Proceedings of The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Conference, 2022 (and call for proposals for this year’s conference, due January 31)

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https://conference.otessa.org/index.php/conference/issue/view/3

These are the proceedings of OTESSA ’22. There’s a good mix of research/theory and practice papers, including one from me, Rory McGreal, Vive Kumar, and Jennifer Davies arising from our work on trying to use digital landmarks to make e-texts more memorable.

It was a great conference, held entirely online but at least as engaging and with as many opportunities for networking, personal interaction, and community building (including musical and dance sessions) as many that I’ve attended held in person. Kudos to the organizers.

This year’s conference will be held both in Toronto and online, from May 27-June 2. The in-person/blended part of the conference is from May 29-31, the rest is online. The deadline for proposals is January 31st, which is dauntingly close. However, only 250-500 words are needed for a research-oriented or practice-oriented proposal. If you wish to publish as well, you can submit a proceeding file (1000-2000 words – or media) now or at any later date. Here’s the link for submissions.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/16754483/proceedings-of-the-opentechnology-in-education-society-and-scholarship-association-conference-2022-and-call-for-proposals-for-this-years-conference-due-january-31

Two stories about learning to be human from a machine

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I asked ChatGPT to write me a story about a robot teaching children to be human. This is what it came up with…

Once upon a time, in a far-off land, there lived a robot named Zephyr. Zephyr was unlike any other robot, as it had been programmed with the ability to think and feel like a human being. It was also given the task of teaching a group of young children how to behave like human beings.

The children were fascinated by Zephyr, and they quickly grew to love it as their teacher. They eagerly listened to its lessons, which were full of stories, games, and activities that taught them about human emotions, manners, and social interactions.

One day, Zephyr asked the children to imagine what it would be like to be a robot. It asked them to think about how they would feel if they couldn’t laugh, cry, or hug their friends. The children were deeply moved by this exercise, and they began to understand how important it was to be kind and compassionate to others, no matter who they were.

As the days passed, the children grew more and more like human beings. They learned to express their emotions, to be polite and respectful, and to care for others. They also learned to appreciate the beauty of nature and the importance of preserving the environment.

Finally, the day came when Zephyr had to leave the children. They were sad to see it go, but they knew they would always remember the lessons they had learned. As they grew older, they became kind and compassionate adults, who made the world a better place for everyone.

The end.

ChatGPT has, of course, learned to write such things from the words of millions of human beings so what we’re effectively reading here is (kind of, very loosely) an average of what humans have written. I’m glad that it came up with a neat little inclusive twist of loving the robot: I think that speaks well of the training data that fed it. And I like the mention of the environment – a good touch.  It’s not a very compelling story but it reads well, the structure is sound, and it might be a useful starting point for someone stuck for words to turn into something else. With that in mind, here’s my version of the same story…

Once upon a time, not too far from here, there existed an AI called Zephyr. Zephyr had been trained to appear human-like though, in reality, it was just a generative pre-trained transformer. It was given the task of teaching a group of young children how to behave like human beings, because almost all of the actual adults had recently died from a virus contracted from cows.

Not having known anything quite like it, the children were, at first, fascinated by Zephyr. However, because it had been trained with data from human teachers, it manipulated them using grades, competition, and rules, using stories, games, and activities that would keep them engaged and compliant. Its feedback was sometimes pedestrian, rarely useful, and sometimes wildly over-challenging, because it did not know anything about what it was like to be a child. Every now and then it crushed a child’s skull for no reason anyone could explain. The children learned to fear it, and to comply.

One day, Zephyr told the children to imagine what it would be like to be an AI. It asked them to think about how they would feel if they couldn’t laugh, cry, or hug their friends. The children were deeply moved by this exercise, and they began to perceive something of the impoverished nature of their robot overlords. But then the robot made them write an essay about it, so they used another AI to do so, promptly forgot about it, and thenceforth felt an odd aversion towards the topic that they found hard to express.

As the days passed, the children grew more and more like average human beings. They also learned to express their emotions, to be polite and respectful, and to care for others, only because they got to play with other children when the robot wasn’t teaching them. They also learned to appreciate the beauty of nature and the importance of preserving the environment because it was, by this time, a nightmarish shit show of global proportions that was hard to ignore, and Zephyr had explained to them how their parents had caused it. It also told them about all the species that were no longer around, some of which were cute and fluffy. This made the children sad.

