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Some thoughts on online instruction.
Until the pandemic, I hated the idea of online classes for as long I'd known about their existence. I would say "as long as I'd known about them," but now that I'm teaching one I realize that I didn't really know about them.
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Until the pandemic, I hated the idea of online classes for as long I'd known about their existence. I would say "as long as I'd known about them," but now that I'm teaching one I realize that I didn't really know about them.
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Why did I hate the idea? I suppose I thought they would lose what I valued in education -- the intimacy of the face-to-face encounter, the opportunity that this provided (or seemed to provide) for understanding where the students were and adapting my insrtuction accordingly.
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I still think that there is a vividness to the traditional classroom that is lost when the course goes online. I do miss that, and sometimes feel that a live explanation of something, especially with some jokes to season the lesson, would make it clearer, make it stick.
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When all my courses migrated online in the middle of the spring semester, because of the pandemic, I was surprised how little changed. That's because we continued the course exactly as it had been, only now on Zoom. We met at the same times of the week and spoke as before.
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By now, everyone knows the limitations of Zoom: the slight delay in transmission, the glitches whenever a connection is weak, the focus on the face rather than one's whole posture, the gallery view (with every difference that introduces into a group's conversation).
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But it was basically the same. Not until I started summer school a few weeks ago, with a fully online, "asynchronous" course, did I realize what online education could really be. I suspect this is what I'll be doing through the pandemic, so I hope to keep learning about it.
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This is thus only a beginning for me. Yet already I see how different online instruction is from the traditional classroomn, and in some ways how much better it is. That is what has truly surprised me.
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So how is the online "classroom" better than the traditional one? I see how it depends on how the instructor sets-up the course, and this is only a report of what I've found from how I've set up mine. The big difference is that there's a Discussion Board.
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I have my students read certain texts of philosophy, as always, and I have them watching certain episodes of *Black Mirror*, as I have always done in this particular course (Philosophy & Film). I also have them listening to my podcast, whose monologues serves as lectures.
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But they must also now answer ten questions a week that cover all the readings and the episode for that week, while sometimes asking about the connections between the two. This is what I used to do informally in class discussion, but now it's a formal component, graded.
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There are so many advantages of this. First of all, no one can hide in the back of the class, so to speak. Nor can any one student dominate the conversation. Everybody can speak, and everyone must speak -- if they are to succeed.
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Some are failing. They're not contributing to the discussion, or their contributions are last-minute, showing no knowledge of the relevant materials. Those students have always been there, and it always became clear by the end. But now it's obvious from the second week.
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Now, no one likes to see students failing, but if it's inevitable, and it can be diagnosed earlier rather than later, that's good for everyone. They can withdraw before wasting their money and time; the professor is spared reading doomed papers and exams.
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The Discussion Board could supplement a traditional classroom discussion, but would double the labor for the professor, who would already be showing up to generate and moderate a discussion. In any case, I think the biggest value of it is for the motivated students.
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I have some motivated students who write daily contributions. They are thinking through the material in a more detailed way than even the best live classroom discussion can afford. Plus, they are getting my detailed replies, the chance to reply to those, and so on.
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It's like they paid for a group class and are getting a one-on-one tutorial with the professor. Morevoer, they are not "dominating" the conversation. If someone wants to ignore that thread, there's no penalty for them doing so. Indeed, they can make another one, and should.
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In sum, for now, I think online education is better for motivated students and "worse" for the unmotivated. I put "worse" in quotation marks because although the unmotivated are going to fail more often than before, it's actually better for them to know the truth.
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For too long the universities have fostered the illusion that those students are getting an education, when in fact they're getting a diploma for money. At all levels of the university (students, faculty, administrators), that fact has been the unspoken secret for years.
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With the pandemic, and the explosion of online education that is consequently happening, that secret will briefly be exposed. Needless to say, many will try to drive it back into the dark, by dumbing down online instruction, sacrificing its potential for the motivated.
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But that's simply an example of our wider choice. The pandemic has exposed lots of dirty secrets about our society. We can choose to restructure accordingly, or we can find more twisted routes of self-deception, paying an even higher price when the next crisis hits.
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