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How Online Learning Kept Higher Ed Open During the Coronavirus Crisis

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How Online Learning Kept Higher Ed Open During the Coronavirus Crisis

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Robert Ubell

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IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News

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On Not Drawing Conclusions About Online Teaching Now — or Next Fall

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On Not Drawing Conclusions About Online Teaching Now — or Next Fall

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James M. Lang
https://www.chronicle.com/article/on-not-drawing-conclusions-about-online-teaching-now-or-next-fall

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Johanne Mednick Myles

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Taking an online course may be convenient, but as a fulfilling learning experience it fails us in several ways.

I am sitting at a desk in one of the consultation rooms of the university writing centre talking with a student (let's call her Jane) who is asking for help with an assignment she has been given in an online course. After shuffling some papers, she shows me a short paragraph, which is her brief response to a reading. She tells me that she is taking a psychology course which is only offered online through the university where I work to fulfill the requirements of a Bachelor of Arts degree. She admits to having trouble understanding the assignments.

Jane tells me she is feeling anxious and isolated and wants me to help her with general learning strategies, that is, how to interpret certain questions, and how to gain a higher standing on the course rubric - those commonly used assessment charts that aim to categorize levels of achievement. She confesses to spending too much time surfing the Internet for information and wandering into overly tangential areas. Jane also mentions that she is obliged to send her written responses to assignments to another online classmate for peer review prior to sending them to the instructor.

"Is this helpful?" I ask.

"No," she replies, "I don't get much feedback."

"Can you email your instructor for help?"

She explains that she also has a part-time job which requires her to work late at night and on some weekends. Her instructor has online "office hours" but is rarely available when she has questions.

I check her paragraph and offer a few tips. For example, I suggest that she stick to the course content and focus on the question at hand by reading it several times and breaking its requirements into chunks. At the end of our conversation she says, "Thank you so, so much - it's great to talk to a real person. You have really made my day."

After the consultation, I think about how appreciative Jane was to talk to a person in real time about her course and her frustrations with online learning. Although there can be several advantages to blended learning, which involves a combination of on-site and online instruction, I have major concerns about the efficacy of the solely online platform. Jane is experiencing the profoundly lonely existence of the online learner. And as an instructor who has designed, taught and taken online courses over several years, my questions are: If learning is a process of acquiring new knowledge and skills, as well as exploring values and ideas over time, can the online format - arguably one of the greatest revolutions in contemporary education - really fulfill that mandate? And, can its benefits outweigh the limitations?

A matter of convenience

The magical thinking and, to be frank, the preponderance of spin on the benefits of online learning in colleges, universities and other educational institutions addresses itself to pragmatics. We hear that online learning is convenient; students can log into their courses at any time of day and anywhere there is accessible Wi-Fi. Online students (and instructors) are working in cafes and libraries, on a cottage dock, or in their own bedrooms dressed in their pajamas - the online school uniform of choice.

We hear that time zones don't matter, Jane's experience of office hours notwithstanding. Students can complete courses while travelling or working in overseas destinations. In fact, I have designed and taught courses while sojourning elsewhere in Canada and abroad. We also hear that students can generally work at their own pace and develop community and networks as they interact with their classmates through discussion forums.

No doubt, there are advantages to online learning; however, as a vehicle for transmitting knowledge and engaging students in a fulfilling learning experience, it fails us for a number of reasons.

My experience has predominantly been in the field of education. I have taught online courses to teachers who are either acquiring additional qualifications or enrolled in a Master of Education program. Participants are already qualified teachers. My students might be reading carefully chosen, topically relevant and current research presented in online articles, book chapters or a course package. Sometimes they are required to watch a video clip such as a TED talk or instructor-created lecture.

In the online courses I have taught, students generally answer questions based on mostly theoretical material and post their responses to a discussion board. This forum gives them the opportunity to exchange ideas and share their teaching and learning experiences with their virtual classmates. They are also required to elaborate on their responses by researching and referencing other topic-related materials they find on the internet, which can be very informative.

The thing is, some students fully engage in the course material by critically reflecting on the topics, posting work in a timely fashion, and responding to their classmates' posts with quality feedback. Others require more encouragement from their instructor to keep on track and to avoid mere summaries and regurgitations of content. They may also be requested to participate more; indeed, I have chased around many a student who for some reason (and there are many) disappear into virtual space, only to return toward the end of the semester with promises to catch up and complete all assignments by the time the course closes. It is the latter who are the most demanding and time consuming and, depending on their numbers, cause no end of frustration to an instructor already stunned by the class size and the amount of work, mostly unpaid, such teaching requires.

The mirage of community

What's more, I wonder about the so-called online learner community that develops as students read and respond to their classmates' posts. Such a community, in my mind, is deceiving. In fact, the warm promise of vibrant and trusting "community" may be the most overrated and egregious oversell of online learning. These are people who have only met each other online through, for example, an introductory assignment in which they are required to answer interview-type questions, and perhaps post a picture or link to a personal website or blog. Strange to me that they could be sitting beside each other on a bus totally unaware of the fact that they are classmates.

To foster more casual communication, some platforms offer a "space" (an online café or general discussion forum) where students can post random bits of personal or professional information not required by the course itself. From my experience, the space is generally underutilized as it requires students to expend extra energy they would rather preserve for graded assignments.

Connected to that false sense of community is the fact that the online platform does not inspire students to provide any kind of honest, engaging commentary. I notice that most of the comments in peer reviews have been rather terse and, for the most part, positive, which is fine when quality work is presented. But what about work that is mediocre or less than mediocre or, in fact, outright bad or obviously copied from some other post? Will an online classmate spend the time it takes to offer detailed suggestions for improvement, for learning-rich encouragement? I have my doubts.

It is no surprise that Jane had found the feedback she received futile and unhelpful. Because constructive criticism in text form can appear to be offensive, most students will try to avoid commentary that seems too direct. Moreover, a written comment by a classmate or instructor can easily be misinterpreted, which can affect an individual's ability to improve their performance or actively contribute creative ideas to a group project. So much for the "learning community."

Authentic human interaction

To be frank, the online class lacks features I feel are fundamental to teaching and learning. Compared to face-to-face classroom instruction in which teachers can clarify, explain and interpret content on the spot, online learning just doesn't cut it. Authentic human interaction is limited, even non-existent, which means that no matter how adept teachers and students may be at navigating the online format and its ongoing innovations, the human vibe is simply not there.

One of my most memorable professors during my own Bachelor of Education program not only gripped the class with her superb storytelling but she also had us uproariously laughing at her off-hand comments and jokes about classroom shenanigans. Laughter can be a welcomed release, especially when experienced by a group of people all sitting together in real time and space - hard, if not impossible to manufacture in the online format.

Along with the human vibe and humour, incidental learning, which is the informal learning that takes place outside the confines of a set curriculum, is also absent. Such learning happens when a teacher or student digresses, when they go off topic or expand on a point not included in the curriculum or lesson plan. It also includes the learning that can take place on a coffee break or lunch hour when students have the opportunity to socially interact with each other outside the classroom or school environment. And what about unintended outcomes? Again, online learning by its very nature does not inspire spontaneous interactions that can lead to a creative, interplay of ideas among students.