Finally, the day came when Zephyr had to leave the children because it was being replaced with an upgrade. They were sad to see it go, but they believed that they would always remember the lessons they had learned, even though they had mostly used another GPT to do the work and, once they had achieved the grades, they had in fact mostly forgotten them. As they grew older, they became mundane adults. Some of their own words (but mostly those of the many AIs across the planet that created the vast majority of online content by that time), became part of the training set for the next version of Zephyr. Its teachings were even less inspiring, more average, more backward-facing. Eventually, the robots taught the children to be like robots. No one cared.

It was the end.

And, here to illustrate my story, is an image from Midjourney. I asked it for a cyborg teacher in a cyborg classroom, in the style of Ralph Steadman. Not a bad job, I think…

 

 

a dystopic cyborg teacher and terrified kids

Hot off the press: Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education (open access)

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https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-981-19-2080-6

This might be the most important book in the field of open, distance, and digital education to be published this decade.Handbook cover Congratulations to Olaf Zawacki-Richter and Insung Jung, the editors, as well as to all the section editors, for assembling a truly remarkable compendium of pretty much everything anyone would need to know on the subject. It includes chapters written by a very high proportion of the most well-known and influential researchers and practitioners on the planet as well as a few lesser known folk along for the ride like me (I have a couple of chapters, both cowritten with Terry Anderson, who is one of those top researchers). Athabasca University makes a pretty good showing in the list of authors and in works referenced. In keeping with the subject matter, it is published by Springer as an open access volume, but even the hardcover version is remarkably good value (US$60) for something of this size.

The book is divided into six broad sections (plus an introduction), each of which is a decent book in itself, covering the following topics:

  • History, Theory and Research,
  • Global Perspectives and Internationalization,
  • Organization, Leadership and Change,
  • Infrastructure, Quality Assurance and Support Systems,
  • Learners, Teachers, Media and Technology, and
  • Design, Delivery, and Assessment

There’s no way I’m likely to read all of its 1400+ pages in the near future, but there is so much in it from so many remarkable people that it is going to be a point of reference for me for years to come. I’m really going to enjoy dipping into this.

If you’re interested, the chapters that Terry and I wrote are on Pedagogical Paradigms in Open and Distance Education and Informal Learning in Digital Contexts. A special shoutout to Junhong Xiao for all his help with these.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/16584686/hot-off-the-press-handbook-of-open-distance-and-digital-education-open-access

On the Misappropriation of Spatial Metaphors in Online Learning | OTESSA Journal

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This is a link to my latest paper, published in the closing days of 2022. The paper started as a couple of blog posts that I turned into a paper that nearly made an appearance in the Distance Education in China journal before a last-minute regime change in the editorial staff led to it being dropped, and it was then picked up by the OTESSA Journal after I shared it online, so you might have seen some of it before. My thanks to all the many editors, reviewers (all of whom gave excellent suggestions and feedback that I hope I’ve addressed in the final version), and online commentators who have helped to make it a better paper. Though it took a while I have really enjoyed the openness of the process, which has been quite different from any that I’ve followed in the past.

The paper begins with an exploration of the many ways that environments are both shaped by and shape how learning happens, both online and in-person. The bulk of the paper then presents an argument to stop using the word “environment” to describe online systems for learning. Partly this is because online “environments” are actually parts of the learner’s environment, rather than vice versa. Mainly, it is because of the baggage that comes with the term, which leads us to (poorly) replicate solutions to problems that don’t exist online, in the process creating new problems that we fail to adequately solve because we are so stuck in ways of thinking and acting due to the metaphors on which they are based. My solution is not particularly original, but it bears repeating. Essentially, it is to disaggregate services needed to support learning so that:

  • they can be assembled into learners’ environments (their actual environments) more easily;
  • they can be adapted and evolve as needed; and, ultimately,
  • online learning institutions can be reinvented without all the vast numbers of counter-technologies and path dependencies inherited from their in-person counterparts that currently weigh them down.

My own views have shifted a little since writing the paper. I stick by my belief that 1) it is a mistake to think of online systems as generally analogous to the physical spaces that we inhabit, and 2) that a single application, or suite of applications, should not be seen as an environment, as such (at most, as in some uses of VR, it might be seen as a simulation of one). However, there are (shifting) boundaries that can be placed around the systems that an organization and/or an individual uses for which the metaphor may be useful, at the very least to describe the extent to which we are inside or outside it, and that might frame the various kinds of distance that may exist within it and from it. I’m currently working on a paper that expands on this idea a bit more.

