Shifting Paradigms in Education
“History,” wrote Thomas Kuhn in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Substitute ‘education’ for ‘science’ and you understand the current state of play with online learning. Education has changed time and again- who is educated, what they’re educated in, why they’re educated, and yes, how they’re educated- and each time it has, the old guard has bemoaned the loss of tradition. The paradigm is shifting.
Why In-Person Education Still Matters
This doesn’t mean that in-person education is over. People still write by hand, listen to the radio, and open the window when it’s hot out. Technological advances are threats only if we are too invested in the way things are to imagine them being different. As far as education goes, there are good reasons to welcome change.
Advantages of Online Learning
One advantage of online education is access: people without physical access to brick-and-mortar institutions can still participate.
Another is the diversity of perspectives: when students living in disparate parts of the globe participate in the same classes, they are exposed to a greater diversity of social, cultural, and political viewpoints. I experienced this first-hand in my work with the Open Society University Network (OSUN), which connected students and faculty from 40+ institutions on five continents. Students from Africa and the West Bank studied human rights with teachers in Taiwan; students from Europe and the US read Persian literature with classmates from Afghanistan. They met people they would not have otherwise met, studied with faculty from institutions on the other side of the world, encountered disciplines, texts, and ideas not otherwise available to them. This is true for their teachers also, who were exposed to a great diversity of viewpoints and had the incredible opportunity to be asked questions they would never get at home.
A third advantage is that online education can enhance curricular and institutional planning. Academic departments plan courses so that the right courses are offered in the right numbers, that there is adequate faculty coverage consonant with sabbaticals, etc. If we conceive of our faculty and curricula as including online partners and plan accordingly, we have more options available to us: my institution doesn’t need to cover my course when I am on sabbatical because we know it will be offered by partner campus Y, who has agreed to hold a certain number of online seats for my institution’s students. It requires a good deal of coordination (this is largely what I did as an OSUN administrator) but the results redound- and it preserves the tuition revenue of the home institution.
Common Concerns About Online Learning
On-line education can help students, teachers, and institutions. What’s not to love? One concern is that students in asynchronous classes are just clicking through screens without learning anything. Some may be. Others are taking advantage of the opportunity to participate while riding the bus to work, while their city suffers an internet outage, while their children are asleep in their one room apartment, etc. Are the numbers substantively different from the number of students sitting in the back of the lecture hall watching videos or the seminar students having chat-GPT summarize the reading?
While the data shows that learning outcomes are lower for asynchronous learners than synchronous learners, it also suggests that large lectures have learning outcomes that are more or less equivalent to asynchronous classes, and that small seminars are better than lectures. Yet we don’t hear so much clamoring about lectures, do we? (Is this because large lectures are cost- and labor-saving without sacrificing revenue?) And we know that 1-1 instruction does better than seminars (decidedly not a cost-saving move!) and well, you get the idea.
A second major concern is assessment- how can we know whether the students in our online classes actually did the work? Higher education is suffering a crisis of assessment, to be sure. We hear this complaint almost verbatim about LLM use in our in-person classes, though; the issue is not unique to the online setting; I think the concern does – like online education itself – invite (require!) us as educators to rethink our practices. Why are we asking students to write papers? To what extent is memorization of dates or formulas criterial for having learned? What are we trying to teach our students and what are the best ways of assessing that? What new modes of assessment are available to us, and how have learning outcomes shifted in the generations since we were students?
Teaching for Today
We insist upon teaching as we were taught and assessing as we were assessed. Why? We write differently than we wrote, we are entertained differently, and on hot summer nights, we cool ourselves differently. Why not teach differently?