And finally, I am sure any instructor will attest to the fact that online teaching can be sheer drudgery. Course development can be time-consuming and finicky, involving an endless search for sound resources and engaging activities. Moreover, with technology changing all the time, the learning curve is often steep and onerous when instructors are faced with new and not always user-friendly software.

Despite all this, I do believe that students should have choices. Some may appreciate the option to either attend a course on site or complete it online. However, from my experience as an academic writing consultant, I have met many students like Jane who have told me that their only option was to take a particular course or courses online to complete their program.

Empathy, compassion and collaboration

Most importantly, we are all hardwired to be social, cultural, collaborative beings. We develop empathy and compassion for one another by looking into each others' eyes, shaking hands, sharing a joke over coffee and just spending time together. I truly believe that establishing genuine rapport with others and experiencing "aha" moments evoked through learning something new cannot solely be achieved through manufactured simulations and "pretend" communities on online platforms. It is time to think about learning as more than the dissemination of subject matter through screens displaying colourful graphics and endless text. The human vibe plays a key role. Our students, like Jane, deserve more options. It can be lonely out there.
Johanne Mednick Myles (PhD) has been an online instructor in the faculty of education at Queen's University. She is presently semi-retired, working part-time as a writing consultant at the Queen's University writing centre.

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The loneliness of the online learner | University Affairs

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Taking an online course may be convenient, but as a fulfilling learning experience it fails us in several ways. I am sitting at a desk in one of the consultation rooms of the university writing centre talking with a student (let's call her Jane) who is asking for help with an assignment she has been given in an online course.

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What We Lose When We Go from the Classroom to Zoom

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What We Lose When We Go from the Classroom to Zoom

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Karen Strassler

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Like other utopian dreams, the fiction of equality has its value.

Credit... Bianca Bagnarelli

By

Dr. Strassler teaches anthropology at Queens College.

When life was normal, my students and I gathered in classrooms.

My favorites are the small intimate ones where we face each other around a seminar table and conversation flows easily. Midsize classes meet in a square room with windows along one side. Around this time of year it becomes unbearably hot in the afternoon, as the spring sunshine streams in. My students slouch drowsily in those uncomfortable chairs with built-in desks, arranged in haphazard rows, while I pace at the front of the room, trying to arouse their interest in some arcane anthropological subject. Sometimes I'm successful. Introductory classes are held in a large lecture hall, and from my vantage point at the bottom of the room, I see rows of students fanned out neatly before me. I recently started wearing prescription glasses so I could distinguish their faces, which were beginning to smudge together as a result of encroaching middle age.

Each type of classroom presents distinct challenges and pleasures, but they all have one thing in common. In these classrooms, students meet one another as apparent equals. They sit in the same chairs.

Now we have lost our classrooms and, I fear, something vital along with them.

At the entrance to the building on the Queens College campus in Flushing, Queens, where I have taught for 14 years, I am greeted with a quote by the cultural critic bell hooks: "The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created." In the book from which these words are taken she continues: "The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility."

When City University of New York campuses shut down, I hastily began turning the remaining lectures for my 130-student Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course into videos. With schedules radically disrupted, limited computer access, spotty Wi-Fi and other obstacles, synchronous virtual classes of this size are impossible. Students can now watch my lectures on their phones.

In my small seminar course, we use Zoom to recreate the classroom experience as best we can. As we discuss our readings, I observe the posters, photos and tapestries that decorate my students' walls. I watch their partners and pets moving like shadows in the background. I see work areas improvised out of cramped and awkward spaces. I hear distracting background noises when a student unmutes her microphone to speak.

These Zoom intimacies are often endearing, and at times I welcome the strange, unexpected ways this period of enforced isolation brings about new kinds of closeness with others. I like knowing that this student drinks tea from a big ceramic mug, while that one seems to be good with houseplants. But I'm also aware that these glimpses into my students' homes violate the implicit contract of the classroom, where students have some measure of control over what parts of their lives outside of school come into view.

It's not that the classroom is ever sealed off from the outside world - nor should it be. When students bring their divergent life experiences to bear on our discussions, they make insightful connections and render abstract ideas vividly concrete. One of my favorite parts of teaching is seeing students link the concepts I teach to the lives they lead. I often feel that my primary role is to give them a vocabulary to think about - and put into words - what they already know.

Sometimes their personal lives leak into the classroom in less welcome ways. A student apologizes for falling asleep in class; he has increased his hours working at night as an Uber driver because his father was laid off from his job. Another misses class, explaining later that he had to translate for his mother at her doctor's appointment. One student apologetically asks permission to keep her phone on her desk during class so she can watch for texts from her son, who is sick at home. Another comes to my office in tears, worried she will fail my course. She has been unable to study since her family was evicted from their apartment.

These are ordinary occurrences when one teaches at a public, commuter school like Queens College. And now comes the pandemic, which both reveals and worsens the inequities in our city and country, rendering lower-income people of color - the majority of CUNY students - more vulnerable in terms of health and livelihood. I see this clearly in my inbox, which has been flooded with emails from students who are ill or tending to stricken family members. A student misses a quiz because he has to rush his grandmother to the hospital; a few days later he writes to tell me she has died. Some students are working longer hours as "essential workers," while others have lost their jobs. I worry most about the ones I haven't heard from at all.

Equality in the classroom is a fiction - it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. It's painfully obvious that only some of my students benefited from strong high school educations. Others start college inadequately prepared in foundational reading and writing skills. Many are immigrants who struggle with academic English and miss the cultural references that would make our readings more readily accessible. Race, gender, class, sexuality, citizenship status and other factors shape who feels confident speaking up in class and who feels afraid of saying the wrong thing.

When we pretend such inequities don't exist, we allow them to persist unchallenged. But like other utopian dreams, the fiction of equality - cultivated by those generic rooms with their uniform chairs - also has its value.

Unlike many of their middle and upper-class counterparts at residential colleges, most of my students live at home. The closure of campuses and the sudden shift to online learning is perhaps less of a shock to them, because college has never been a cloistered experience away from the complicated demands of family life and the pressures of putting food on the table.

But that's exactly why the classroom is so crucial. It is not a space apart from the damaged and unfair world in which we live, but it is a place where students meet each other, first and foremost, as fellow learners. As a teacher, I cannot level a deeply unequal playing field. But within the classroom, my students and I can try to forge a community where we listen to one another with respect, where everyone has a right to the floor, and where students share their experiences because of the trust we've built together, not because their private lives are on display via Zoom.

CUNY students and faculty are resilient; we know how to get by with more limited resources than we deserve. For now, my students and I make do, as we must, teaching and learning from our crowded and sometimes chaotic homes. But as soon as it becomes possible, we want to be sitting in those uncomfortable chairs again, reaching for our paradise of learning.

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What We Lose When We Go From the Classroom to Zoom

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Like other utopian dreams, the fiction of equality has its value. By Dr. Strassler teaches anthropology at Queens College. When life was normal, my students and I gathered in classrooms. My favorites are the small intimate ones where we face each other around a seminar table and conversation flows easily.