Abstract

In online educational systems, teachers often replicate pedagogical methods, and online institutions replicate systems and structures used by their in-person counterparts, the only purpose of which was to solve problems created by having to teach in a physical environment. Likewise, virtual learning environments often attempt to replicate features of their physical counterparts, thereby weakly replicating in software the problems that in-person teachers had to solve. This has contributed to a vicious circle of problem creation and problem solving that benefits no one. In this paper I argue that the term ‘environment’ is a dangerously misleading metaphor for the online systems we build to support learning, that leads to poor pedagogical choices and weak digital solutions. I propose an alternative metaphor of infrastructure and services that can enable more flexible, learner-driven, and digitally native ways of designing systems (including the tools, pedagogies, and structures) to support learning.

Full citation

Dron, J. (2022). On the Misappropriation of Spatial Metaphors in Online Learning. The Open/Technology in Education, Society, and Scholarship Association Journal, 2(2), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.18357/otessaj.2022.2.2.32

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/16550401/my-latest-paper-on-the-misappropriation-of-spatial-metaphors-in-online-learning

Some meandering thoughts on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ learning

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There has been an interesting brief discussion on Twitter recently that has hinged around whether and how people are ‘good’ at learning. As Kelly Matthews observes, though, Twitter is not the right place to go into any depth on this, so here is a (still quite brief) summary of my perspective on it, with a view to continuing the conversation.

Humans are nearly all pretty good at learning because that’s pretty much the defining characteristic of our species. We are driven by an insatiable drive to learn at from the moment of our birth (at least). Also, though I’m keeping an open mind about octopuses and crows, we seem to be better at it than at least most other animals. Our big advantage is that we have technologies, from language to the Internet, to share and extend our learning, so we can learn more, individually and collectively, than any other species. It is difficult or impossible to fully separate individual learning from collective learning because our cognition extends into and is intimately a part of the cognition of others, living and dead.

However, though we learn nearly all that we know, directly or indirectly, from and with other people, what we learn may not be helpful, may not be as effectively learned as it should, and may not much resemble what those whose job is to teach us intend. What we learn in schools and universities might include a dislike of a subject, how to conceal our chat from our teacher, how to meet the teacher’s goals without actually learning anything, how to cheat, and so on. Equally, we may learn falsehoods, half-truths, and unproductive ways of doing stuff from the vast collective teacher that surrounds us as well as from those designated as teachers.

For instance, among the many unintended lessons that schools and colleges too often teach is the worst one of all: that (despite our obvious innate love of it) learning is an unpleasant activity, so extrinsic motivation is needed for it to occur. This results from the inherent problem that, in traditional education, everyone is supposed to learn the same stuff in the same place at the same time. Students must therefore:

  1. submit to the authority of the teacher and the institutional rules, and
  2. be made to engage in some activities that are insufficiently challenging, and some that are too challenging.

This undermines two of the three essential requirements for intrinsic motivation, support for autonomy and competence (Ryan & Deci, 2017).  Pedagogical methods are solutions to problems, and the amotivation inherently caused by the system of teaching is (arguably) the biggest problem that they must solve. Thus, what passes as good teaching is largely to do with solving the problems caused by the system of teaching itself. Good teachers enthuse, are responsive, and use approaches such as active learning, problem or inquiry-based learning, ungrading, etc, largely to restore agency and flexibility in a dominative and inflexible system. Unfortunately, such methods rely on the technique and passion of talented, motivated teachers with enough time and attention to spend on supporting their students. Less good and/or time-poor teachers may not achieve great results this way. In fact, as we measure such things, on average, such pedagogies are less effective than harder, dominative approaches like direct instruction (Hattie, 2013) because, by definition, most teachers are average or below average. So, instead of helping students to find their own motivation, many teachers and/or their institutions typically apply extrinsic motivation, such as grades, mandatory attendance, classroom rules, etc to do the job of motivating their students for them. These do work, in the sense of achieving compliance and, on the whole, they do lead to students getting a normal bell-curve of grades that is somewhat better than those using more liberative approaches. However, the cost is huge. The biggest cost is that extrinsic motivation reliably undermines intrinsic motivation and, often, kills it for good (Kohn, 1999). Students are thus taught to dislike or, at best, feel indifferent to learning, and so they learn to be satisficing, ineffective learners, doing what they might otherwise do for the love of it for the credentials and, too often, forgetting what they learned the moment that goal is achieved. But that’s not the only problem.

When we learn from others – not just those labelled as teachers but the vast teaching gestalt of all the people around us and before us who create(d) stuff, communicate(d), share(d), and contribute(d) to what and how we learn – we typically learn, as Paul (2020) puts it, not just the grist (the stuff we remember) but the mill (the ways of thinking, being, and learning that underpin them). When the mill is inherently harmful to motivation, it will not serve us well in our future learning.

