Now that every educator is supposedly delivering an online education to students, we need to educate parents, students, administrators, politicians and even some of our colleagues what online education means.
The COVID-19 pandemic (Coronavirus 2019) pushed most universities online after March 13, 2020. By the end of March, most K12 schools had joined us online — prepared or not. Most instructors (and students) weren’t prepared. That’s okay, since this was an emergency, but now we have had a month to reflect on where we find ourselves.
I’m a rhetorician, and therefore I am obsessed with meaning and persuasion. My scholarship has been in digital design, and my passion is the rhetoric of economics. Oddly, and sadly, this is the right time for me… because so much is going wrong.
Online education doesn’t try to mimic the classroom experience. It delivers a unique educational experience based on current best practices. Great theoreticians have studied online spaces, online pedagogy, and digitally mediated communication. Education is dialogue and discovery, a systematic approach to guiding students towards self-discovery and enlightenment.
Good teachers don’t merely lecture and hope wisdom is magically received. That’s not education. Wisdom is more than knowledge or skills; it’s the ability to analyze and evaluate what is being presented. You don’t gain wisdom listening to someone blather.
Distance learning and correspondence courses are synonymous to most educators. That’s because the educator does so little in these formats. The educator does select the materials and does provide, asynchronously with a long delay, some feedback. You give students materials and hope they are able to teach themselves. Yes, the educator offers feedback after receiving the work, but then there’s yet another delay between the feedback and any revisions. The delays disrupt the teacher-student relationship.
The rush to online settings in the COVID-19 pandemic created a lot of distance learning. That is the best we could do, but that’s not what we should be doing if we’re still online in the fall.
The worst of online delivery schools have adopted for this emergency is computer-based training (CBT). Yes, that’s happening, and we should be ashamed that any institution has allowed or encouraged this.
Computer-based training has prepackaged content pushed online for students to complete. Large corporations dominate educational publishing and content platforms. These companies sell the supposed benefits of ready-to-use content. The teacher might offer some feedback, though much of these systems include automatic grading.
My daughters are enduring the CBT version of school. They don’t like it and that makes things difficult.
The only thing worse than CBT is the thankfully fading nonsense called massively open online course (MOOC) model. Sure, let us have 1000 students in an online setting and call that education. It’s the worst lecture hall ever, and I hate lecture halls.
Learning is a social activity. CBT is not social. MOOCs are not social, even with “sub-groups” in the class. Distance learning is barely social — it’s like exchanging letters.
I spent three graduate degrees studying how to make online education work. What students are experiencing today is a case study in what not to do. The damage to education might last a decade or more.
Rhetoric is a discipline that traces its Western tradition to the classical Greek and Roman thinkers. We quote Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle. We build on Quintilian. We believe in students debating ideas. We employ the Socratic method.
I need to see my students and they need to see each other. We need tension and conflict. We need to learn from each other and to have that thing called an education happen.