BY JONATHAN REES
Guest blogger Jonathan Rees teaches at Colorado State University-Pueblo
Do you remember Massive Open Online Courses (or MOOCs)? 2012 was supposedly the “Year of the MOOC” because they were going to revolutionize higher education. By teaching at scale, matching a few superstar professors with thousands of students at a time, the argument went, higher education would become open to the masses. While MOOCS have proven to be, in the words of one famous MOOC entrepreneur, “a lousy product,” some faculty might be afraid that the COVID-19 move to remote education might lead to similar efforts to force them into inferior online classes over the longterm, probably as a cost-saving measure.
This is a reasonable fear, but luckily, plenty of your colleagues have been teaching classes just like yours very well online for many years now and you can always learn from them. There is no reason that even an emergency move into online education in the middle of the semester should destroy the quality of the education that you’ve been providing your students for your entire career. I’m not talking grading standards here. Obviously it is a good idea to be as kind as possible when all of your students are facing a national catastrophe to some degree or another. I’m talking about whether your course still does what you intend it to do.
There was an extraordinarily tone-deaf article in the Chronicle a few weeks back suggesting that a pandemic was a great opportunity to test the effectiveness of online learning. Please understand that I’m not suggesting that at all. My point is simply that you shouldn’t change all the things that make you a great teacher just because you might be uncomfortable with technology. Experienced teachers are experts in their own pedagogy. If your administration or your IT department want you to conduct your newly-remote class in a way that doesn’t feel right to you, then don’t do it.
That said, I don’t blame anyone who has decided to defer to other authorities for the next few weeks because this seemed far easier than redesigning their whole course in the middle of their semester. However, I blame everyone, faculty and administration alike, if their version of remote education stays this way for the foreseeable future. Your emergency remote class is far better than a MOOC because MOOCs were designed to limit the direct interaction between the student and the professor. However, your emergency remote class is not nearly as good as the best online education available today if faculty don’t have the inclination and the administrative encouragement they need to adapt whatever and however they teach to the strengths and limitations of this new environment.
Higher education was changing rapidly long before COVID-19 came along. It seems inevitable that at least some faculty who are new to online learning will enjoy its advantages and want to keep doing it after this emergency is over. That doesn’t scare me a bit. Indeed, this likely would have happened anyway (albeit at a much slower pace). What scares me is the prospect that administrations will eventually decide that poorly-designed online classes will become acceptable because they somehow met the minimum standards of what constitutes higher education during a pandemic.
I don’t think it’s a radical idea to suggest that online instructors deserve the same rights and prerogatives as professors get in a face-to-face setting. If you want to use the learning management system, then use the learning management system. If you don’t want to use the learning management system, then don’t. If you want to teach asynchronously because that suits your learning objectives better than convening on Zoom at what was once your regular class time, then you should do so. Your class is still yours, even during a pandemic.
Just because you didn’t expect to teach online is no reason to forfeit the rights and prerogatives you possessed before COVID-19 arrived. It may take time and a bit of research to decide what’s best for your classes, but the longer this experiment in mass remote teaching remains in place the more important your efforts will become. Only by understanding what distinguishes a good online class from an emergency triage measure will faculty be able to prevent the erosion of quality standards that those Silicon Valley snake oil purveyors tried to instigate way back during the “Year of the MOOC.”