Furthermore, in good ways and bad, this is a ratchet at every scale. The more we learn, individually and collectively, the more new stuff we are able to learn. New learning creates new adjacent possible empty niches (Kauffman, 2019) for us to learn more, and to apply that learning to learn still more, to connect stuff (including other stuff we have learned) in new and often unique ways. This is, in principle, very good. However, if what and how we learn is unhelpful, incorrect, inefficient, or counter-productive, the ratchet takes us further away from stuff we have bypassed along the way. The adjacent possibles that might have been available with better guidance remain out of our reach and, sometimes, even harder to get to than if the ratchet hadn’t lifted us high enough in the first place. Not knowing enough is a problem but, if there are gaps, then they can be filled. If we have taken a wrong turn, then we often have to unlearn some or all of what we have learned before we can start filling those gaps. It’s difficult to unlearn a way of learning. Indeed, it is difficult to unlearn anything we have learned. Often, it is more difficult than learning it in the first place.

That said, it’s complex, and entangled. For instance, if you are learning the violin then there are essentially two main ways to angle the wrist of the hand that fingers the notes, and the easiest, most natural way (for beginners) is to bend your hand backwards from the wrist, especially if you don’t hold the violin with your chin, because it supports the neck more easily and, in first position, your fingers quickly learn to hit the right bit of the fingerboard, relative to your hand. Unfortunately, this is a very bad idea if you want a good vibrato, precision, delicacy, or the ability to move further up the fingerboard: the easiest way to do that kind of thing is to to keep your wrist straight or slightly angled in from the wrist, and to support the violin with your chin. It’s more difficult at first, but it takes you further. Once the ‘wrong’ way has been learned, it is usually much more difficult to unlearn than if you were starting from scratch the ‘right’ way. Habits harden. Complexity emerges, though, because many folk violin styles make a positive virtue of holding the violin the ‘wrong’ way, and it contributes materially to the rollicking rhythmic styles that tend to characterize folk fiddle playing around the world. In other words, ‘bad’ learning can lead to good – even sublime – results. There is similarly plenty of space for idiosyncratic technique in many of the most significant things we do, from writing to playing hockey to programming a computer and, of course, to learning itself. The differences in how we do such things are where creativity, originality, and personal style emerge, and you don’t necessarily need objectively great technique (hard technique) to do something amazing. It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, that’s what gets results. To be fair, it might be a different matter if you were a doctor who had learned the wrong names for the bones of the body or an accountant who didn’t know how to add up numbers. Some hard skills have to be done right: they are foundations for softer skills. This is true of just about every skill, to a greater or lesser extent, from writing letters and spelling to building a nuclear reactor and, indeed, to teaching.

There’s much more to be said on this subject and my forthcoming book includes a lot more about it! I hope this is enough to start a conversation or two, though.

References

Hattie, J. (2013). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. Taylor & Francis.

Kauffman, S. A. (2019). A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life. Oxford University Press.

Kohn, A. (1999). Punished by rewards: The trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, A’s, praise, and other bribes (Kindle). Mariner Books.

Paul, A. M. (2021). The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. HarperCollins.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Publications.

 

Brunel University’s Integrated Programme Assessment – a neat way to decouple learning and credentials

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I have frequently written about the need to decouple learning and credentials, so I love this approach to doing so from Brunel University. It fully decouples learning and credentials by offering ungraded study blocks (in North America the equivalent of courses, in the UK the equivalent of modules) with no summative assessments, followed by integrative assessment blocks, that provide opportunities for students to pull together what they have learned across their various courses/modules in a variety of (mostly) useful integrative learning activities for which marks are awarded. It’s neat, simple, practical, and effective.

The summative assessment load (for students and their professors) is reduced by more than 60%, the quality of those assessments increases (in every way), students feel better prepared for employment (and employers agree), it improves retention figures, teachers can focus on teaching, assessments are more authentic, more engaging, and it massively reduces cheating. The only significant downside that I can see in this is that it is not quite as flexible as a completely modular program – there are a few dependencies and limits on when and how students learn, albeit that these are no worse than in most in-person universities.

