This is a remarkable paper, pubished in the Asian Journal of Distance Education, written by 35 remarkable people from all over the world and me. It was led by the remarkable Aras Boskurt, who pulled all 36 of us together and wrote much of it in the midst of personal tragedy and the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. The research methodology was fantastic: Aras got each of us to write two 500-word pieces of speculative fiction, presenting positive and negative futures for generative AI in education. The themes that emerged from them were then condensed in the conventional part of the paper, that we worked on together using Google Docs. It took less than 50 days from the initial invitation on January 22 to the publication of the paper. As Eamon Costello put it, “It felt like being in a flash mob of top scholars.” At 130 pages it is more of a book than a paper, but most of it consists of those stories/poems/plays, many of which are great stories in their own right. They make good bedtime reading.
Abstract
While ChatGPT has recently become very popular, AI has a long history and philosophy. This paper intends to explore the promises and pitfalls of the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) AI and potentially future technologies by adopting a speculative methodology. Speculative future narratives with a specific focus on educational contexts are provided in an attempt to identify emerging themes and discuss their implications for education in the 21st century. Affordances of (using) AI in Education (AIEd) and possible adverse effects are identified and discussed which emerge from the narratives. It is argued that now is the best of times to define human vs AI contribution to education because AI can accomplish more and more educational activities that used to be the prerogative of human educators. Therefore, it is imperative to rethink the respective roles of technology and human educators in education with a future-oriented mindset.
Citation
Bozkurt, A., Xiao, J., Lambert, S., Pazurek, A., Crompton, H., Koseoglu, S., Farrow, R., Bond, M., Nerantzi, C., Honeychurch, S., Bali, M., Dron, J., Mir, K., Stewart, B., Costello, E., Mason, J., Stracke, C. M., Romero-Hall, E., Koutropoulos, A., Toquero, C. M., Singh, L Tlili, A., Lee, K., Nichols, M., Ossiannilsson, E., Brown, M., Irvine, V., Raffaghelli, J. E., Santos-Hermosa, G Farrell, O., Adam, T., Thong, Y. L., Sani-Bozkurt, S., Sharma, R. C., Hrastinski, S., & Jandrić, P. (2023). Speculative futures on ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence (AI): A collective reflection from the educational landscape. Asian Journal of Distance Education, 18(1), 53-130. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7636568
Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/17699638/view-of-speculative-futures-on-chatgpt-and-generative-artificial-intelligence-ai-a-collective-reflection-from-the-educational-landscape
I am pleased to announce my latest paper, published openly in the Journal of Open, Flexible and Distance Learning, which has long been one of my favourite distance and ed tech journals.
The paper starts with an abbreviated argument about the technological nature of education drawn from my forthcoming book, How Education Works, zooming in on the distributed teaching aspect of that, leading to a conclusion that the notion of “distance” as a measure of the relationship between a learner and their teacher/institution is not very useful when there might be countless teachers at countless distances involved.
I go on to explore a number of alternative ways we might conceptualize distance, some familiar, some less so, not so much because I think they are any better than (say) transactional distance, but to draw attention to the complexity, fuzziness, and fragility of the concept. However, I find some of them quite appealing: I am particularly pleased with the idea of inverting the various presences in the Community of Inquiry model (and extensions of it). Teaching, cognitive, and social (and emotional and agency) distances and presences essentially measure the same things in the same way, but the shift in perspective subtly changes the narratives we might build around them. I could probably write a paper on each kind of distance I provide, but each gets a paragraph or two because what it is all leading towards is an idea that I think has some more useful legs: technological distance.
I’m still developing this idea, and have just submitted another paper that tries to unpack it a bit more, so don’t expect something fully-formed just yet – I welcome discussion and debate on its value, meaning, and usefulness. Basically, technological distance is a measure of the gaps left between the technologies (including cognitive tools in learners’ own minds, what teachers orchestrate, textbooks, digital tools, etc, etc) that the learner has to fill in order to learn something. This is not just about the subject matter – it’s about the mill (how we learn) well as the grist (what we learn). There are lots of ways to reduce that distance, many of which are good for learning, but some of which undermine it by effectively providing what Dave Cormier delightfully describes as autotune for knowledge. The technologies provide the knowledge so learners don’t have to engage with or connect it themselves. This is not always a bad thing – architects may not need drafting skills, for instance, if they are going to only ever use CAD, memorization of facts easily discovered might not always be essential, and we will most likely see ubiquitous generative AI as part of our toolset now and in the future, for instance – but choosing what to learn is one reason teachers (who/whatever they are) can be useful. Effective teaching is about making the right things soft so the process itself teaches. However, as what needs to be soft is different for every person on the planet, we need to make learning (of ourselves or others) visible in order to know that. It’s not science – it’s technology. That means that invention, surprise, creativity, passion, and many other situated things matter.
