I suggest reading (and hopefully using in your online and on-ground classrooms) a newly released book called, Resilient Pedagogy: Practical Teaching Strategies to Overcome Distance, Disruption, and Distraction.
Resilient pedagogy: Practical teaching strategies to overcome distance, disruption, and distraction. Utah State University. https://doi.org/10.26079/a516-fb24.
My colleague Krissy Wilson and I teamed up to write a chapter for this volume and we are very excited to see it finally published as an open educational resource through Pressbooks.
According to Dr. Travis Thurston, the editor and project lead from Utah State University,
-Social Media: Our primary social media presence is on Twitter using @ResiPed and #ResilientPedagogy to share out the book, chapters, quotes, etc. We also encourage you to share this out through your professional channels and connections. Please reach out if you’d like help finding ways to share out the collection.
-Podcast: Finally, I want to thank those of you who have already recorded a podcast episode with me. We are ramping up our efforts to get the podcast released. If you haven’t had the chance to record an episode (and you would still like to do so) please reach out to me via email and we’ll find a mutually convenient time to record our conversation.
Thanks again! It has been a please to work on this project đ
Travis Thurston, Ph.D.
Indeed, it has been a pleasure working on the project, and I look forward to including many of the chapters and ideas within into my own online teaching.
When I designed a 10-week online graduate course called Learning Environment Design for Northwestern University in 2015, I created one week-long module entitled, âPreparing for the Apocalypse: Using the Internet to Survive Downtime.â In my introductory video of the weekâs subject matter to the class I said,
âI know the title of this Module sounds very dramatic and I wanted it to be. Being an educator and learning environment designer in the information age requires some careful and critical reflection about how we view technology and the relationship of people to technology.â
Little did I know how prophetic this title would turn out to be, although the rest of the module did not venture into the realm of a global pandemic. I was only thinking at the time about school web systems.
âWhen instructors ask me what they should do if the LMS or school web site goes down, I point out that the Internet was designed to have multiple channels operating simultaneously to limit disruption of information sharing.â
I never dreamed it would be the actual school itself that would be shut down, but in both scenarios the message that the internet operates as a communications safety net holds true.
As I designed IDS 425, I tried to incorporate adult education theories wherever possible. The entire course was constructed with a learner-centered approach. From the very first week of class, I wanted students to determine their own expectations, not only for themselves, but also for me. I created a Community Charter assignment, not a new concept in online learning, but what was new for my students was that they had nothing to work from. It was entirely from scratch and with people they did not yet know. Throughout this process I encouraged students to listen and work together but did not intervene at all. We examined roles and responsibilities and then students were broken into groups to develop their own case studies that they would use throughout the course for various assignments. Students also were asked to provide items for our weekly optional sync sessions agendas. Lastly, I built in periods of self-reflection near the beginning and near the end of the class. This provided an opportunity to connect one to one with each student and form not a student/teacher relationship, but rather a collaborative/learner relationship. I even included readings from Malcolm Knowles and Jack Mezirow during discussions on adult learning and transformative learning theory.
I was teaching the last two weeks of the winter iteration of IDS 425 when it became clear the pandemic would force all courses to be conducted online. I was still grading final projects as we prepared to train over 1,000 faculty members in little over a week how to move their course content and start teaching online for the spring quarter. We were witnessing the great onlining of 2020, as George Siemens called it on Twitter.
And it wasnât just Northwestern that moved rapidly, according to a survey conducted by Bay View Analytics and published in Inside Higher Education (2020), 90% of American colleges and universities had about a week to move their courses, instructors, and students online. As a result, the quality of instruction took a hit. For example, 80% of instructors used synchronous video to teach, while 48% said they lowered their expectations for the amount of work students would be able to do. Another 32% said they had “lowered the expectations about the quality of work that my students will be able to doâ
There appears to be consensus among many academic researchers and scholars that the move to emergency remote teaching, now commonly referred to as ERT, has created a two-tier system of online education. ERT courses and properly designed online courses. I would like to place ERT on the lower tier and Optimal Online Learning (OOL) on the upper tier. The speed with which thousands of courses are being moved online as we speak is staggering. Development cycles that are normally 6 months are being reduced to mere weeks. While ostensibly only a temporary, or emergency fix, this will lead to the inevitable comparison between online learning and face-to-face learning. Some educators are warning that the term âonline learningâ itself will become politicized. Already âtrollishâ articles are appearing with sweeping and uninformed headlines. The usual theme is that distance learning does not work or is inferior, but there is also often an underlying theme undergirded by fear of change and incompetence.