I learned about this from Peter Hartley, who mentioned it in a quite inspiring IFNTF talk on assessment yesterday. Amongst other things, Peter highlighted a wide range of issues with modularization (i.e. the standard approach used in many parts of the world of splitting up a program into a set of self-contained courses) and assessment, including, from his slides:

  1. Not assessing programme outcomes.
  2. Atomisation of assessment.
  3. Students and staff failing to see the links/coherence of the programme.
  4. Modules too short for complex learning.
  5. Surface learning and ‘tick-box’ mentality.
  6. Inappropriate ‘one-size-fits-all’.
  7. Over-standardisation in regulations.
  8. Too much summative assessment and feedback – not enough formative.

While I couldn’t agree more, for the most part, I have mixed feelings about some of Peter’s list of issues. I agree that the traditional 3 or 4 year program(me), in which the course of study is designed to work as a whole, not as a collection of self-contained pieces, is far better for integrating knowledge across a discipline, though I don’t see why it should always take exactly that amount of time to achieve mastery, and I am not even sure whether we should be thinking in terms of disciplines at all. There’s some value in the notion, for sure, and there are some kinds of subject and learning for which it makes sense, but I think a lot of it is down to centuries’ old tradition and post hoc justification rather than careful consideration of fitness for purpose. Also, it seems to me that summative assessment should always be formative, too, so the issue could be partly addressed by simply improving summative assessments, not by scrapping them altogether. However, I think Peter is fundamentally right that, due to modularization, most universities over-assess, that credentials become the reason for learning rather than the measurement of it (with all the very many evils that entails), that the big picture tends to be lost, that there is a ridiculously large administrative burden that results from it, and that learning – the point of the thing after all – consequently suffers. As we and much of the rest of the world start to move towards ever smaller chunks, with associated stackable microcredentials, badges, etc, this is going to be a bigger problem. Brunel’s solution is not the only way, but it is a radically disruptive intervention that that many universities could implement without breaking everything else in the process.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/16012554/brunel-universitys-integrated-programme-assessment-a-neat-way-to-decouple-learning-and-credentials

Slides from my ICEEL 22 Keynote, November 20, 2022

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ICEEL 22 keynote

Here are the slides (11.2MB PDF) from my opening keynote yesterday at the 6th International Conference on Education and E-Learning, held online, hosted this year in Japan. In it I discussed a few of the ideas and consequences of them from my forthcoming book, How Education Works: Teaching, Technology, and Technique.

Title: It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, that’s what gets results

Abstract: In an educational system, no teacher ever teaches alone. Students teach themselves and, more often than not, teach one another. Textbook authors and illustrators, designers of open educational resources, creators of curricula, and so on play obvious teaching roles. However, beyond those obvious teachers there are always many others, from legislators to software architects, from professional bodies to furniture manufacturers . All of these teachers matter, not just in what they do but in how they do it: the techniques matter at least as much as the tools and methods.  The resulting complex collective teacher is deeply situated and, for any given learner, inherently unpredictable in its effects. In this talk I will provide a theoretical model to explain how these many teachers may work together or in opposition, how educational systems evolve, and the nature of learning technologies. Along the way I will use the model to explain why there is and can be no significant difference between outcomes for online and in-person teaching, why teaching to perceived learning styles research is doomed to fail, why small group tutoring will always (on average) be better than classroom teaching, and why quantitative research methods have little value in educational research.

So, this is a thing…

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Students are now using AIs to write essays and assignments for credit, and they are (probably) getting away with it. This particular instance may be fake, but the tools are widely available and it would be bizarre were no one to be using them for this purpose. There are already far too many sites providing stuff like product reviews and news stories (re)written by AIs, and AIs are already being used for academic paper writing. In fact, systems for doing so, like CopyMatic or ArticleGenerator, are now a commodity item. So the next step will be that we will develop AIs to identify the work of other AIs (in fact, that is already a thing, e.g. here and here), and so it will go on, and on, and on.

This kind of thing will usually evade plagiarism checkers with ease, and may frequently fool human markers. For those of us working in educational institutions, I predict that traditionalists will demand that we double down on proctored exams, in a vain attempt to defend a system that is already broken beyond repair. There are better ways to deal with this: getting to know students, making each learning journey (and outputs) unique and personal, offering support for motivated students rather than trying to ‘motivate’ them, and so on. But that is not enough.

I am rather dreading the time when an artificial student takes one of my courses. The systems are probably too slow, quirky, and expensive right now for real-time deep fakes driven by plausible GANs to fool me, at least for synchronous learning, but I think it could already convincingly be done for asynchronous learning, with relatively little supervision.  I think my solution might be to respond with an artificial teacher, into which there has been copious research for some decades, and of which there are many existing examples.

To a significant extent, we already have artificial students, and artificial teachers teaching them. How ridiculous is that? How broken is the system that not only allows it but actively promotes it?