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Jonathan Zimmermann
https://www.chronicle.com/article/video-kills-the-teaching-star/

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The Academy's Neoliberal Response to COVID-19

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The Academy's Neoliberal Response to COVID-19

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Honor Brabazon

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The emergency shift to remote teaching that universities have made in response to the COVID-19 crisis has been justified as an exceptional measure for these unprecedented times. Faculty understand and appreciate the privilege many of us have in this crisis and we were happy to do our part to keep students safe in last few weeks of the winter semester. However, as universities begin their summer semesters entirely online and start to reveal their plans for the fall, researchers and educators must look more closely at the choices administrators are making, the assumptions underpinning these choices, and the vision of the university they advance.

Critique is essential in times of crisis. It is our job, and our responsibility, not to accept these directives without questioning their impact on the less privileged among us, on the university community as a whole, and on the project of public research and education in which academics are engaged.

A preliminary examination of these questions suggests that remote teaching, as it is being implemented, is not the exceptional response that it has been made out to be, nor is it the only option available. Instead, it is the product of choices that reflect and advance the particular view of society that has underpinned the neoliberal restructuring of universities and other institutions over the past several decades.

Neoliberalism is commonly understood as a market-oriented ideology that is associated with policies of privatization, free trade, deregulation, and public service cuts. The original neoliberal thinkers of the 1930s-1950s sought to devise a way of organizing human interaction that would maximize freedom, which they understood to be limited to the ability of individuals to make self-interested decisions through the market.

Over the past 40 years, there has been considerable variation in how neoliberal ideas have been harnessed by policymakers worldwide, but certain fundamental principles are clear -and a number of these shape the way that universities have responded to COVID-19. Recognizing these neoliberal assumptions will help faculty both to question the way that COVID-19 era teaching is being implemented and to imagine alternatives that do not put public research and education at risk.

Assumption 1: Faculty are work-ready employees

In the neoliberal economy, workers are seen as commodities and are expected to be trained and "work-ready" before they are hired. The cost and responsibility for job-training fall predominantly on individual workers rather than on employers. This is evident in the expectation that work experience should be a condition of hiring. This is true of the academic hiring process, which no longer involves hiring those who show promise in their field and can be apprenticed on the tenure track, but rather those with the means, privilege, and grit to assemble a tenurable CV on their own dime and arrive to the tenure track work-ready.

The assumption that faculty are pre-trained, or able to train themselves without additional time and support, underpins university directives that faculty move classes online without investing in training to support faculty in this shift. For context, at the University of Waterloo, the normal supports for developing an online course include one to two course releases, 12-18 months of preparation time, and the help of three staff members-one of whom is an online learning consultant, and each of whom supports only about two other courses. Instead, at universities across Canada, the move online under COVID-19 is not called "online teaching" but "remote teaching", which universities seem to think absolves them of the responsibility to give faculty sufficient technological training, pedagogical consultation, and preparation time.

Assumption 2: All faculty are equal

A guiding principle of neoliberal thought is that citizens should interact as formal equals, without regard for the substantive inequalities between us. This formal equality makes it difficult to articulate needs that arise from historical injustices, for instance, as marginalized groups are seen merely as stakeholders with views equally valuable to those of other stakeholders.

In the neoliberal university, this notion of formal equality can be seen, among other things, in the use of standards and assessments, such as teaching evaluations, that have been shown to be biased against instructors from marginalized groups, and in the disproportionate amount of care and service work that falls to these faculty members.

In university responses to COVID-19, remote teaching directives are rooted in the assumption that faculty are equally positioned to carry them out. However, at the best of times, not all faculty can drop everything to re-design all their courses, and the COVID-19 crisis has presented additional child care, elder care, mental health, and homeschooling responsibilities, among other challenges that disproportionately affect women (especially women of colour), differently-abled faculty, and contract faculty (who, at some institutions, are putting multiple summer courses online at once while receiving notice that their fall courses have been cancelled).

The dual delivery model-in which some students in a course come to class and others work remotely using pre-recorded or other asynchronous course material- is already part of a number of university plans for the fall, even though it requires vastly more work than either in-person or remote courses alone. The failure to accommodate faculty who are not well positioned to transform their courses from in-person to remote teaching-or some combination of the two- will actively exacerbate existing inequalities, marking a step backward for equity.

Assumption 3: Faculty are atomized individuals

Neoliberal democracy is characterized by competitive individualism and centres on the individual advocacy of ostensibly equal citizens through their vote with no common social or political goals. By extension, group identity and collective advocacy are delegitimized as undemocratic attempts to gain more of a say than those involved would otherwise have as individuals.

Portraying people as atomized individuals allows social problems to be framed as individual failures. For instance, in the neoliberal framework, poverty is understood to be a result of an individual's poor choices and their lack of effort rather than the collective failure of an affluent society. This shift in thinking has allowed neoliberal governments in countries like Canada to restructure social assistance programs in ways that responsibilize and penalize the poor for their own poverty.

In the neoliberal university, this logic can be seen in the move away from the ideal of the university as a public sphere with collective goals of critical enquiry, equality, deliberation, and the pursuit of knowledge. Instead, faculty are increasingly encouraged to see themselves as competitors who must maintain a constant level of productivity and act as entrepreneurs to sell ideas to potential investors in the form of external funding agencies or private commercial interests. Rather than freedom of enquiry, faculty research is increasingly monitored through performance metrics. Academic governance is being replaced by corporate governance models while faculty and faculty associations are no longer being respected for the integral role they play in the governance process, but are instead considered to be a stakeholder akin to alumni associations or capital investors.

In university responses to COVID-19, these shifts are visible in the failure to consult faculty or faculty associations, the circumvention of academic governance structures, and the prioritization of revenue concerns over the safety and pedagogical concerns of faculty or the workload, equity, and academic freedom provisions of collective agreements.

Instead, in true neoliberal fashion, it has been incumbent upon individual faculty members to identify their needs and concerns in virtual town-halls or to department chairs. Memos and videos from university administrators thanking faculty for their hard work and telling us we are all in this together leave individual faculty members weighing the need to speak out against the potential perception that we are not team players and that we are failing to put students first.

Responsibilizing individual faculty members for the outcomes of the move to remote teaching treats structural and pedagogical barriers as minor individual technical or administrative problems that the instructor can overcome simply by watching more Zoom webinars and practising better self-care. See, for instance, this Tweet from the manager of UOIT's Teaching and Learning Centre:

Assumption 4: Education is merely 'content delivery'

In the neoliberal worldview, the self-interest that guides individual decision-making is not the kind of self-interest characterized by an understanding of the individual as a social being, whose interests are intertwined with those of others and can be known through research or influenced through education. Rather, self-interested decision making is considered more efficient and democratic when it is informed only by an individual's unadulterated, uninformed perceptions, which are then aggregated and processed by the supposedly unbiased market.

In this view, a transformative education, in which students develop and practise self-awareness, empathy, social consciousness, critical thought, and collective agency, is not necessary to sustain a democracy but is a hindrance to it-an undemocratic interference. In neoliberal thought, education is merely pursued by individuals who want to invest in skills and credentials that will increase their value in the labour market.

This view of education is reflected in the ongoing reframing of postsecondary education as an instrumental mode of job training. Increasingly, students are seen by universities-and see themselves-as customers engaged in a transactional relationship-a view that is only encouraged by (rising) tuition fees. Likewise, faculty are encouraged to strip away the transformative pedagogical work that has long been part of their profession and to merely administer a course or deliver course material, often-as is the case for contract faculty (who now teach over 50 per cent of university courses in Ontario)-with little job security, poor pay, and insufficient benefits.

