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BY AARON BARLOW

Those advocating a permanent move online for a much greater proportion of college classes are, I think, purposefully conflating two different needs in their quest. The first is the need for all teachers to be comfortable using digital tools, something we all have been woefully remiss in fulfilling. The second is the temporary necessity of converting all of our courses to online platforms for the duration of the coronavirus crisis. Both of these deal with the digital, of course, but neither alone nor together should they amount to an argument for stand-alone permanent digital classrooms.

We are learning quite a number of things as we stumble toward completion of the current semester. One is that a surprisingly high percentage of college professors are woefully underprepared for effective utilization of digital tools of any sort. Another is that pedagogies for online education vary widely, most of them created on the fly either in the past few weeks or through the necessities of the digital platforms used, platforms teaching methods often created with little real understanding of the place of the digital in any pedagogical structure. In other words, the pedagogy responds to the needs of the platforms and not necessarily those of the students.

The lesson should be that we need to make command of digital tools a necessary part of all teaching assignments. Even teachers with decades of classroom experience need to be conversant in the digital tools available to them. And all of us need to be developing a cohesive pedagogical base for utilization of the digital. The lesson is not that we should migrate all teaching online, or even increase the percentage.

The upshot certainly needn’t be that we introduce more permanent online classes but it certainly should be that we all learn to incorporate the digital into our pedagogies.

Perhaps the key work for launching moves toward this development could be an article now more than fifty years old by Fred Keller, “Good-Bye, Teacher… .“ A specialist in teaching machines and programmed instruction, Keller was working before the arrival of the digital but his key proposal anticipates the possibilities we are learning to manipulate now. As a result, he provides a starting point for a humane pedagogy that incorporates both face-to-face and digital instruction, making clear that we should not be looking at a competition between the two but a melding of them.

Instead of arguing for more online courses or steadfastly refusing to incorporate the digital at all, we should be looking back at Keller and what came to be known as the Keller Method or, as he called it, the Personalized System of Instruction, taking this opportunity to develop something new and flexible out of this old idea, a pedagogical base that recognizing the importance of direct human interaction in learning while making use of the increasingly powerful digital tools at our disposal.

Keller based PSI on what he had observed in military training centers during World War II. He writes:

instruction in such a center was highly individualized, in spite of large classes, sometimes permitting students to advance at their own speed throughout a course of study. I could have seen the clear specification of terminal skills for each course, together with the carefully graded steps leading to this end. I could have seen the demand for perfection at every level of training and for every student; the employment of classroom instructors who were little more than the successful graduates of earlier classes; the minimizing of the lecture as a teaching device and the maximizing of student participation. I could have seen, especially, an interesting division of labor in the educational process, wherein the non-commissioned, classroom teacher was restricted to duties of guiding, clarifying, demonstrating, testing, grading, and the like, while the commissioned teacher, the training officer, dealt with matters of course logistics, the interpretation of training manuals, the construction of lesson plans and guides, the evaluation of student progress, the selection of non-commissioned cadre, and the writing of reports for his superiors.

This is close to what good education today with a strong digital component could be, and it lays the groundwork for a pedagogical model that can move online if need be and then back into a physical space. It provides the basis for a more fruitful argument than those either/or discussions going on now; it provides something we can use moving forward, a means of re-envisioning the classroom in a changed educational environment.

The classroom, in Keller’s vision, becomes a suite that includes individual workspaces, group work spaces, faculty offices, and a lecture hall that can be used for performance and film. He quotes an earlier article of his on how these could be used:

“(1) The go-at-your-own-pace feature, which permits a student to move through the course at a speed commensurate with his ability and other demands upon his time.

“(2) The unit-perfection requirement for advance, which lets the student go ahead to new material only after demonstrating mastery of that which preceded.

“(3) The use of lectures and demonstrations as vehicles of motivation, rather than sources of critical information.

“(4) The related stress upon the written word in teacher-student communication; and, finally:

“(5) The use of proctors, which permits repeated testing, immediate scoring, almost unavoidable tutoring, and a marked enhancement of the personal-social aspect of the educational process.”

These features are all easy to institute right now and can be enhanced by the knocking down of a few walls.

We should be talking about them instead of rushing willy-nilly into whatever new (or old) paradigm we have our hearts set on. Change is coming; let’s control it with student learning in mind.