My paper is nicely juxtaposed in the journal with one from Simon Paul Atkinson, which addresses definitions of “open”, “distance” and “flexible” that, funnily enough, was my first idea for a topic when I was invited to submit my paper. If you read both, I think you’ll see that Simon and I might see the issue quite differently, but his is a fine paper making some excellent points.
Abstract
The “distance” in “distance learning”, however it is defined, normally refers to a gap between a learner and their teacher(s), typically in a formal context. In this paper I take a slightly different view. The paper begins with an argument that teaching is fundamentally a technological process. It is, though, a vastly complex, massively distributed technology in which the most important parts are enacted idiosyncratically by vast numbers of people, both present and distant in time and space, who not only use technologies but also participate creatively in their enactment. Through the techniques we use we are co-participants in not just technologies but the learning of ourselves and others, and hence in the collective intelligence of those around us and, ultimately, that of our species. We are all teachers. There is therefore not one distance between learner and teacher in any act of deliberate learning— but many. I go on to speculate on alternative ways of understanding distance in terms of the physical, temporal, structural, agency, social, emotional, cognitive, cultural, pedagogical, and technological gaps that may exist between learners and their many teachers. And I conclude with some broad suggestions about ways to reduce these many distances.
Reference
Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/17293757/my-latest-paper-technology-teaching-and-the-many-distances-of-distance-learning-journal-of-open-flexible-and-distance-learning
I, like many staff and students, have been deeply shaken and outraged by recent events at Athabasca University. This is a petition by me and Simon Buckingham Shum, of the University of Technology Sydney, Australia to protest the blatant interference by the Albertan government in the affairs of AU over the past year, that culminated in the firing of its president, Professor Peter Scott, without reason or notice. Even prior to this, the actions of the Albertan government had been described by Glen Jones (Professor of Higher Education, University of Toronto) as: “the most egregious political interference in a public university in Canada in more than 100 years” This was an assault on our university, an assault on the very notion of a public university, and it sets a disturbing precedent that cannot stand unopposed.
We invite you to view this brief summary, and consider signing this petition to signal your concern. Please feel more than free to pass this on to anyone and everyone – it is an international petition that has already been signed by many, both within and beyond the AU community.
Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/17102318/petition-%C2%B7-athabasca-university-oppose-direct-political-interference-in-universities-%C2%B7-changeorg
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
This might be the most important book in the field of open, distance, and digital education to be published this decade. 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.
Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/16584686/hot-off-the-press-handbook-of-open-distance-and-digital-education-open-access
This is the (near enough final) English version of my journal paper, translated into Chinese by Junhong Xiao and published last year (with a CC licence) in Distance Education in China. (Reference: Dron, Jon (2021). Technology, technique, and culture in educational systems: breaking the iron triangle (translated by Junhong Xiao). Distance Education in China, 1, 37-49. DOI:10.13541/j.cnki.chinade.2021.01.005).
The underlying theory is the same as that in my paper Educational technology: what it is and how it works (Reference: Dron, J. Educational technology: what it is and how it works. AI & Soc 37, 155–166 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01195-z direct link for reading, link to downloadable preprint) but this one focuses more on what it means for ways we go about distance learning. It’s essentially about ways to solve problems that we created for ourselves by solving problems in the context of in-person learning that we inappropriately transferred to a distance context.
