Retrograde II: Hidden Costs
Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but is what’s new always best? We learn by reflecting on old mistakes, but re-tracing our steps also reveals hard-won wisdom from previous generations.
“Retrograde” is an ongoing series exploring how University Teaching has changed over the past 20 years. You can find Part 1 here.
Not too long ago, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were a novel jewel in the crown of Higher Education, making headlines as Big Education and Big Tech converged in productive synergy. Students from all across the world can access education from Ivy-league institutions, and the transformative potential it had on global education was palpable.
Fast forward a few years, and all of a sudden MOOCs were making headlines again for all the wrong reasons. The risks of >90% student drop out rate and ongoing workload implications for teachers made many institutions hesitate, and the value proposition of developing new free MOOCs became muddier and muddier.
How did the sector arrive at this point, and should we continue to design new online courses accessible to the masses? My answer is a resounding yes, but perhaps not for the reason you think. Let’s look backwards before we can look forwards and see what’s next.
PHASE 3: “The Revolution will be Televised” (2005 to 2010)
Automated lecture recordings are the bane of many teachers’ existence.
Will I be fact-checked by students if I say something wrong in the recording?
Will they even come to class if everything is recorded?
What once was a niche opt-in process has now become the default expectation, and automated lecture capture systems became in vogue just before 2010 and never went away. We want students to attend classes live but automated lecture capture seems to disincentivize in-person attendance. Naturally there is tension between students and teachers on this point all across the world.
The challenge for teachers is to create learning experiences that are more compelling than automated lecture recordings of a computer screen and a static-filled audio feed. What value do students get from actually coming to class? There are no easy answers here, and attending class will always come second to students working to pay bills, or fulfilling their carer duties. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, so I think opening a conversation with your students about attendance at the start of the semester is a good approach. Missing classes and catching up by watching lecture recordings is perfectly fine as an exception, but not great as the default rule for their learning.
Can you make this visible to them from the start of the semester?
Provide authentic learning activities that rely on collaborating with other students, co-constructing shared knowledge with teachers through undergraduate research, work-integrated learning opportunities or students as partners projects? There are more and more creative initiatives in this space to maximise student engagement both in and outside of class time, so you can pick a strategy that you’re most comfortable with as a teacher.
PHASE 4: “MOOCs, MOOCs, MOOCs” (2010 to 2015).
MOOCs started upscaling in their global reach in 2012 and that continues to this day. Every university or college is thinking about how to compete in this online space, and the institutions with billions in endowments can afford to experiment with this at the highest levels. Ironically the intended audience for MOOCs - students who have never studied or experienced higher education before - benefit the least from independent online learning. The high dropout rate for MOOCs (>90% in some instances!) has been well documented. It is in fact us - teachers, and other professional learners with one degree or qualification already under our belt, who have the skills and motivation to propel our independent learning forward through MOOCs.
This is the main reason that I am a strong advocate for MOOCs - teachers have just as much to learn (and gain) as students from the process.
These early MOOCs served as the prototype for how online learning is done today. Graphics, animations, video, voiceover - a range of high quality multimedia resources that teachers typically don’t know how to create. The professional learning required in this space alongside the rest of our jobs as academics or faculty members is daunting. There is a lot of value though, for teachers to learn something about multimedia creation.
Yes it could be as simple as drawing your own diagrams, and not being at the mercy of textbook publishers updating their figures every single year, all the way to recording podcasts or videos tailored for your students - to create that sense of an individualised learning experience…
How should you go about learning these skills? Well this just so happens to be another ripple effect of the MOOC movement - the internet is flooded with free online courses teaching you how to do everything, especially in the creative industries. A quick YouTube search will show you how to use any of the programs that content creators rely on to animate, edit, and publish their work online, and these are all designed to be small digestible chapters for you to work through at your own pace.
Professional learners seem to benefit the most from the results of MOOCs more than new learners fresh to higher education, so teachers should take advantage of these free resources.
Jack.
