym for "distance" in order to avoid any sorts of contractual agreements that they have made. For instance, at my institution, if a faculty member develops an online course from scratch (for the first time), they are entitled to a development stipend. There is a process behind this stipend, which includes working with an instructional designer and getting a Bootcamp version of the skills one needs to teach online, but it exists, and it takes time. In the times of COVID19, timelines are compacted, and such processes are too long, and money is often too short. So, instead of calling these classes online, they euphemistically call them "remote" in order to avoid paying any stipend. The "right" course of action would be to negotiate with the faculty union about this.
The second issue that I have with the designation "remote" is that it seems to denote a "less-than" term for distance education. It's OK that this course stinks because it's a "remote" course. I wholeheartedly disagree. I think the correct term for a rushed course is an emergency online course, not a remote course. Online courses can stink. And, some do! But to claim that we don't want to call what we do classify what we do in an emergency online learning context as online learning because that's not what online learning is,...well, that's just silly IMO. We did start off with emergency remote teaching when this started, and why we picked the wrong word - picking remote over emergency - is beyond me. The word emergency should be enough to denote that what's happening is not necessarily the most fully fleshed out, but it is the best we can do in with the time and resources we have at hand. Furthermore, emergency remote/online/distance learning is perfectly fine when you have one week to make the pivot. Come September, if we're all still quarantined in place, distance learning should not be emergency anything! We should use the summer to plan for good online learning and to build out student supports that may be lacking at the moment!
Finally, there is an aspect of synchronous often tied with the affinity of using the term remote learning. Many people decided to just move their lectures into zoom. Hey, a 45-minute live session might be OK three-times per week for one class; multiply that by 4 courses for a full-time student. However, sitting in front of a computer for 9 hours per week on zoom sessions that might not be needed, and then being in front of your computer for all assignment (plus all the distractions and poor internet that you might have at home) and it doesn't make for a conducive learning environment. That said, we do have the option for synchronous online meetings. Online courses aren't designed to be strictly asynchronous or self-paced. Furthermore, just because mixed-mode institutions have ignored their online learners for the past decade doesn't mean that online or distance learning is inflexible and doesn't adapt to the changing needs of learners. It doesn't mean that there is a lack of community, and it doesn't mean that distance education cannot create co-curricular opportunities. Just because you have ignored some or all of these possibilities doesn't mean that they don't exist, and it doesn't require that you create a new term to describe them.
In the end, what I am seeing with remote learning is the same thing we saw in the 2012-2014 MOOC Craze years, where what we knew about online and distance education was summarily ignored due to the new shiny. Did we not learn anything from that experience? ❓
Your thoughts?
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