Distrust.
For some, online instruction is just another example of the neoliberal threat to higher education.
Thanks to the pandemic, online education is being poked and prodded from all sides. This is generally a good thing because it demonstrates that instructors in higher education take instruction seriously, and they want to be sure that the shift online will not hinder their ability to teach or the students’ ability to learn. In this current cycle of posts that I’ve been writing, my attention has been drawn to articles that think the online education ignores the learner or where the classroom is venerated as a place of educational communion.
Photo by Dimitri Karastelev on Unsplash
Other writers don’t just dislike online education; they distrust it. The history of technological innovation in university and college teaching is replete with examples in which university administrators or regional politicians get the notion in their heads that technology will enable universities to teach more students at a lower cost per student. This “bottom line” thinking infects any discourse that involves technology and employment, and the higher education sector isn’t immune from it. These fears are always in the back of the minds of instructors in higher education. A survey conducted by Richard Watermeyer and others in March, 2020, bears this out. They surveyed primarily UK and US educators, and their initial findings “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.” As one respondent pointed out: ““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.”
Writing in Inside Higher Ed a couple of years ago, Christopher Schaberg noted the unease he experienced in supporting online education, a sentiment now shared by many during the pandemic: “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.”
The distrust of online education was most coherently and vociferously voiced by Honor Brabazon in Academic Matters, the magazine of OCUFA, the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations. Brabazon’s title, “The academy’s neoliberal response to COVID-19: Why faculty should be wary and how we can push back,” makes clear where she stands, and she uses the essay to address a number of ways the pandemic is letting university administrations indulge in their neoliberal fantasies. Brabazon takes the universities to task for ducking the responsibility of investing in and supporting instructors during the COVID-19 crisis. She argues that the universities have the resources to create smaller classes and better pedagogy, but their neoliberal mindset prevents them from doing so.
The article is broken up into a series of assumptions explaining how higher education today is informed by the neoliberal zeitgeist. The fourth assumption addresses online education directly: “Education is merely ‘content delivery’.” She makes the case, as others have, that the mediated classroom with its “disembodied video images and temporally delayed chat functions” hinder the learning that comes from bringing students together in a classroom. She coins a new definition for active learning, calling it a humanizing experience that “requires the trust, collectivity, and understanding of divergent experiences built through regular synchronous meetings in a shared physical space.” She argues that “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.”
I think she is mistaken on this last point. “Still some advocates” suggests that most educators have realized that online education cannot supplant the ability of in-class instruction to foster a critical attitude in learners. Most educators may indeed believe that, but that in no way makes it true. It ignores the ability of human beings to adapt to teaching and learning situations. It gives short shrift, often due to a lack of familiarity with online education, to the inventive and innovative work of educators to make of online education what we want to make of all education: a chance for learners to understand truths about the world and their existence in it. And it assumes that online educators are only interested in content delivery when, like any well-meaning educator, they are interested in far more.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
Post 18/60.