Here’s the abstract: This paper presents arguments for a different way of thinking about how distance education should be designed. The paper begins by explaining education as a technological process, in which we are not just users of technologies for learning but coparticipants in their instantiation and design, implying that education is a fundamentally distributed technology. However, technological and physical constraints have led to processes (including pedagogies) and path dependencies in In-person education that have tended to massively over-emphasize the designated teacher as the primary controller of the process. This has resulted in the development of many counter technologies to address the problems this causes, from classrooms to grades to timetables, most of which have unnecessarily been inherited by distance education. By examining the different strengths and weaknesses of distance education, the paper suggests an alternative model of distance education that is more personal, more situated in communities and cultures, and more appropriate to the needs of learners and society.
I started working on a revised version of this (with a snappier title) to submit to an English language journal last year but got waylaid. If anyone is interested in publishing this, I’m open to submitting it!
With a possible audience of thousands, and without a clue they were there because the Zoom output was streamed to a different site (weird), I talked very fast about my experience of higher education for about 20 minutes at the THE UK Student Festival yesterday. The talk was recorded and will be used again for the THE Canada Student Festival later in the month. It’s a huge event – over 8000 enrolled (though not all attending every session) – with quite a lot of other keynotes and a great many other talks, panels, and discussions, aimed at helping students starting out in higher education. The audience was very different from those I normally talk to, and the (very sensible) strict 20-minute format gave me a lot less leeway than the usual hour allowed, so I found it interestingly challenging. These are the slides I used.
The brief I was given was not to preach, but to share my experience of higher education, as a student and as an educator. My personal agenda was to talk about why and how online learning is worth doing (especially at AU), so I tried (a bit clunkily) to aim my story in that direction. I failed to remember to mention some key things, I spent too long on others, and I suspect that the most memorable message that came through was, for in-person students living on campus, to get a kettle (it’s a great way to make lots of new friends fast) but, hopefully, my bigger message got through to some.
The essential point of my wild ramble was not that kettles are the solution to success in higher education, but that students and the rest of us should take ownership of our own education: it should be done by us, not to us. We should learn the way we want to learn, and we should learn what we want to learn; we should seek adventure and challenge rather than easy pickings; and we should hang out with interesting people and/or those we care about, because that’s how most learning happens, as well as being a large part of what makes it meaningful. I noted that we should focus on learning and should to try to ignore grades as much as possible, because grades destroy the love of doing something simply because we enjoy it. Essentially, my advice was about finding the things that intrinsically motivate us and reducing the effects of things that demotivate us. My own educational journey, and (I think) that of most committed educators, has largely followed that path: that’s how we thrived in a system not conducive to intrinsic motivation, and it’s the path we try to encourage our own students to take. I observed that it is much easier to own your own education when it is done online, at least if it is done in ways that take advantage of the medium, and not through a pale simulacrum of in-person teaching, because the teacher cannot be in control, the level of challenge is much more controllable, and there are way more people (online and in your own environment) who can support you.
I am slowly getting used to the ugly abbreviation WFH that has emerged during the pandemic, though I don’t much like it because it’s not always accurate. Even in pandemic times I often work from my boat (WFB). In non-pandemic times I’ve worked from a tent (WFT), a library (WFL), a hotel room (WFHR), a park bench (WFPB), a conference (WFC), a plane (WFP), a bus (WF… OK, you get the picture), and much, much more. I have even worked at Athabasca University’s own buildings (Working from Work?) on rare occasions. But why do most of us in the trade so rarely use terms like learning from home when working from home (WFH) is so ubiquitous?
Terms like e-learning, online learning, distance learning, remote learning, and so on, are weird. Learning is never remote, electronic, online, or at a distance. There is more sense to terms like distance education, online education, remote teaching, and so on, because education and teaching describe relationships between people, and there are different ways that those relationships can be mediated, that do (or should) deeply affect the process. There is also a whole slew of intentional and implicit structures, systems, methods, and toolsets that are assumed when we prefix education with terms like distance or online. But why online or distance learning?
As teachers we are (rightly) taught that it’s not about the teaching, it’s about the learning. For at least the last 30 years or more we have, for instance, therefore been strongly encouraged to use the term ‘learning & teaching’ instead of ‘teaching & learning’ because learning must come first. I’ve corrected people myself for getting the order wrong, many times. Charitably, therefore, it might be that we are trying to draw attention to the fact that it’s about learning. But, if so, why distance or online?
