Last Saturday I went to a meeting of adjunct (part-time) professors in National University's School of Education (of which I am one). Enrollment in National's education classes is sharply down, as it is in all schools of education both public and private, and there hasn't been much work for us part-timers. More dramatic, however, is the shift to online courses. Over two thirds of National's enrollment is now online. This shouldn't be surprising since so many teacher credential candidates are already working and very limited in the time they have for classes. Many of them also live scattered throughout the state and nation and thus unable to attend classes "on the ground."
Most of us at the meeting were experienced teachers and administrators from the LAUSD and other districts. We are struggling to be successful in online teaching. We have found that there tends to be a lot more writing and assignments in online classes. At the same time the university is encouraging us to use various interactive, real-time options to mix up the otherwise somewhat abstract and, frankly, dreary relationship between students and professors in an online course. We discussed at length how to make use of the new capacity for real-time discussions with students.
The university is aware, as all of us at the meeting were, that there is something counter-intuitive about preparing teachers to interact with groups of students without actually requiring them to interact directly with anyone! National is even planning to require that the advanced class on instruction and classroom management be taken "on the ground" rather than online. This is clearly a recognition that learning to teach means learning to interact with real live people.
I was struck by the way that this trend to online teacher preparation parallels the trend to standardized curriculum and testing for the students themselves. Both are ways of spending less money to educate people. Online courses for teacher candidates cost less than ground classes, even if they are less effective. (That's not a provable claim, but it seems clear that online courses develop interpersonal skills less effectively.) Standardized curriculum and testing allows schools to run bigger class sizes, a necessity in this era of dismantling public institutions and services.
But online courses are also THE FUTURE. Everything is moving online in one form or another, and who are we to exempt education and teacher preparation from this trend? Am I just a cranky old guy showing my discomfort with the ether age, clinging desperately to my old-style classroom that students and teachers traipse into and out of, spending hours on the freeway to sit face to face when everything could be handled on the internet in the comfort of our own homes? Maybe. Oh, and I still love paper books too! and live music! and theater! and walks in the park and dinner with friends.
Anyway....notwithstanding this little rant, online courses are here to stay. We'd better make them as good as we can, taking advantage of features like instant communication, access to widespread resources, and geographical diversity while preserving the development of traditional teacher abilities to relate directly to students. Some things about people really don't change even when many other things change dramatically.
(Literary postscript: On the subject of electronic communication replacing face-to-face contact, I am reminded of a wonderful novel by Isaac Asimov that I remember vividly from many years ago--The Naked Sun. It's one of his robot series and is set in a breakaway Earth colony called Solaria. You can read a little summary of the novel here. You'll see what I mean.)
No comments:
Post a Comment