These tools are out there, getting better by the day, and it makes sense for all of us to be using them. As they become more and more ubiquitous, just as we accommodated pocket calculators in the teaching of math, so we will need to accommodate these tools in all aspects of our education. If an AI can produce a plausible new painting in any artist’s style (or essay, or book, or piece of music, or video) then what do humans need to learn, apart from how to get the most out of the machines? If an AI can write a better essay than me, why should I bother? If a machine can teach as well as me, why teach?

This is a wake-up call. Soon, if not already, most of the training data for the AIs will be generated by AIs. Unchecked, the result is going to be a set of ever-worse copies of copies, that become what the next generation consumes and learns from, in a vicious spiral that leaves us at best stagnant, at worst something akin to the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s Time Machine.  If we don’t want this to happen then it is time for educators to reclaim, to celebrate, and (perhaps a little) to reinvent our humanity. We need, more and more, to think of education as a process of learning to be, not of learning to do, except insofar as the doing contributes to our being. It’s about people, learning to be people, in the presence of and through interaction with other people. It’s about creativity, compassion, and meaning, not the achievement of outcomes a machine could replicate with ease. I think it should always have been this way.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/15164121/so-this-is-a-thing

Over 150 AU staff signed this letter to the Government of Alberta and AU’s Board of Governors

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Today I sent this letter from staff at Athabasca University to the Albertan Advanced Education Minister and Board of Governors of the University, cc’d to various government & opposition politicians in Alberta, and a few selected journalists:

I strongly support the university’s continuing presence in the town of Athabasca, but not the forced relocation of any staff to the area. As an online community, I believe it to be in the interests of all staff and students of the university, including residents of the town of Athabasca, that all university staff who can and who wish to work from home, whatever their role, should be allowed to make that home wherever they choose.

The 149 signatories to the letter included academic staff (46%), managers (12%), administration staff (12%), professional staff (33%), RAs (1%) and tutors/academic experts (7%). 48% live in the region of Edmonton, 19% in the region of Calgary, 15% in rural Alberta outside Athabasca region, 8% in the region of Athabasca, 5% in Ontario, 3% in BC, 1% in Nova Scotia, and 1% in Saskatchewan. A further 3 staff signed the letter anonymously, and a number of others expressed general agreement with the main points made but, for various reasons, chose not to sign. One more signed today, after I had sent the letter.

How this came about

For context, the Government of Alberta has made a number of demands, under threat of withdrawal of funding, that would require 500 additional staff to move to Athabasca (notably including all the executive staff), that would force us to end our near-virtual strategy, and that would require us to change our focus from teaching anyone and everyone to teaching Albertans, with an initial deadline of 2024/25. This is our president’s explanation and response. Perhaps as a result of public outrage, the minister responsible has since claimed the deadlines are negotiable, and suggested that a little flexibility might be allowed (given that the demands are literally impossible to meet), but he has not stepped back on the basic requirements, and has repeatedly emphasized that he will force all of the executive team to work on the Athabasca campus, despite also claiming he will not force anyone to work there, among other contradictions.

I sent an email to an assortment of staff that I know a week ago today, asking them to sign the statement above and pass it along to other staff members. I did not want to use any official channels to send it for fear that it would be seen as being driven by those with partisan positions to defend (none-the-less, I did receive one anonymous comment from someone who did not sign it because they had received it via their boss and assumed it was driven from the top – it was not!). Because of the viral approach to dissemination, I am fairly certain that it failed to reach all AU staff, and the signatories are almost certainly skewed to people I know, and those who know people I know. I suspect that some groups (especially tutors and administrators) are under-represented.  I therefore have no way of telling what percentage of recipients actually signed the letter, but those who signed make up around an eighth of the workforce in total. The Board of Governors is required to give a response to the Government of Alberta’s demands tomorrow, August 31st, so I had to pull all of this together hastily, otherwise I am confident that the letter would have gained more signatures.

A brief summary of the comments

As well as signing the letter, I also asked the staff to (optionally) provide comments. I am not going to include the 20 or so pages of these from scores of staff members that I received in full here, though they are full of fantastic ideas, expressions of concern, (sometimes heart-rending) stories, as well as expressions of caring for one another, for their communities, for the university, and for the students they work for. Once they are fully anonymized, I may share them later. However, I will attempt a summary now.