I think something nasty has happened to the term ‘learning’ when it is used this way, because I think that what we actually mean by it is ‘teaching’. Some British English dialects take that dubious elision fully on board. When something nasty happens to someone as a consequence of something they have done that is perceived to be wrong, or even when some punishment is inflicted on them by someone else, it is common in some circles to say ‘that’ll learn yer’ (the ‘yer’ is important – don’t imagine the Queen saying in received pronunciation ‘that will learn you’ because it would be wrong). When I hear the phrase I imagine it being said with a snarl. It’s a cruel thing to say, though it can be used kind-of humorously, at least if, as many of my compatriots do, you appreciate a particularly crude form of Benny-Hillish shadenfreude (‘Ha ha, you fell flat on your face and hurt yourself. That’ll learn yer’).
Outside a subset of British and perhaps some other minor English vernaculars, learning is never something that we do to people. It’s something done by people, with what and with whom is around them (and that might include a teaching website, textbook, or course pack). So let’s stop calling people distance or online learners because it devalues and obscures what they are actually doing. They are not being learned at. They are being taught at a distance, and learning from home (or wherever they happen to be).
I recently downloaded What Teacher Educators Should Have Learned From 2020. This is an open edited book, freely downloadable from the AACE site, for teachers of teachers whose lives were disrupted by the sudden move to emergency remote teaching over the past year or so. I’ve only skimmed the contents and read a couple of the chapters, but my first impressions are positive. Edited by Richard Ferdig and Kristine Pytash, It springs from the very active and engaged AACE SITE community, which is a good indicator of expertise and experience. It seems well organized into three main sections:
Social and Emotional Learning for Teacher Education.
Online Teaching and Learning for Teacher Education.
eXtended Reality (XR) for Teacher Education
I like the up-front emphasis on social and emotional aspects, addressing things like belongingness, compassion, and community, mainly from theoretical/model-oriented perspectives, and the other sections seem wisely chosen to meet practitioner needs. The chapters adopt a standardized structure:
Introduction.
What We Know.
Lessons Learned for Research.
Lessons Learned for Practice.
What You Should Read.
References
Again, this seems pretty sensible, maintaining a good focus on actionable knowledge and practical steps to be taken. It’s not quite a textbook, but it’s a useful teach-yourself resource with good coverage. I look forward to dipping into it a bit more deeply. I expect to find some good ideas, good practices, and good theoretical models to support my teaching and my understanding of the issues. And I’m really pleased that it is being released as an open publication: well done, AACE, for making this openly available.
But I do wonder a little about who else will read this.
Comfort zones and uncomfortable zones
The other day I was chatting with a neighbour who teaches a traditional hard science subject at one of the local universities, who was venting about the problems of teaching via Zoom. He knew that I had a bit of interest and experience in this area, so he asked whether I had any advice. I started to suggest some ways of rethinking it as a pedagogical opportunity, but he was not impressed. Even something as low-threshold and straightforward as flipping the classroom or focusing on what students do rather than what he has to tell them was a step too far. He patiently explained that he has classes with hundreds of students and fixed topics that they need to learn, and he really didn’t see it as desirable or even possible to depart from his well-tried lecture format. At least it would be too much work and he didn’t have the time for it. I did try to push back on that a bit and I may have mentioned the overwhelming body of research that suggests this might not be a wise move, but he was pretty clear and firm about this. What he actually wanted was for someone to make (or tell him how to make) the digital technology as easy and as comfortably familiar as the lecture theatre, and that would somehow make the students as engaged as he perceived them to normally be in his lectures, without notably changing how he taught. The problem was the darn technology, not the teaching. I bit my tongue at this point. I eventually came up with a platitude or two about trying to find different ways to make learning visible, about explicitly showing that he cares, about taking time to listen, about modelling the behaviour he wanted to see, about using the chat to good advantage, and about how motivation differs online and off, but I don’t think it helped. I suspect that the only things that really resonated with him were suggestions about how to get the most out of a webcam and a recommendation to get a better microphone.