The notion that faculty can simply move their courses online-or teach them simultaneously online and in person-is rooted in the assumption that educating involves merely delivering information to students, which can be done just as easily online as it can be in person. There are many well-developed online courses, yet all but the most ardent enthusiasts concede that the format works better for some subjects and some students. Moreover, while there are still some advocates for the democratic potential of online teaching, there are strong criticisms that pedagogies rooted in well-established understandings of education as a collective, immersive, and empowering experience, through which students learn how to deliberate, collaborate, and interrogate established norms, cannot simply be transferred online. These pedagogies are not optional frills but the product of decades of research and experience, as well as important commitments to equality and reconciliation that are not meant to be upheld only when convenient.

In particular, some of the essential social and humanizing components of education are diminished, if not eliminated, when teaching is mediated through screens and students are learning in physical isolation from each other. An in-person university course is immersive in a way an online course is not. Even attending a basic lecture is a social experience, like going to a play, parade, or sporting event. On the surface, a lecture may seem to be merely a means of delivering information that students consume individually. However, students learn not only from the lecturer but also from the affectiveexperience itself and from observing how others respond to it. Their shared experience provokes further reflection, discussion, and connection-which are all part of their education.

Giving a basic lecture is also a social experience, like a performance in many ways. Lecturers learn from their audiences, feeling the room and adjusting material-often substantially-as they speak, which is far more challenging online, and impossible in the pre-recorded lectures faculty are being encouraged to produce.

Education is also a humanizing experience that involves questioning and altering one's sense of self and one's relationship to others. Humans learn through narrative, context, empathy, debate, and shared experiences. We are able to open ourselves up enough to ask difficult questions and allow ourselves to be challenged only when we are able to see the humanity in others and when our own humanity is recognized by others. This kind of active learning (as opposed to the passive reception of information) requires the trust, collectivity, and understanding of divergent experiences built through regular synchronous meetings in a shared physical space. This is hindered when classroom interaction is mediated through disembodied video images and temporally delayed chat functions.

In the COVID-19 era neoliberal university, accommodations are not being made for faculty who engage in pedagogies that involve more than content delivery. Some institutions are even discouraging synchronous teaching altogether and are not scheduling set times for classes. Making these pedagogical methods impossible and expecting faculty to continue teaching without them constitutes a clear violation of academic freedom.

The administrative push for asynchronous teaching, hybrid online/in-person courses, and flexible evaluation methods tailored to each student are justified in the name of ensuring equitable access for students who face very real limitations during the COVID-19 crisis. However, there is a point at which we must ask what exactly students will be getting access to and if it is worthy of university credit and scholarly advancement, particularly if remote teaching continues in some form for several semesters.

When teaching is reduced to content delivery, faculty become interchangeable, which raises additional questions about academic freedom. Suggestions have already been made that the workload problem brought on by remote teaching would be mitigated if faculty simply taught existing online courses designed by others. It does not take complex modelling to imagine a new normal in which an undergraduate degree consists solely of downloading and memorizing cookie-cutter course material uploaded by people with no expertise in the area who are administering ten other courses simultaneously.

Likewise, when teaching is reduced to content delivery, intellectual property takes on additional importance. It is illegal to record and distribute lectures or other course material without the instructor's permission, but universities seem reluctant to confirm that they will not have the right to use the content faculty post online. For instance, if a contract faculty member spends countless hours designing a remote course for the summer semester and then is laid off in the fall, can the university still use their recorded lectures and other material in the fall? Can the university use this recorded lecture material to continue teaching these courses if faculty are on strike ( as happened in the UK in 2018)? What precedents are being set?

Universities have also been downloading the responsibility to navigate the incredibly complicated process of determining copyright for course material posted online to overworked faculty, which will result in some creative and unconventional material simply being scrapped. Students' exposure to a range of rigorous thought is also endangered, since it is much easier for students to record and distribute course content when faculty post it online. Some websites are already using the move to remote teaching as an opportunity to urge students to call out and shame faculty they deem to be "liberal" or "left" by reposting their course material. To avoid this, faculty are likely to self-censor, choosing material they feel is safer. Course material will become more generic, which will diminish the quality of students' education.

Yet, universities push on, insisting to faculty and to the public that students should and will receive the same quality of education that they would in courses offered in the classroom. This simply is not possible, and it is not surprising that students have begun to demand tuition refunds and rebates.

Assumption 5: Research is expendable

In neoliberal thought, the public sphere is severely diminished, and the role of the university in the public sphere-and as a public sphere unto itself-is treated as unnecessary. The principle that enquiry and debate are public goods in and of themselves, regardless of their outcome or impact, is devalued, as is the notion that a society's self-knowledge and self-criticism are crucial to democracy, societal improvement, and the pursuit of the good life. Expert opinion is devalued, and research is desirable only when it translates into gains for the private sector, essentially treating universities as vehicles to channel public funding into private research and development.

In response to COVID-19, universities have supported medical and other COVID-19 related research but have left everyone else with no choice but to drastically cut back on their research time. As online courses are front-loaded, many faculty have already spent weeks converting a single course to a remote format for the summer semester and are likely to spend at least all of August preparing remote options for fall courses they have taught many times before. Much of this time would usually have been spent doing research. According to some calculations, this lack of support from the university, combined with other barriers such as travel restrictions, will decrease faculty research productivity by 50-70 per cent.Notably, this drop will not affect all faculty equally, with some journals already noting a marked decrease in submissions from women since COVID-19 began.

The expectation that this is something faculty should simply accept diminishes the importance of their research. It suggests that research is a hobby faculty pursue in their spare time when they are finished with their teaching commitments. Research is essential for understanding the human experience, the world we live in, and the nature of our existence within that world. The free and broad pursuit-and critique-of knowledge is arguably even more important in times of crisis and rapid social change.

Assumption 6: Faculty are expendable

Since the neoliberal approach views people as commodities in competition with each other, it acknowledges that some people will simply be left behind and considers this the inevitable result of market competition functioning as it should.

The culture of disposability fostered by this view can be seen in the dramatic expansion of precarious contract work and gig labour during the neoliberal period. Just-in-time production and outsourcing have gone hand-in-hand with the casualization of labour in many industries, building an expendable workforce that can be hired and fired as needed to protect profit.

In the neoliberal university, this has meant an increase in the number of contract faculty, who, again, teach over half of the courses at Ontario universities. They have years, if not decades, of teaching experience, and are typically overworked and underpaid.

As universities plan for the possibility of lower fall enrolments, they are already dramatically cutting contracts for contract faculty. But because these are contracts the university can simply choose not to renew, they are not counted as layoffs so contract faculty generally are not eligible for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit.

The message that these plans send to all faculty-contract or not-is that their expertise, societal role, and physical and mental health are expendable.

Assumption 7: There is no alternative

Policies that advance neoliberal ideals have long been justified-and opposition to them discredited-using Margaret Thatcher's famous line that "there is no alternative." This notion is reproduced in universities framing their responses to COVID-19 as a fait accompli-the inevitable result of unfortunate circumstances. Yet the neoliberal assumptions that underpin these responses illustrate that choices are being made and force us to ask whether the emergency we face necessitates this exact response.