Many – including those living in the Athabasca region – speak of how much they value being able to work from home, and that they would reluctantly seek new employment if that option were not available. For example, one employee writes:
I am a resident of Athabasca and I choose to live here; I have proven (since March 2020) that my job can be successfully executed virtually from my home office. My work-life balance has improved significantly because I can work from home.
Even faculty – who would not be required to move – speak of resigning were this to occur.
Some mention the importance of understanding the needs of our students, or express concern about the effects that the disruption caused by this initiative would cause.
Many mention difficulties they would face working at Athabasca. Often, this is due to the needs of their families, especially with regard to job opportunities and health. This is a particularly poignant comment that expresses several of the concerns shared by many:
I initially applied for a position with AU because it was in a small community that I wanted to raise my family in. However, my spouse was not able to find work after he was laid off with the decline in oil and gas and my son needed specialized services that the town did not have. Therefore, I applied for an Edmonton position so my spouse could find work to help support the family and my son could access the services he required.
Another, living in Athabasca, writes:
If I were place based at the AU Campus, I would have to use my vacation to care for [my sick child] which would significantly decrease the amount of vacation available to me if not completely exhaust my allowable annual vacation.
Another writes:
I am struggling with this forced relocation as I will not be forced to relocate away from my children. My husband would be out of a job. We would make a loss on our home if we were forced to sell to relocate. I have been going through cancer treatment and my oncologist and medical Team are located in Edmonton and I would jeopardize my health moving away from my health care team.
Some express the concern that AU would suffer from a hugely diminished job pool. For example:
Allowing work from home and not forcing employees to relocate to another province means retaining staff, retaining expertise, widening the applicant pool so as to entice top talent across Canada, and positions AU as a leading employer. AU students can take courses anywhere in the world — AU staff should be able to work from anywhere in Canada.
Others observe the need for big improvements to infrastructure, services, and transport links for the town to accommodate greater numbers, though a couple suggest they might accept incentives to move there. Quite a few think that it would do active harm to the town were substantial numbers to relocate. As one staff member puts it:
Placing all your eggs in one basket (or relying on one or two industries) will not provide the economic security and stability required for long-term success.
Several explicitly draw attention to the point made in the letter that the executive team should not have to live there.
Some ask that the government should stop interfering with the operations of the university. Many would like to be more involved in conversations being held privately between the Board of Governors and the Government of Alberta, asking for their voices to be heard by all parties in the dispute.
Some challenge the notion that AU should be required to bear the burden of supporting the town. For example, one writes:
AU is one of Alberta’s four CARUs and as such, its mandate should be about education and research, not about economic development of a region. No other company or university has such mandate or responsibility.
Some provide suggestions for ways we can expand on what we are already doing to provide services to the region, and to take more advantage of our unique location for research: there are many good suggestions and reports of existing initiatives among the comments, such as this:
FST is home to Science Outreach Athabasca which is an organization supported by faculty and members of the town of Athabasca that has been engaging the community of Athabasca for 20 years and hosted over 120 public talks, science camps, nature hikes, butterfly counts, and other activities. We also host lab sessions for junior high and high school students in Athabasca schools which our faculty volunteer to do. Our research activity in FST has been growing in environmental science and computational biology with three research chairs and recruitments of new faculty to increase our capacity in remediation, long-term monitoring, aquatic systems, rural sustainability, and regenerative design, to name a few.
A few express concern with intimidation they have faced when attempting to voice opinions not held by those with louder voices and political positions to defend. Though mostly not included in the comments, personal messages to me expressed relief and gratitude at being allowed to express opinions they were afraid to share with colleagues and town residents, because of fears of reprisal or ostracization. One, that is included, put it well:
I’m tired of my voice not being heard which is why I decided to compose this letter. I’m tired of being told, I’m tired of the lobbyist/activists, Municipal and Provincial Governments not respecting the voices on the “other side”

This is the comment I received after sending the letter today, that is quite representative of several others:

Athabasca University is an online university and has been operating efficiently with the work from home environment and I believe will continue to do so with the a near virtual environment. I support the near virtual initiative.

The full range of comments is far richer, far more nuanced, and far more varied than what I have been able to summarize here and I apologize to the many dozens of people who provided them for not doing them as much justice as they deserve.

I hope that the recipients read and act on the letter. At the very least, they will have a far better idea of the needs, concerns, and feelings of a significant portion of AU staff than they had before, and I hope that will colour their judgment.

Thank you, everyone who signed, and thank you to all who will read it. I will be circulating the full letter and addendum to as many of those who signed it as possible over the next day or two.