Within the context in which he usually teaches, he is probably a very good teacher. He’s a likeable person who clearly cares a lot about his students, he knows a lot about his subject, and he knows how to make it appealing within the situation that he normally works. His courses, as he described them, are very conventional, relying a lot on the structure given to them by the industry-driven curriculum and the university’s processes, norms, and structures, and he fills his role in all that admirably. I think he is pretty typical of the vast majority of teachers. They’re good at what they do, comfortable with how they do it, and they just want the technology to accommodate them continuing to do so without unnecessary obstacles.
Unfortunately, technology doesn’t work that way.
The main reason it doesn’t work is very simple: technologies (including pedagogies) affect one another in complex and recursive ways, so (with some trivial exceptions) you can’t change one element (especially a large element) and expect the rest to work as they did before. It’s simple, intuitive, and obvious but unless you are already well immersed in both systems theories and educational theory, really taking it to heart and understanding how it must affect your practice demands a pretty big shift in weltanschauung, which is not the kind of thing I was keen to start while on my way to the store in the midst of a busy day.
To make matters worse, even if teachers do acknowledge the need to change, their assumption that things will eventually (maybe soon) return to normal means that they are – reasonably enough – not willing and probably not able to invest a lot of time into it. A big part of the reason for this is that, thanks to the aforementioned interdependencies, they are probably running round like blue-arsed flies just trying to keep things together, and filling their time with fixing the things that inevitably break in the process. Systems thrive on this kind of self-healing feedback loop. I guess teachers figure that, if they can work out how to tread water until the pandemic has run its course, it will be OK in the end.
If only.
Why in-person education works
The hallmark technologies (mandatory lectures, assignments, grades, exams, etc, etc) of in-person teaching are worse than awful but, just as a talented musician can make beautiful noises with limited technical knowledge and sub-standard instruments, so there are countless teachers who use atrocious methods in dreadful contexts but who successfully lead their students to learn. As long as the technologies are soft and flexible enough to allow them to paper over the cracks of bad tools and methods with good technique, talent, and passion, it works well enough for enough people enough of the time and can (with enough talent and passion) even be inspiring.
It would not work at all, though, without the massive machinery that surrounds it.
An institution (including its systems, structures, and tools) is itself designed to teach, no matter how bad the teachers are within it. The opportunities for students to learn from and with others around them, including other students, professors, support staff, administrators, and so on; the supporting technologies, including rules, physical spaces, structures, furnishings, and tools; the common rooms, the hallways, the smokers’ areas (best classrooms ever), the lecture theatres, the bars and the coffee shops; the timetables that make students physically travel to a location together (and thus massively increase salience); the notices on the walls; the clubs and societies; the librarians, the libraries, the students reading and writing within those libraries, echoing and amplifying the culture of learning that pervades them; the student dorms and shared kitchens where even more learning happens; the parties; even the awful extrinsic motivation of grades, teacher power, and norms and rules of behaviour that emerged in the first place due to the profound motivational shortcomings of in-person teaching. All of this and more conspires to support a basic level of at least mediocre (but good enough) learning, whether or not teachers teach well. It’s a massively distributed technology enacted by many coparticipants, of which designated teachers are just a part, and in which students are the lead actors among a cast of thousands. Online, those thousands are often largely invisible. At best, their presence tends to be highly filtered, channeled, or muted.
Why in-person methods don’t transfer well online
When most of that massive complex machinery is suddenly removed, leaving nothing but a generic interface better suited to remote business meetings than learning or, much worse, some awful approximation of all the evil, hard, disempowering technologies of traditional teaching wrapped around Zoom, or nightmarishly inhuman online proctoring systems, much of the teaching (in the broadest sense) disappears with it. Teaching in an institution is not just what teachers do. It’s the work of a community; of all the structures the community creates and uses; of the written and unwritten rules; of the tacit knowledge imparted by engagement in a space made for learning; of the massive preparation of schooling and the intricate loops that connect it with the rest of society; of attitudes and cultures that are shaped and reinforced by all the rest. It’s no wonder that teachers attempting to transfer small (but the most visible) parts of that technology online struggle with it. They need to fill the ever-widening gaps left when most of the comfortable support structures of in-person institutions that made it possible in the first place are either gone or mutated into something lean and hungry. It can be done, but it is really hard work.