According to Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust, and Bond (Educause Review, 2020),
âOnline learning carries a stigma of being lower quality than face-to-face learning, despite research showing otherwise. These hurried moves online by so many institutions at once could seal the perception of online learning as a weak option, when in truth nobody making the transition to online teaching under these circumstances will truly be designing to take full advantage of the affordances and possibilities of the online format.â
Courses that are designed using sound online education guidelines and taught by experienced online educators offer an experience as good, or even better than traditional on-ground lectures. However, ERT courses are often neither well designed for online learners, nor taught by experienced online instructors.
Yes, learning how to teach online takes time and training.
Many universities are now scrambling to ramp up their online preparedness by mandating summer bootcamps for full and part-time faculty. These boot camps are intended to address the obvious deficiencies in ERT courses. However, despite these efforts, there is still a gap in the underlying practice of online instruction that has become exposed under these extraordinary conditions.
Even under the best of circumstances, how can online learning possibly fill the needs of undergraduates yearning human contact and a sense of college community? While virtual teaching can cover the curriculum, how will schools address the social, emotional, and experiential needs that real campuses offer? What is missing from ERT? Below is a short list of some of the missing components:
Student-centered learningÂ
Community building
Experiential learning opportunities
Opportunities for Critical Thinking
Meaningful self-reflection
Transformative learning
While many educators may shrug their shoulders at this dilemma, leading adult educators and philosophers have long extolled the virtues of community building and creating learner-centered cultures in virtual communities. Challenging undergraduates to not only participate in, but create and lead virtual communities can fill some of the void laid bare by empty campuses and non-existent student groups. By leveraging extensive research conducted on the roles of online learners and teachers, and by making self-governance and action learning new pillars of online learning, we may be able to turn adversity into a new age of online adult education.
How can ERT be converted to OOL using adult education theory?
Despite the challenges, however, many teachers are adopting the new age of online learning with enthusiasm and an open mind. In doing so, they are discovering a whole new world of opportunities for learners and teachers.
ERT classrooms often resort to Freireâs (2010) âbanking modelâ by relying on synchronous âZoom lecturesâ.
ERT classrooms lack opportunities for open dialogue & exploratory learning.
OOL classrooms can leverage bell hooksâ (1994) âteaching to transgressâ model.
ERT classrooms pay lip service to the community of online learners.
OOL celebrates communities and individual learners, their life-stories, and builds on Knowlesâ (1980) idea that learners like to solve specific problems that are relevant to them and allow them to be part of the planning process.
ERT classrooms tend to be outcome driven and critical thinking is viewed as too difficult to achieve.
OOL values critical thinking and strives for âtransformative learningâ by having students openly share their unique perspectives, challenge one another respectfully, and through self-reflection. Disorienting dilemmas are welcome (Mezirow, 2000).
Manya Whittaker (2020), in an article entitled, âWhat an ed-tech skeptic learned about her own teaching in the covid-19 crisisâ, lists 16 things she has adopted since starting to teach online. It is well worth a read.
References
Freire, Paulo. (2010). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.
Hodges, Charles., Moore, Stephanie., Lockee, Barb., Trust, Torrey., Bond, Aaron. (2020). The difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/ybnwz255
hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY.: Routledge.
Knowles, M. S. (1980). The modern practice of adult education: From pedagogy to andragogy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall/Cambridge.
I grew up in the land down under. And, as a youthful Sydneysider, it took more than a few skills to help me get by. I learned many of them when my father took up his career-defining mission at the Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross and we moved to Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
The moss covered piers by Double Bay were etched in my young mind along with the small skiffs, or VJâs as we called them, sailing out into the harbor. Across the waters my brothers and I could see our favorite Clark Island, lying just west of its bigger brother, Shark Island. There, the two of them seemed to call out to us young explorers,
âCome see me… no, land on me… no, land on me first.”
We always thought they were magical, and they probably were. Many nights we looked out from the Double Bay pier and wondered what mysterious events were taking place on those mystical islands beneath their luminescent blankets of fog and salty air. At night they seemed to disappear and reappear like magicians performing tricks. By day, they stood stark, each like an oasis, beckoning adventurers to come their way….and we did.
The shores and islands of Sydney Harbor offered limitless adventures for youngsters to explore and hone their survival skills. Outside the headlands, which stood like godly bookends, lay the great Pacific, that awesome blue mass that wraps itself around the vast land down under, forbidding any frivolous encounters with other cultures. You must want very badly to get into or out of Australia. The British certainly knew how to pick their prison colonies.
Learning Environment Designer 