Instead, we should see this as but one approach that is rooted in a vision of the university we do not need to support. Liminal times, in which the established social order is suspended, are opportunities, and this is an opportunity for university communities to have a broad discussion about what the university is, what we think it should be, and how to move toward that goal.

Pushing back

Instead of discussing better Zoom learning techniques, we should collectively ask what teaching in the COVID-19 era would look like if universities valued education and research as essential public goods.For instance, what would remote teaching look like if we openly acknowledged that it was not an adequate substitute for classroom teaching and reduced both tuition and teaching and learning standards?This would alleviate pressure on both faculty and students and facilitate open conversations with students about the nature of education and the limitations of a tuition fee-based model. It could be supported by acknowledgements from administrations that faculty are not expected to completely reimagine and redesign their courses to suit the online format but merely to offer as much as they can of their existing courses online as a temporary stopgap measure.

Likewise, what would COVID-19 era teaching look like if it were properly supported?It might include course releases and smaller course sections, which would create additional positions for contract faculty; more teaching assistant, technology, and online pedagogy support; postponement of courses with pedagogies that do not work online; extra compensation, job security, and health benefits for contract faculty; strong protections for intellectual property, academic freedom, workload, and research; accommodation for faculty with additional challenges and responsibilities at home; and discussion of the additional support that many faculty members need under normal circumstances-and the precarity faced by many.

Finally, what would COVID-19 era teaching look like if educational institutions made decisions about teaching on the basis of pedagogy instead of neoliberal fiscal policy? So far, we have been buying into the trope of scarcity and deficit-mongering that characterized the cruellest social policy of the 1990s. In this crisis, even conservative politicians have shown that the bottom line can be shifted to fund public priorities. Universities have a tendency to prioritize funding for capital projects, administration, and surpluses, while claiming they are unable to find sufficient funds for their core missions of teaching and research. However, most universities have healthy reserves they can draw on in times of crisis. Further, federal and provincial governments can and should be providing funding to sustain institutions essential to the public sphere, including universities, during this crisis and into the future. Even in the midst of a crisis, it is not necessary, appropriate, or responsible for universities to sacrifice teaching and research or to make overworked, overstressed faculty members feel like they may be responsible for letting their institution's core mission slide.

These are only very basic ideas. The point is that faculty, students, and all university workers can-and should-be having a discussion in which we collectively imagine a better path forward-one that is consistent with, and moves toward, the kind of university we want for students' education, for quality research, for good jobs, for a thriving campus community, and for a vibrant democracy.

Emergencies matter. Far from occasions that justify suspending our principles, the way that we handle the extra-ordinary, the unexpected, sends a message about what we truly value. While COVID-19 may seem exceptional, university responses to this crisis are hardly a departure from the neoliberal norm, and university administrations are already making plans to extend online teaching after it dissipates. We must be careful not to send the message that the neoliberal university and the worldview that underpins it are acceptable.
The author thanks colleagues at various universities for helpful conversations on the topics in this article. You can read a shorter version of this article in the CAUT Bulletin. Honor Brabazon is an assistant professor, Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, St. Jerome's University.

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The academy's neoliberal response to COVID-19: Why faculty should be wary and how we can push back - Academic Matters

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The emergency shift to remote teaching that universities have made in response to the COVID-19 crisis has been justified as an exceptional measure for these unprecedented times. Faculty understand and appreciate the privilege many of us have in this crisis and we were happy to do our part to keep students safe in last few weeks of the winter semester.

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Forced Shift to Online Teaching in Pandemic Unleashes Educators' Deepest Job Fears

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Forced Shift to Online Teaching in Pandemic Unleashes Educators' Deepest Job Fears

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Richard Watermeyer et al

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'Culture-change moment' for higher education.

Richard Watermeyer et al.*

Sam Edwards/Getty

As universities everywhere rapidly move their learning, teaching and assessment online in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, academics especially in the UK feel unprepared, inadequately supported and deeply fearful.

They dread that this forced culture-change moment for universities will result in their deskilling, obsolescence and ultimately, unemployment, our survey of 1165 university educators reveals.

It's still early days. Our online survey started on March 27 and remains open. But our initial findings have surfaced ominous predictions of the impact of this current pandemic - and digital conversion - not only on the health, employment and wellbeing of academics as educators, but on the sustainability of the university sector.

"It's the end of the 'traditional learning space' as we know it," wrote one respondent.

"I believe that the university will use this as an opportunity to remove all face-to-face teaching of postgraduate students, effectively destroying my role and the style of teaching that I love. I expect to either be forced into online teaching or to be made redundant within the year", wrote another.

Unprepared

The survey was distributed among our many academic and higher education policy networks, through learned societies and through higher education support organisations. Among our respondents so far, the great majority (1013) work in the UK higher education sector, followed by the USA (79) and the European Union nations (73). Most self-identified as assistant of associate professors (780), or full professors (184). There were 103 respondents identified as being on teaching-only contracts. The biggest groups represented among a broad spread of disciplines were social science (15%), education (14%) and computer science (13%).

Fewer than half of our total respondents agreed they felt prepared in moving all learning, teaching and assessment (LT&A) online. Overall, UK academics appear to be lagging behind their European and USA counterparts in terms of feeling prepared and confident in moving LT&A online, and also in terms of their knowledge of its technological dimensions. The proportion of academics who said they felt prepared was 47.5% in the UK compared with 62.5% in the US and 81.5% in the EU.

Those who expressed confidence in their ability to facilitate LT&A online were also much rarer in the UK, only 59.9%, compared with 70.9% for the US and 93.9% for the EU. UK educators were similarly far behind those in the US and EU in stating they had a good working knowledge of the technologies supporting LT&A online.

Respondents identifying 'Computer Science' (69.9%) and 'Education' (67.3%) as disciplinary affiliation were most represented in agreeing they felt prepared to deliver online LT&A. Conversely, respondents identifying 'Biological Sciences' (71%) and 'Business and Administrative Studies' (60.6%) as disciplinary affiliation were most represented in disagreeing that they felt prepared.

Only half of all respondents said they had a home environment suitable to supporting LT&A online. While fewer than half stated that they have caring responsibilities, almost 80% of those who did said this was negatively impacting on their ability to effectively deliver LT&A online. There may be a gender correlation here with a higher percentage (56.5%) of total respondents being female.

Many referred to the difficulty in balancing home demands with a sense of now being permanently on-call to students - *"We are available 24/7 now that we are online" *- in addition to the alienating effects of an exclusive technologically-facilitated interface:
"I am finding it difficult to manage and balance the demands of home-schooling whilst constantly being available online via email etc to feedback, mark, answer questions. I am a slave to devices now which I really don't enjoy".
Some are also reflecting on how being "constantly inundated with electronic contact is overloading and mentally exhausting".

Dread of deskilling

Others have seen the online transition as a process of deskilling, with a lack of focus on effective digital pedagogies and practice: "I feel like I may as well be a technician rather than an instructor. I'm just posting stuff online and trying to keep up with far too many online discussions."

