BY JONATHAN PORITZ AND JONATHAN REES

When we wrote about “Academic Freedom in Online Education” for the winter 2021 Academe released this month, we tried hard not to focus too much on the pandemic. While many faculty members have only come to online education because COVID-19 has made it unsafe to teach in any physical classroom, academic freedom online is an issue that doesn’t depend upon why you ended up teaching online. In fact, as we point out in our article, every exclusively face-to-face teacher has to worry about academic freedom when they use online tools, especially their campus learning management system (or LMS), in their physical classrooms.

If you’re only teaching online because of the pandemic, you may be shocked at how difficult it is to do it well. After all, Zoom wasn’t built for lecturing, and you may not have realized how badly designed the typical LMS is, perhaps because you avoided your institution’s LMS altogether before the pandemic. The cookie-cutter approach of the LMS offers the antithesis of the scholarly worldview, which values the previously unimagined combination of facts and ideas. Big Tech somehow convinced the public that the only way to get out into cyberspace is through platforms like Facebook that control the ways one can communicate, with whom, and using which tools. If people were aware of how easy it is to put together simple websites and, as one gets more experience, to attach more and more sophisticated FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open-Source Software, a better term for what is usually known only as “open-source”) services, they would be less willing to allow companies like Facebook to harvest their entire personal lives as data for advertisements and more willing to develop innovative alternatives.

Unfortunately, guidance for using an LMS in a pedagogically interesting way is only available on corporate web pages that provide help on a limited range of topics or, at some colleges and universities, from the insight of an in-house tech guru. Making it insanely hard to use what was supposed to be the easy gateway perpetuates the myth that only tech gurus can build their own pedagogical websites and services. It’s a “the food was bad AND the portions were small” situation!

Furthermore, you’ll notice that the LMS exists for the sole purpose of ”managing” learning—it’s there in the name! It’s possible that the only reason administrations encourage the use of LMS platforms is that they facilitate the creation of reports for accreditors about the number of assignments, contact minutes, and other such data about many courses on a campus. Faculty members could instead enhance their pedagogy by using the broad range of FLOSS tools and set a great example for their students of working outside of walled surveillance gardens with rigid, predetermined affordances—if it were not for the desire to “manage” the learning they provide.

If you’ve been using your campus LMS for a while now, you probably see different issues to address. We all know that COVID-19 was an emergency situation. Because of that emergency, a lot of faculty members with no training or experience teaching online were thrust into a situation requiring them to start doing so mid-semester. Even after a semester of experience, it is unreasonable to expect those faculty members to meet the quality level that people who have been doing this for years have achieved. However, just because those classes have proven acceptable during an emergency is no reason to accept those courses as the “new normal.” If at least some of the faculty members teaching online now will be asked to continue doing so once this pandemic is over, they should demand both training and incentives to continue to do so. This should include the same expectation of academic freedom that face-to-face teachers already have and that many experienced online instructors had carved out for themselves before the pandemic.

Similarly, many students who had no experience learning in an online setting began to take online courses that were not designed with online delivery in mind. This changes everyone’s expectations about what an online class should be, and probably not in a good way. We as faculty members cannot let this become the new normal. There is a huge array of FLOSS tools and other resources developed outside of LMS platforms that allow online instructors to shape their courses into unique educational experiences. Just because everyone is using the LMS during an emergency is no reason for administrators to mandate its use going forward. To do so would be a terrible step backward, both for the quality of all types of higher education and the academic freedom of the faculty who work so hard to provide it.

Whether you’re new to online education or an experienced hand at this relatively new form of instruction, our message to you is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Do not accept the sacrifices that faculty have willingly made because of an emergency as the standard operating procedure once that emergency is over. It’s difficult to argue against the idea that the pandemic will change higher education forever, but exactly how it changes the way we teach online remains an open question. No matter what your experience level in this new mode of course delivery, now is not the time to stand back and just see what happens.

The guest bloggers are the authors of the Academe feature article, “Academic Freedom in Online Education.” Jonathan Poritz is associate professor of mathematics and open educational resources coordinator at Colorado State University‒Pueblo. Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University‒Pueblo and a member of the AAUP’s national Council. They are coauthors of Education Is Not an App: The Future of University Teaching in the Internet Age.

Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.