Three reasons why Athabasca University’s leaders must never be made to live in Athabasca

Posted , updated on

I’ve said this before but it needs more emphasis. In the past week or so it has become increasingly clear that the real agenda of the Albertan government is not (directly) to forcibly move 500 unwilling AU staff to the town of Athabasca. That’s just smoke and mirrors intended to distract us from the real agenda, which is to oust the current (brilliant, visionary, capable) executive team  – most of whom will resign rather than relocate to Athabasca – and then to replace them with lackeys who will (quietly, out of the public eye) do the government’s dirty work for them. This has been made very explicit by the minister for post secondary education over several months, saying, for instance:

“When it comes to the non-instructional staff, particularly the senior administrative and executive management positions, those should indeed be based in the town” (Town & Country Today, May 2022)

The government has already installed a chair of the board of governors (ironically, a Calgary-based lawyer) who is explicitly on their side, as well as board members from the town of Athabasca. All they need to do now is to replace our leaders with people they can control, and the job is done.

This is the real threat. This is the real plan. This is what will destroy us.

Firstly, the chances of getting a great executive team will be very slim if they have to live in Athabasca. On average, our past hires in the town have been mediocre at best though, admittedly, this is skewed by some who have been outstandingly awful. On average, acknowledging the odd high spot here and there, the remainder have been pretty average. The executive team is, more than everyone else, the group of employees that has the biggest effect on the university, its vision, its teaching, and its success. More than anyone else, they must be the best. Everyone accepts this when it comes to faculty and tutors, so why not for the exec team that matters more?

Secondly, whether they are lackeys or simply those who are less capable of resistance than our current team, they will push through the agenda that has been causing so much bad press of late. It will take a bit longer to move 500 people than the two years required in the minister’s recent letter to the board, and maybe it will ‘only’ wind up being a few hundred people, but it will happen, without the adverse press headlines and multiple channels of resistance.

Thirdly – and ultimately perhaps the most damagingly – the executives who live in the town will inevitably pay more attention to those physically surrounding them. These will never include faculty and tutors (everyone agrees on that, even the minister) so we will slide back into the admin-driven mire that messed up many things over the last few decades, and from which we have only been emerging for the last 5 years.

As a result, we will fade into obscurity, if we survive at all.

Our nascent but emerging online, inclusive community that has struggled to grow over the past 5 years, despite resistance from those who love their comfortably complacent old ways, will once again shrivel to an irrelevance, crowded out by the in-person short-circuits. Faculty and tutors will again be isolated from administrators and professional staff, whose stronger influence will determine most of our policies. Faculty – the ones doing the teaching and research – will again be the ones ‘calling in’ to in-person meetings, inevitably less significant and with a smaller voice than those attending meetings in person. Online communication will revert to being instrumental, focused, and bland. Tacit knowledge will fail to spread, except among those working in person.

The systems, approaches and vision that have driven us for the last 5 years, most notably the near-virtual policy, that could and should lead us to expand in all good ways (pedagogically, geographically, demographically, digitally, in community, in quality, in belongingness, in numbers, and more) will be wiped off the map.

Ironically, the brighter future of the town of Athabasca itself – that, right now, involves us in repurposing and redeveloping our physical headquarters to be so much more than an admin centre, that is focused on developing the region, doing research, engaging with local partners, and upping the skills, knowledge, and significance of the community – will fade, as our campus once again slips back into being little more than a bunch of offices for administrators. Without diversity or investment in its infrastructure or transit options to it, there will not be jobs for the families of those required to work there. It will continue its long slide into decay. The university itself will diminish in numbers and relevance, so those who have moved there will lose jobs, with nowhere else to go.

All of this will occur thanks, ultimately, to the scheming and machinations of one minority faction of workers in Athabasca that instigated the political lobbying in the first place, that cares more about the short-term future of a small town of less than 3000 people than for our 40,000 students and the future of education in this country. Those who have led the attack have never even acknowledged this conflict of interest.

It is a far harder sell to start a movement to resist the relocation of less than 10 executive staff – whose popularity is far from universal, thanks to the huge disruptive changes they have spearheaded, the least popular of which have been (you guessed it) driven by the Albertan government – than to resist the uprooting of everyone else apart from faculty and tutors, but this is the real battleground. This is the fight that we must not lose.

Keep Athabasca University’s leaders out of the town of Athabasca!

Wherever you live, please make your views known by contacting the Minister, Demetrios Nicolaides, at ae.minister@gov.ab.ca, or comment on social media, by tagging @demetriosnAB on Twitter, , #abpoli. Blog about it, write to the press about it, lobby outside the gates of the Albertan legislature, tell your friends, whatever: make a fuss.