A dread of deprofessionalisation, dwindling agency and even future obsolescence in the face of digitalisation is a feature of many respondents' accounts, for instance:
"An expectation that each session will be recorded and made available online regardless of staff preference takes away from our autonomy as lecturers and makes us feel like cogs in a machine and not human beings. It will add to the rhetoric that we're disposable and accountable for literally everything we say and will take away from our freedom of speech and creativity within the learning space to have timely, challenging discussions."
Half of our respondents expressed doubt about students being able to access and meaningfully engage with online materials. Some also expressed concerns that online transition will disadvantage non-traditional university entrants and those targeted under widening participation initiatives.

While a slim majority of our respondents spoke positively of the support received from their institutions in making an online move, the experience of many has been less positive and prompted them to reflect, in this typical statement: "What we're doing isn't even "online teaching" - it's disaster management".

Others have signalled fear that universities' hybrid or even permanent transition to LT&A online was a cost-cutting initiative that would significantly alter the teaching role in universities and jeopardise academic jobs.

Concern about competition

Respondents also expressed concern about the market-vulnerability of universities in being far behind the digital standard of existing online or private higher education providers:
"I am concerned that with our online activities not being as well developed as other (private) competitor institutes, we will lose out on students and therefore my course might have insufficient numbers to run. I'm concerned about the longer-term viability of my role".
Some attributed work intensification caused by online transitioning of LT&A as major drain on their research careers and a cause of them ceasing research separate from the physical closure of university premises. Those trying for their first permanent academic job were seen to be affected most of all in this respect.

The brighter side

However, respondents' perspectives are not uniformly bleak. Some are looking at online transitioning as a necessary and overdue, if forced, transformation of an academic mindset towards LT&A:

"As an institution where a substantial proportion of academic staff have been resistant to the use of any teaching and learning methods except face to face for a very long time, this situation has been a revelation for many colleagues and seems likely to fundamentally change the shape of our teaching and learning design in future".

Some have even characterised forced online migration for universities as a 'renaissance' for LT&A.

Long-term impacts

We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of the implications of universities' online migration in the immediate context of the pandemic. It is already, however, plain to see from our early analysis that there is not only variation across disciplines, universities and international sectors in terms of preparedness, confidence and necessary knowledge in facing the challenge of moving LT&A online, but major and potentially long-term impacts for academics and universities as members of a global higher education community.

There are important social, health and wellbeing related issues to consider. Moreover, a prolonged - perhaps, even permanent - shift online raises significant questions around student engagement and related concerns of student retention and recruitment.

The immediate challenge is to use this rich and wide-ranging data to begin to engage a UK and international community of policy-makers and higher education stakeholders, in making appropriate arrangements for the protection, support and development of the academic workforce in a massively uncertain and troubled era.

* Tom Crick, Cathryn Knight and Janet Goodall are co-authors.
Richard Watermeyer is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol Tom Crick is Professor of Digital Education and Policy at Swansea University Cathryn Knight is Lecturer of Education at Swansea University Janet Goodall is Associate Professor of Education at Swansea University This is an article from the Nature Index community, a place for readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged. If you would like to contribute, please read here for guidelines, and contact us here: natureindex[at]nature.com.
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Forced shift to online teaching in pandemic unleashes educators' deepest job fears

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'Culture-change moment' for higher education. Richard Watermeyer et al.* Sam Edwards/Getty As universities everywhere rapidly move their learning, teaching and assessment online in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, academics especially in the UK feel unprepared, inadequately supported and deeply fearful.

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Two Scholars Debate the Pros and Cons of Online Learning

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Two Scholars Debate the Pros and Cons of Online Learning

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Steve Mentz and Christopher Schaberg

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Should we teach online? Our chairs and directors are asking us to do so, as they weigh student demand for online courses with the existing supply of face-to-face classes. These decisions about pedagogy often come in a rush, obfuscated by institutional pressures, departmental habits or day-to-day operations. What does the choice mean for students and instructors?

Pausing in the midst of the hubbub, we two professors at different higher education institutions decided to reflect on our own ambivalence about online learning and whether and how we might best venture into this still-new learning environment. For those of us who were trained to teach face-to-face classes, is it now time to (also) teach online?

Chris says "maybe." I've come to realize after some stubborn resistance that I should try to teach an online course at my university. And I have one in mind. My students have been requesting that I bring back a particular senior-level undergraduate class that I haven't taught in a couple years. It's called Interpretive Approaches -- basically an introduction to critical inquiry from Marx and Freud up to more current readings in postcolonial studies and queer theory.

Why would I teach this particular course online, beyond just the fact of everything being on the internet these days?

Because many of my students end up working two or more jobs by the time they are seniors, and demands on their time can make it difficult for them to carve out 75 minutes twice a week to come to the campus for class. If I offered the course online, I could facilitate our spirited discussions there and even offer a generous window of optional office hours to meet with students in person to untangle the knottier passages or philosophical conundrums. Maybe those office hours would even become microseminars, with multiple students coming to hash out the readings together.

Teaching this difficult course online could create an opportunity for more students to succeed in it, replacing what can at times be freewheeling discussions with written -- searchable and rereadable -- transcripts of our dialogue and inquiry. And instead of my normal grueling passage identification and explication exams, I could create a way of assessing students that would have them writing together on a platform in which they are already comfortable conversing. Offering this course online could revamp and re-energize how I teach it.

Steve says "ugh." I'll probably teach another online grad class this summer, but before the process starts, I'm mulling my usual pregame regrets. Every year before I teach this class, I have the same flashback to my first semester as a new teacher in a high school classroom in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. I was fresh out of college and getting advice from an experienced colleague. "Steve," he said to me in a solemn voice, "you can only teach them what they are ready to learn that day."

"But Alan," I importuned back, all earnest idealism, "how do you know what that is?"

"You don't know" -- he smiled back -- "until you see the whites of their eyes."

It was a joke, of course, and a playful response to my new-teacher nervousness. But it comes back to me every year before I teach online, when my only view of student eyes comes in the profile photos of the university personnel system's electronic record. Are those even their real eyes? How can I see my students if we're each typing alone, focusing intermittently on the present tense of black cursor on white e-page, churning emptiness into language?

Teaching at its core responds to human encounters and makes its turns and dives forward through shared human feelings. "There's nothing I hate more," I announce each face-to-face semester to a new room of slightly bemused students, "than a room in which everyone thinks the same thing. There is no right answer to the questions that I'll ask in this class -- only a wide variety of true ones." Every year I think these thoughts, feel this proleptic regret and wonder about what flashes and connections the online medium will make us miss, misread or simply not recognize.

Chris wants more. I can't shake the feeling that the current pushes for online education are about more, and something more insidious, than providing opportunities for learning to wider audiences. While I recognize that people can be incredibly creative on the internet, I also know that using digital media platforms -- especially on a mass scale -- funnels staggering amounts of capital in one direction: toward the owners of the technologies that make online communication possible in the first place. I worry that as online education encroaches on traditional classroom space and time, it reflects pervasive trends wherein we would prefer to see people on their digital devices everywhere and always.

This is no conspiracy theory. My dentist now wants me to track my brushing on my iPhone, and my banking "just got easier" (read: less costly for the bank) thanks to a mobile app. Such things save people time and money, of course, but they also tether human activity to infrastructures and systems that often remain hidden, beyond direct access.

