BY JONATHAN REES
I read the AAUP’s Redbook from back to front. What I mean by that is that when a problem comes up, I ask myself, “I wonder what the AAUP has to say about this?” then search the index of the Redbook in order to see the collective wisdom of 110-odd years of experience. This strategy suited me well until I started getting interested in online education. The old Statement on Distance Education (later renamed Statement on Online and Distance Education) was written in 1999, and it shows. Twenty-five years might as well be a century when it comes to online education, and even though the old version has some weirdly prophetic parts—for example, “The development of distance-education technologies has created conditions . . . that raise basic questions about standards for teaching and scholarship”—the authors of that statement weren’t quite prepared to predict all of the current realities of online learning.
In early 2022, AAUP president Irene Mulvey asked the Committee on Research, Teaching and Publication to take up the task of drafting a new statement. That committee, which includes me, ran a listening session at the 2022 biennial meeting for feedback on this issue. Then I volunteered to turn that feedback into a draft. The revised draft, now called the Statement on Online Education, made it to the Council in November 2023 and appeared online for the first time in January 2024. This revised version will be incorporated into every new version of the Redbook, beginning with the forthcoming twelfth edition, until new technology makes it necessary to revise it again.
Committee chair Hank Reichman and I have a friendly difference of opinion over exactly how many of the words that I originally wrote made it into the final version of the revised statement. (I’m on the side of “fewer.” Remember, anything that required cross-referencing had to be put in by someone else since I have to start reading the Redbook at the index.) However, I am certain that the final version of the statement kept the same overall structure that I originally imagined. What I want to do here is briefly run through why each section is there and then explain what I think holds it all together.
The AAUP invented academic freedom and shared governance. People who want to know what the AAUP thinks of online education are going to want to know what we think about academic freedom and shared governance online. Therefore, the first thing the statement says after the preamble is:
Faculty members engaged in online education are entitled to academic freedom in accordance with the provisions of the AAUP-AAC&U 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Under the principles of academic government set forth in the AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, the faculty has primary responsibility for decisions regarding curriculum and instruction, which include the technological infrastructure for all courses, whether online, in-person, or a hybrid of the two.
Why would anybody ever voluntarily choose to teach online if this weren’t true? There are some interesting side issues that have come up in the last twenty-five years like the ratio of online to in-person courses at any institution and the proper role of instructional technologists in this new online world, but making this sentiment abundantly clear from the beginning of the statement was always very important.
The second section of the revised statement involves learning management systems (LMSs). There were LMSs in 1999, but they weren’t nearly as universal as they are now. Perhaps more importantly, they weren’t widely used in in-person classes back then (for grades and the like) the same way they are used now. That’s why almost every class is in some ways an online class these days, which made revising this statement that much more important.
I happen to hate LMSs. (You can start here if you want to know why, but honestly I have a lot more reasons than that.) However, I also know that lots of people are very pro-LMS because they make getting an online class up and running much easier. So to me, the most important part of this section of the statement is:
Faculty members should have the freedom to utilize those aspects of the LMS they find helpful to their teaching and decline to use those that they do not find helpful.
The funny thing about drafting a statement like this one is that you have to make it specific enough that it addresses on-the-ground reality but general enough that it can also apply to developments that haven’t happened yet. This focus on LMSs may be the thing that leads to the next revision of this statement, but right now it doesn’t seem like LMSs will be going extinct anytime soon.
The last section of the new statement involves intellectual property and open education resources (OER). Of course, the AAUP has been concerned with intellectual property issues long before anyone taught online, but the fact that online education often involves gathering your resources online and displaying your teaching tools the same way made it necessary to add a new section about this subject here. As was the case with academic freedom and shared governance, why would anyone want to teach online if this meant that they would lose control over what resources they can choose or the authorship rights over their teaching materials?
However, an important change over recent years has been the rise of OER textbooks and other teaching resources. They are posted on the internet precisely so that everyone can use them. I use an OER textbook in my US history survey class. I’m also a published author who is looking forward to my next royalty check arriving soon. This made it easy for me to see both sides of the coin here. The statement is pro-OER since this promotes the spread of knowledge. Using OER also saves students money, so it was easy to imagine administrators mandating their use in specific classes. That’s why the statement says the decision to use them should ultimately be left up to the instructor (or instructors).
In all my years of reading the Redbook from back to front, I’ve come to recognize that the AAUP has always been an extraordinarily reasonable organization. Once you work from the premise that professors are the ones doing the educating, and that therefore they should have an important role to play in every education-related aspect of a college or university, you can almost always guess exactly what the AAUP has to say about any issue. Take a look at the whole revised statement and I think you’ll see that it upholds this tradition.
Contributing editor Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University Pueblo.