More abstractly, a big part of the problem with this transfer-what-used-to-work-in-person approach is that it is a technology-first approach to the problem that focuses on one technology rather than the whole. The technology of choice in this case happens to be a set of pedagogical methods, but it is no different in principle than picking a digital tool and letting that decide how you will teach. Neither makes much sense. All the technologies in the assembly – including pedagogies, digital tools, regulations, designs, and structures – have to work together. No single technology has precedence, beyond the one that results from assembling the rest. To make matters worse, what-used-to-work-in-person pedagogies were situated solutions to the problems of teaching in physical classrooms, not universally applicable methods of teaching. Though there are some similarities here and there, the problems of teaching online are not at all the same as those of in-person teaching so of course the solutions are different. Simply transferring in-person pedagogies to an online context is much like using the paddles from a kayak to power a bicycle. You might move, but you won’t move far, you won’t move fast, you won’t move where you want to go, and it is quite likely to end in injury to yourself or others.
Such problems have, to a large extent, been adequately solved by teachers and institutions that work primarily online. Online institutions and organizations have infrastructure, processes, rules, tools, cultures, and norms that have evolved to work together, starting with the baseline assumption that little or none of the physical stuff will ever be available. Anything that didn’t work never made it to first base, or has not survived. Those that have been around a while might not be perfect, but they have ironed out most of the kinks and filled in most of the gaps. Most of my work, and that of my smarter peers, begins in this different context. In fact, in my case, it mainly involves savagely critiquing that context and figuring out ways to improve it, so it is yet another step removed from where in-person teachers are now.
OK, maybe I could offer a little advice or, at least, a metaphor
Roughly 20 years ago I did share a similar context. Working in an in-person university, I had to lead a team of novice online teachers from geographically dispersed colleges to create and teach a blended program with 28 new online courses. We built the whole thing in 6 months from start to finish, including the formal evaluations and approvals process. I could share some generic lessons from what I discovered then, the main one being to put most of the effort into learning to teach online, not into designing course materials. Put dialogue and community first, not structure. For instance, make the first thing students see in the LMS the discussion, not your notes or slides, and use the discussion to share content and guide the process. However, I’d mostly feel like the driver of a Model T Ford trying to teach someone to drive a Tesla. Technologies have changed, I have changed, my memory is unreliable.
In fact, I haven’t driven a car of any description in years. What I normally do now is, metaphorically, much closer to riding a bicycle, which I happen to do and enjoy a lot in real life too. A bike is a really smart, well-adapted, appropriate, versatile, maintainable, sustainable soft technology for getting around. The journey tends to be much more healthy and enjoyable, traffic jams don’t bother you, you can go all sorts of places cars cannot reach, and you can much more easily stop wherever you like along the way to explore what interests you. You can pretty much guarantee that you will arrive when and where you planned to arrive, give or take a few minutes. In the city, it’s often the fastest way to get around, once you factor in parking etc. It’s very liberating. It is true that more effort is needed to get from A to B, bad weather can be a pain, and it would not be the fastest or most comfortable way to reach the other side of the continent: sometimes, alternative forms of transport are definitely worth taking and I’m not against them when it’s appropriate to use them. And the bike I normally ride does have a little electric motor in one of the wheels that helps push me up hills (not much, but enough) but it doesn’t interfere with the joy (or most of the effort) of riding. I have learned that low-threshold, adaptable, resilient systems are often much smarter in many ways than high-tech platforms because they are part-human. They can take on your own smartness and creativity in ways no amount of automation can match. This is true of online learning tools as much as it is true of bicycles. Blogs, wikis, email, discussion forums, and so on often beat the pants off learning management systems, commercial teaching platforms, learning analytics tools or AI chatbots for many advanced pedagogical methods because they can become what you want them to be, rather than what the designer thought you wanted, and they can go anywhere, without constraint. Of course, the flip side is that they take more effort, sometimes take more time, and (without enormous care) can make it harder for all concerned to do things that are automated and streamlined in more highly engineered tools, so they might not always be the best option in all circumstances, any more than a bike is the best way to get up a snowy mountain or to cross an ocean.
Why you shouldn’t listen to my advice
It’s sad but true that most of what I would really like to say on the subject of online learning won’t help teachers on the ground right now, and it is actually worse than the help their peers could give them because what I really want to tell them is to change everything and to see the world completely differently. That’s pretty threatening, especially in these already vulnerable times, and not much use if you have a class to teach tomorrow morning.
