| Wednesday, October 31, 2007 5:15PM | | | | Online Teaching | Posted By: Boria Sax
|
| Tags: Online education, higher education, professors | Institutions of higher education almost always seem to be much less than the sum of their parts. Individually, professors are generally open, engaging people, who become animated simply at the mention of their teaching and research. But most of that passion is dissipated in office politics, as they try to negotiate all of the elaborate protocols imposed by the departmental bureaucracies and their corporate representatives. More than once, I have a sad witness as many lovely, gentle scholars were reduced to unseemly bickering and feuding, when they could find no other response to an institutional crisis. I have never been able to fully comprehend, much less accept, this gap between the personal and institutional faces of the scholarly vocation. Yes, our universities may do a fairly decent job, but they could be far more than they are....
When people first began to experiment with online education in the 1980's and 1990's, a part of its appeal was that enabled people to circumvent educational bureaucracies. I was teaching in the online campus of AOL, which was then a pioneer in online education. In training, a trainer from AOL showed us how to make a sound like applause come out of the computer, which everybody thought was an amazing novelty. She gave us a few simple rules of etiquette then set up a chat room for the class, a room that was, incidentally, constantly locking the right people out and letting the wrong ones in. It was all absurdly primitive by today's standards, but that actually did not seem to matter. Everybody was motivated, and the classes flourished. Later, when I worked with a few colleagues to help build the online campus of Mercy College, we constantly had to improvise in response to crises, but we still had an exhilarating sense of endless possibilities.
A great deal has happened since then, but online learning retains a lot of that openness and the collaborative spirit. People in online learning seem receptive to new ideas, no matter where these come from. It is not necessary to constantly go through some esoteric process of approval to try out them out. A process of professionalization is necessary for quality control, even inevitable. In the Sloan-C group on faculty training which I directed until a year or so ago, one thing that emerged over and over was that smaller institutions especially are often overwhelmed by the magnitude of their tasks. A handful of people is often charged with the task of training and supporting professors in hundreds of online classes. But I hope that "professionalization" will not mean simply subjecting online learning to the bureaucratic protocols that govern most of higher education, whether these are presented in the name of either "corporate interests" or "academic tradition." I would like us to proceed in a collaborative spirit, involving many institutions, perspectives, and individuals in the process. Above all, I would like us to professionalize without once again losing track of the love of learning, which is supposed to be the core of the scholarly vocation.
| | | |
| | |
|
|
|
