Online teaching is not just content delivery. If your institution wants you just to post material for students to interact with and then do something for you to summatively assess, then you are not teaching. You might as well be replaced by a robot. #21stCenturyHigherEd #COVID19

If that is how you treat your physical classroom, then you have another problem -- lectures without student engagement might as well be just TedTalks on YouTube. Yes people can learn from lectures, just like they can from documentaries, and books, and websites.

Teachers are not just content delivery media. Books, documentaries, TedTalks, websites may just be such media; all have their purpose and utility depending on different situations. But one-way communication of information, with summative assessment of retention, is not teaching.

Teaching is more akin to game design. It requires back-and-forth, formative and summative assessment in relation to the acquisition and usage of information to make correct decisions given the nature of the situation being experienced. Games are content delivery media, yes, but

good game design structures the learning experience to start with the easier knowledges and skills as a foundation to build more advanced ones. Along the way, acquisition of knowledges and skills are applied to game experiences to succeed or fail in the gameplay situation.

Learning from failures improves success later on, and success allows for progress and increasing acquisition of more complicated knowledges and skills. Teaching is game design: teaching is dialogic, engaged interaction for a common purpose of moving from foundational to advanced.

And, no, I am not saying to replace teachers with games. No one game can do everything a good teacher can do, no matter how good the game is. What I am saying is that we cannot think of teaching as just one-way communication of knowledges and skills. Teaching must be dialogic.

Which means your online course cannot just be watch, listen, read content and then take an exam. That structure can be overseen by a bot. That stays at foundational level knowledges and skills. Like any course, online teaching needs to get students to more advanced levels.

Course design needs to include formative and summative assessment. It needs interaction between teacher-student and student-student. The online space must continue to be a community and a safe space for students to fail and learn from their failures -- alone and together.

Higher ed institutions that do not support faculty labor in the design and implementation of such online learning communities will only expedite the death of academia. Why pay for scholars/teachers when millions can be taught by an AI running them through the same MOOC?

I understand the desire to not put students at risk of a novel coronavirus, but courses cannot be "simply" shifted online without a major disruption to the students' learning experience. That disruption could lead to many students suddenly underperforming and deciding to leave.

The same logic about why pay for tenured scholars to teach applies to students when they don't have a mentor relationship or a communal experience in college. If they can learn the same knowledges and skills through some other content delivery media that won't cause them...

to go into massive debt, then why attend college? If online courses rely too much on what is basically indistinguishable from autodidactic approaches to learning, then students would only need to go to college if technical certification is necessary for a particular career.

These next months could be a make-or-break moment for #21stCenturyHigherEd. The technological disruption of online teaching is about to get its biggest test of concept since institutions really started investing in it. And the ramifications could be widespread, longlasting.

And I really hope @AAUP and others are paying close attention to what could happen to students, faculty, and staff across the country and the world.

For other ideas, check out my posts on #OnlineLearningCommunities at http://www.playingwithresearch.com  /end