The AACE book is more grounded in where in-person teachers are now. The chapter “We Need to Help Teachers Withstand Public Criticism as They Learn to Teach Online”, for example, delves into the issues well, in accessible ways that derive from a clear understanding of the context. However, the book cannot help but be an implicit (and, often, explicit) critique of how teachers currently teach: that’s implied in the title, and in the chapter structures. If you’re already interested enough in the subject and willing enough to change how you teach that you are reading this book in the first place, then this is great. You are 90% of the way there already, and you are ready to learn those lessons. One of the positive sides of emergency remote teaching has been that it has encouraged some teachers to reflect on their teaching practices and purposes, in ways that will probably continue to be beneficial if and when they return to in-person teaching. They will enjoy this book, and they may be the intended audience. But they are not the ones that really need it.
I would quite like to see (though maybe not to read) a different kind of book containing advice from beginners. Maybe it would have a title something like ‘What I learned in 2020’ or ‘How I survived Zoom.’ Emergency remote teachers might be more inclined to listen to the people who didn’t know the ‘right’ ways of doing things when the crisis began, who really didn’t want to change, who maybe resented the imposition, but who found ways to work through it from where they were then, rather than where the experts think (or know) they should be aiming now. It would no doubt annoy me and other distance learning researchers because, from the perspective of recognized good practice, much of it would probably be terrible but, unlike what we have to offer, it would actually be useful. A few chapters in the AACE book are grounded in concrete experience of this nature, but even they wind up saying what should have happened, framing the solutions in the existing discourse of the distance learning discipline. Most chapters consist of advice from experts who already knew the answers before the pandemic started. It is telling that the word ‘should’ occurs a lot more frequently than it should. This is not a criticism of the authors or editors of the book: the book is clear from the start that it is going to be a critique of current practice and a practical guidebook to the territory, and most of the advice I’ve seen in it so far makes a lot of sense. It’s just not likely to affect many of the ones who have no wish to change not just their practices but their fundamental attitudes to teaching. Sadly, that’s also true of this post which, I think, is therefore more of an explanation of why I’ve been staring into the headlights for most of the pandemic, rather than a serious attempt to help those in need. I hope there’s some value in that because it feels weird to be a (slight, minor, still-learning) expert in the field with very strong opinions about how online learning should work, but to have nothing useful to say on the subject at the one time it ought to have the most impact.
Read the book:
Ferdig, R.E. & Pytash, K.E. (2021). What Teacher Educators Should Have Learned From 2020. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved March 22, 2021 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/219088/.
A Quartz article that claims (accurately) that p-learning bootcamps dominate for those learning programming and other technical skills and (inaccurately) that the reason for that is that e-learning is much less engaging. In fact, there’s a sneaky and almost unnoticeable sleight of hand here, because what is actually claimed is that online learning can be less engaging and, based on that indubitable fact, extrapolates from the particular to the general, asserting that all online learning suffers the same way.
Nonsense.
Yes, there is a lot of rubbish online learning and, in fairness, even a well-evolved establishment like Athabasca University has some of it, at least for some people some of the time. But that’s not at all surprising because every university (online or not) presents the same problem and, if you are trying to make a single learning design work for everyone, you are sure to make it too complex for some and too boring for others (personalization technologies and intelligent personal learning designs notwithstanding). Athabasca has a lot less of it thanks to its extremely rigorous quality assurance processes, but it would be crazy to imagine that everything it does is perfect for every learner at every time, as much as it would be crazy to imagine that everyone at a bricks and mortar institution gets a wonderful learning experience every time. Crazier, in fact.
The thing is, it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it, that’s what gets results. It’s not that online learning is less effective (countless studies prove otherwise), it’s simply that it tends to be done in a way that gives control and flexibility to learners. The immersion of physical bootcamps does have one major and very distinctive benefit: that it pulls people out of everything else and forces them to engage for a lot of hours in the day. The ‘bootcamp’ part of it ensures that they are well and truly immersed, with no way to back out apart from backing out completely It’s not that the learning experience is any better – very far from it in most cases. Most bootcamps I have seen use inane pedagogies that would not pass muster even in a conventional university, let alone somewhere like Athabasca University that actually pays attention to such things. It’s just that people are there and they have to do stuff (a lot of social pressure is involved, as well as loss-aversion) so they wind up learning a lot simply because they put in the hours, and that happens simply because they are enrolled on a bootcamp and cannot get away.Not dissimilar to the ways traditional universities work, as it happens, just a lot more intense.