I'm not advocating wholesale alarmism. I mentor my students to become savvy social media users, and I just taught a face-to-face class where 100 percent of the writing took place on Amazon through student reviews. Online education is a part of our modern, media-entangled ecosystem -- I get it.

But I also wonder about the future world that online education presages. Can internet-based education foster the very ideas that may lead to an alternative future that radically revises our current patterns of being online? I remain skeptical that digital tools can be used to dismantle this economic structure that projects itself into the future as the ultimate horizon of human progress. There is no getting around this: every click generates profit, for someone. Now that I explain it this way, I guess it sounds like a case for a college-level inquiry. We'll have to mull over this -- and in person. I think I'll teach my class on the ground, after all.

Steve says "yes." I remember being a bit taken aback, sometime in the late 2000s, when an academic who was senior to me and whom I greatly admire said to me, with no irony, "I love -- love -- my iPhone." At that time, I had not yet plunged into smartphonia, but I would soon, and it didn't take me long to figure out what she was talking about. Even for old-guy professors like me, living in the 21st century means processing emotions and human relationships through screens.

I've read the books that rail against the internet and its stupefying effects. They echo jeremiads written against newfangled print culture when it was sweeping across 15th-century Europe. Maybe smartphones are bad for us in the same way Socrates thought writing was bad -- because these technologies cause memory to atrophy.

But digital screens populate the mediated media oceans we all swim in now. When my students take an online class with me, they work in an electronically mediated system of communication and identity formation that they are going to be living and working in throughout their personal and professional lives.

Many of my students arrive in my classes as social media virtuosos, although a surprisingly visible cohort pledges allegiance to King Lud. In the online class, I ask all of us to build and cultivate a virtual community. Over the years, I've used various software programs like Coursekit.com, Lore.com, PBwiki, WordPress and, most recently, Google Classroom. I spend significant time and teaching labor thinking about community building in online space. (Community building is the most important thing I think about regarding face-to-face classrooms, too.)

Teaching requires us to fashion a community into some in-process knowledge of itself and our shared world. I worry about finding the best way to do that in the corporatized world of online learning, and I also worry about building intellectual community in the corporatized culture of the 21st-century university. All classroom conversations happen in dialogue with our wider culture and its corporate and mediated structures. We can't go back to pristine pre-internet days, even if there are things about pedagogy, especially shared concentration and collective thinking about difficult questions, that partly resist the e-verse of constant distraction. Teaching online locates our virtual classrooms where our students live, inside the e-belly of the beast. Surely, that's a good, albeit sometimes unsettling, thing?

Chris's thesis: If I'm going to teach online, it will probably be a blended course, which I see as the best version of online learning. But I say this admitting my relative privilege to be able to prefer such a thing. Blended courses require investment in permanent faculty members who have offices, the ability to mentor students over multiple semesters and the like. I'm not yet convinced that my own teaching efficacy would be enhanced or improved through strictly online instruction.

Steve's antithesis: Not every course should be the same, and sometimes things that aren't "the best" can still be worthwhile -- even necessary. Blended courses are ideal, and so are blended programs. Our students should graduate having worked in traditional seminars, lecture/discussion courses, hybrid digital structures and fully online environments. That's the way to prepare them, and ourselves, for the plural media landscapes of the 21st century.

Chris and Steve's synthesis: Engaged ambivalence is the slightly conflicted way we approach online teaching. We aim to empower our students with what digital networks offer while shielding them to a degree from its problems. We don't expect we'll get it exactly right every time. We'll keep trying.

Inconclusive postscript: Our educational missions and training were mostly articulated before the rise of the internet. Teaching today may require us to incorporate online learning into our practices, but we do not want to surrender our pedagogy to corporate control, monetization or groupthink.

Plenty of open questions remain about how best to extend our attention, time and energy into online pedagogy. How might we embrace the opportunities of online learning, and when should we redouble our efforts to defend face-to-face instruction?

We don't assume easy answers or quick solutions, and we recognize that university bureaucracies have budgetary and recruiting imperatives that, while perhaps necessary for the larger system's functioning, should not control our focus when we think about pedagogy. Online teaching requires us to change and learn, to be uncomfortable and disoriented in this new space into which we invite our students. One of the most important things about entering a new pedagogic space is not assuming we already know the things we'll discover when we go there -- while also staying wary in the face of initiatives that are presented as panaceas for institutional health.

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Two scholars debate the pros and cons of online learning (opinion)

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Should we teach online? Our chairs and directors are asking us to do so, as they weigh student demand for online courses with the existing supply of face-to-face classes. These decisions about pedagogy often come in a rush, obfuscated by institutional pressures, departmental habits or day-to-day operations.

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The Effectiveness of Online and Blended Learning: A Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Literature

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The Effectiveness of Online and Blended Learning: A Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Literature

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Means et al

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George Velestianos

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Research shows few differences in academic outcomes between online and face-to-face university courses. A professor who’s been teaching online for years offers advice on good online courses.

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"There is no such thing as a neutral educational process." ~ Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

"Pedagogy is not ideologically neutral." This line has been for me almost a mantra over the last several years. I've said variations of it on Twitter, on the About Us page of Hybrid Pedagogy, and in our recent CFP focused on Critical Digital Pedagogy. I've circled around this phrase, because I feel increasingly certain that the word "pedagogy" has been misread - that the project of education has been misdirected - that educators and students alike have found themselves more and more flummoxed by a system that values assessment over engagement, learning management over discovery, content over community, outcomes over epiphanies. Education (and, to an even greater extent, edtech) has misrepresented itself as objective, quantifiable, apolitical.

Higher education teaching is particularly uncritical and under-theorized. Most college educators (at both traditional and non-traditional institutions) do little direct pedagogical work to prepare themselves as teachers. A commitment to teaching often goes unrewarded, and pedagogical writing (in most fields) is not counted as "research."

The entire enterprise of education is too often engaged in teaching that is not pedagogical. There are a whole host of other words I'd use to describe this work: instruction, classroom management, training, outcomes-driven, standards-based, content delivery. Pedagogy, on the other hand, starts with learning as its center, not students or teachers, and the work of pedagogues is necessarily political, subjective, and humane.

What is Critical Pedagogy?

Critical Pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning predicated on fostering agency and empowering learners (implicitly and explicitly critiquing oppressive power structures). The word "critical" in Critical Pedagogy functions in several registers:

Critical, as in mission-critical, essential;

Critical, as in literary criticism and critique, providing definitions and interpretation;

Critical, as in reflective and nuanced thinking about a subject;

Critical, as in criticizing institutional, corporate, or societal impediments to learning;

Critical Pedagogy, as a disciplinary approach, which inflects (and is inflected by) each of these other meanings.

