I think I’ve been the victim of an academic drive by shooting over the last couple of weeks. It’s fine, I’ll survive and who knows? Perhaps I’ll even come out of it with the cachet of a gangsta rapper (although I personally doubt it). It began about a month ago, when Dan Worth, who works for the Times Educational Supplement in the UK, got in touch with me to ask for some advice about online teaching and learning. I explained that it wasn’t really my area of expertise (he thought I was because of an article I wrote a few years ago about using Google Apps for Education in tertiary education), but I did share what I did know about it, drawing on the work that I’ve done in blended learning environments and also working with teaching unions and providing professional development and online learning. I also made the point that Australia, in particular, has a long history of distance education, which has much in common with the sudden move to online learning. The most important point I made – and this was present in the article – was that we’re not seeing a planned, prepared and well resourced shift to online learning; rather, we’re seeing a sudden rush to find practical solutions to problems most teachers weren’t even considering in January.
Some of this made it into the article (and some didn’t), but overall, it wasn’t a bad article. I felt that it made some good points, and communicated clearly some of the challenges facing teachers in these difficult times. However, that article (being in the TES) has a bit of reach, and I was not overly surprised to see a Google Alert pop up advising me that I had been quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article by Jonathan Zimmerman entitled ‘Video killed the teaching star’.
Unfortunately, the article is behind a paywall, so I can’t read it all, but I have seen a brief excerpt that reads: “It’s all fine and good to say that students should get ‘a sense of who you are and what kind of person you are,’ as the Australian remote learning expert Keith Heggart recently recommenced, advising online teachers. It’s quite another to give them one, and to have them believe it.”
So why is this the equivalent of a drive-by shooting? (And of course, I’m being a bit flippant). It’s because I don’t think the author has taken the time to read the article in any depth, or to do any further research. I might be entirely wrong, and I’m happy to acknowledge that if that’s the case, but it’s difficult to work that out when paywalls are in operation. Even more concerning, for Zimmerman, is that my comments about an online presence are hardly controversial. Any study about teaching online will emphasise the need for students to see the lecturer or tutor as being present in the classroom. And there are lots of ways of doing this – from avatars, the use of video feedback, presence on forums, discussion boards, using social media and so on. I’d have been happy to share any and all of this with Zimmerman, if he had asked – but instead, it looks like he went searching for a cheap target to take out of context to prove his point.
Interestingly enough, though, Zimmerman points out that ‘In their big lecture classes, my students tell me, any semblance of real connection with their professors has been lost’. One of the criticisms of some lectures is that they are far too large – there is no human connection between the lecturer and the 500 students in front of them. My point here is not to criticise either lecture classes or online learning; rather, these are a medium or a context for learning. The key is the design of the learning that takes place within these contexts, not the medium of that learning.