Online learning gives people more choice and greater control so, if they are not innately fascinated or they have not very single-mindedly put aside enough time then, of course, they wind up learning less quickly because they put in less time over a longer period. Duh. It’s not rocket science. This is not about teaching effectiveness or smart learning designs, it is simply about stopping people from being distracted and doing other things. The solution, if a solution is needed, is for online learners to block out the time and drop the distractions. I can imagine plenty of learning designs for online learning that would make that happen – simply making it real-time and using smart tools for desktop sharing, real-time interaction, and monitoring of progress would achieve much the same results, as long as the ground rules are fully understood by all concerned. I was at a conference the other day that did pretty much that. Such an approach doesn’t happen much, of course, for all the reasons people go for online learning in the first place, inasmuch as such methods take away the control and flexibility that make it so appealing. On the other hand, perhaps there is a place for such techniques. It seems there is a market and, as long as expectations are carefully managed (you don’t distract yourself with reading emails and engaging in social media, you pledge to be available, you block out your calendar) it might work pretty well. But why bother? Seems to me that online learning is better precisely because of the control it gives people. If they need extrinsic motivation to force them to learn then that’s the problem that should be solved before enrolling on any courses, and it will do them a world of good in many other situations too.
I think something nasty has happened to the term ‘learning’ when it is used this way, because I think that what we actually mean by it is ‘teaching’. Some British English dialects take that dubious elision fully on board. When something nasty happens to someone as a consequence of something they have done that is perceived to be wrong, or even when some punishment is inflicted on them by someone else, it is common in some circles to say ‘that’ll learn yer’ (the ‘yer’ is important – don’t imagine the Queen saying in received pronunciation ‘that will learn you’ because it would be wrong). When I hear the phrase I imagine it being said with a snarl. It’s a cruel thing to say, though it can be used kind-of humorously, at least if, as many of my compatriots do, you appreciate a particularly crude form of Benny-Hillish shadenfreude (‘Ha ha, you fell flat on your face and hurt yourself. That’ll learn yer’).
I recently downloaded 
In fact, I haven’t driven a car of any description in years. What I normally do now is, metaphorically, much closer to riding a bicycle, which I happen to do and enjoy a lot in real life too. A bike is a really smart, well-adapted, appropriate, versatile, maintainable, sustainable soft technology for getting around. The journey tends to be much more healthy and enjoyable, traffic jams don’t bother you, you can go all sorts of places cars cannot reach, and you can much more easily stop wherever you like along the way to explore what interests you. You can pretty much guarantee that you will arrive when and where you planned to arrive, give or take a few minutes. In the city, it’s often the fastest way to get around, once you factor in parking etc. It’s very liberating. It is true that more effort is needed to get from A to B, bad weather can be a pain, and it would not be the fastest or most comfortable way to reach the other side of the continent: sometimes, alternative forms of transport are definitely worth taking and I’m not against them when it’s appropriate to use them. And the bike I normally ride does have a little electric motor in one of the wheels that helps push me up hills (not much, but enough) but it doesn’t interfere with the joy (or most of the effort) of riding. I have learned that low-threshold, adaptable, resilient systems are often much smarter in many ways than high-tech platforms because they are part-human. They can take on your own smartness and creativity in ways no amount of automation can match. This is true of online learning tools as much as it is true of bicycles. Blogs, wikis, email, discussion forums, and so on often beat the pants off learning management systems, commercial teaching platforms, learning analytics tools or AI chatbots for many advanced pedagogical methods because they can become what you want them to be, rather than what the designer thought you wanted, and they can go anywhere, without constraint. Of course, the flip side is that they take more effort, sometimes take more time, and (without enormous care) can make it harder for all concerned to do things that are automated and streamlined in more highly engineered tools, so they might not always be the best option in all circumstances, any more than a bike is the best way to get up a snowy mountain or to cross an ocean.