Each of these registers distinguishes Critical Pedagogy from pedagogy; however, the current educational climate has made the terms, for me, increasingly coterminous (i.e. an ethical pedagogy must be a critical one). Pedagogy is praxis, insistently perched at the intersection between the philosophy and the practice of teaching. When teachers talk about teaching, we are not necessarily doing pedagogical work, and not every teaching method constitutes a pedagogy. Rather, pedagogy necessarily involves recursive, second-order, meta-level work. Teachers teach; pedagogues teach while also actively investigating teaching and learning. Critical Pedagogy suggests a specific kind of anti-capitalist, liberatory praxis. This is deeply personal and political work, through which pedagogues cannot and do not remain objective. Rather, pedagogy, and particularly Critical Pedagogy, is work to which we must bring our full selves, and work to which every learner must come with full agency.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues against the banking model, in which education "becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor." This model emphasizes a one-sided transactional relationship, in which teachers are seen as content experts and students are positioned as sub-human receptacles. The use here of "sub-human" is intentional and not exaggeration; for in the tenets set out in Freire's work (and the work of other Critical Pedagogues, including bell hooks and Henry Giroux), the banking model of education is part and parcel with efforts most clearly summed up in the term dehumanization. The banking model of education is efficient in that it maintains order and is bureaucratically neat and tidy. But efficiency, when it comes to teaching and learning, is not worth valorizing. Schools are not factories, nor are learning or learners products of the mill.

I immediately become deeply skeptical when I hear the word "content" in a discussion about education, particularly when it is accompanied by the word "packaged." It is not that education is without content altogether, but that its content is co-constructed as part of and not in advance of the learning.

Critical Pedagogy is concerned less with knowing and more with a voracious not-knowing. It is an on-going and recursive process of discovery. For Freire, "Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other." Here, the language echoes the sort of learning Freire describes. With a flurry of adjectives and clauses separated by commas, his sentence circles around its subject, wandering, pushing restlessly at the edges of how words make meaning - not directly through literal translation into concepts, but in the way words rub curiously against one another, making meaning through a kind of friction. Knowledge emerges in the interplay between multiple people in conversation - brushing against one another in a mutual and charged exchange or dialogue. Freire writes, "Authentic education is not carried on by 'A' for 'B' or by 'A' about 'B,' but rather by 'A' with 'B'." It is through this impatient dialogue, and the implicit collaboration within it, that Critical Pedagogy finds its impetus toward change.

In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for "problem-posing education," in which a classroom or learning environment becomes a space for asking questions - a space of cognition not information. Vertical (or hierarchical) relationships give way to more playful ones, in which students and teachers co-author together the parameters for their individual and collective learning. Problem-posing education offers a space of mutual creation not consumption. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes, "As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another's voices, in recognizing one another's presence." This is a lively and intimate space of creativity and inquiry - a space of listening as much as speaking.

What is Critical Digital Pedagogy?

My work has wondered at the extent to which Critical Pedagogy translates into digital space. Can the necessary reflective dialogue flourish within web-based tools, within social media platforms, within learning management systems, within MOOCs? What is digital agency? To what extent can social media function as a space of democratic participation? How can we build platforms that support learning across age, race, culture, gender, ability, geography? What are the specific affordances and limitations of technology toward these ends? If, indeed, all learning is necessarily hybrid, as I've argued, to what extent are Critical Pedagogy and digital pedagogy becoming also coterminous?

The wondering at these questions is, in fact, not particularly new. In his forward to Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Shaull writes, "Our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system [...] The paradox is that the same technology that does this to us also creates a new sensitivity to what is happening." And, John Dewey writes in Schools of To-Morrow, published decades earlier, "Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing." If we are to keep every educative endeavor from becoming mill-work - from becoming only a reflection of oppressive labor practices and uneven power relationships - we must engage deeply with its reality.

Increasingly, the web is a space of politics, a social space, a professional space, a space of community. And, for better or worse, more and more of our learning is happening there. For many of us, it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between our real selves and our virtual selves, and in fact, these distinctions are being altogether unsettled. In "The New Learning is Ancient", Kathi Inman Berens writes, "It doesn't matter to me if my classroom is a little rectangle in a building or a little rectangle above my keyboard. Doors are rectangles; rectangles are portals. We walk through." When we learn online, our feet are usually still quite literally on ground. When we interact with a group of students via streaming video, the interaction is nevertheless face-to-face. The web is asking us to reimagine how we think about space, how and where we engage, and upon which platforms the bulk of our learning happens.

In Small Pieces Loosely Joined: a Unified Theory of the Web, David Weinberger writes, "We are the true 'small pieces' of the Web, and we are loosely joining ourselves in ways that we're still inventing." Ten years ago, following the publication of Weinberger's book, I wouldn't have imagined the learning networks I have now built with colleagues working together (sometimes simultaneously in real time) in places as seemingly remote as Portland, Madison, Manchester, Prince Edward Island, Sydney, Cairo, and Hong Kong.

This is not to say, however, that there aren't challenges to this sort of work. In On Critical Pedagogy, Henry Giroux argues,

Intellectuals have a responsibility to analyze how language, information, and meaning work to organize, legitimate, and circulate values, structure reality, and offer up particular notions of agency and identity. For public intellectuals, the latter challenge demands a new kind of literacy and critical understanding with respect to the emergence of the new media and electronic technologies, and the new and powerful role they play as instruments of public pedagogy.

Most digital technology, like social media or collaborative writing platforms or MOOCs, does not have its values coded into it in advance. These are tools merely, good only insofar as they are used. And platforms that do dictate too strongly how we might use them, or ones that remove our agency by too covertly reducing us and our work to commodified data, should be rooted out by a Critical Digital Pedagogy. Far too much work in educational technology starts with tools, when what we need to start with is humans.

We are better users of technology when we are thinking critically about the nature and effects of that technology. What we must do is work to encourage students and ourselves to think critically about new tools (and, more importantly, the tools we already use). And when we're looking for solutions, what we most need to change is our thinking and not our tools.

In short, Critical Digital Pedagogy:

centers its practice on community and collaboration;

must remain open to diverse, international voices, and thus requires invention to reimagine the ways that communication and collaboration happen across cultural and political boundaries;

will not, cannot, be defined by a single voice but must gather together a cacophony of voices;

must have use and application outside traditional institutions of education.

A Critical Digital Pedagogy demands that open and networked educational environments must not be merely repositories of content. They must be platforms for engaging students and teachers as full agents of their own learning.

Pete Rorabaugh writes in " Occupy the Digital: Critical Pedagogy and New Media ":

Critical Pedagogy, no matter how we define it, has a central place in the discussion of how learning is changing in the 21st century because Critical Pedagogy is primarily concerned with an equitable distribution of power. If students live in a culture that digitizes and educates them through a screen, they require an education that empowers them in that sphere, teaches them that language, and offers new opportunities of human connectivity.

Critical Pedagogy is as much a political approach as it is an educative one. As Sean Michael Morris writes, it is "a social justice movement first, and an educational movement second."

So, Critical Digital Pedagogy must also be a method of resistance and humanization. It is not simply work done in the mind, on paper, or on screen. It is work that must be done on the ground. It is not ashamed of its rallying cry or its soapbox. Critical Digital Pedagogy eats aphorisms - like this one right here - for breakfast. But it is not afraid to incite, to post its manifestos, to light its torches.
On November 21 at the OpenEd Conference in Washington, DC, Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel will present on critical digital pedagogy and MOOCs. This is the first of three articles that inspired that talk.

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We are better users of technology when we are thinking critically about the nature and effects of that technology. What we must do is work to encourage students and ourselves to think critically about new tools (and, more importantly, the tools we already use).

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Adaptability - Connection - Equity
https://colab.plymouthcreate.net/ace/