OLDaily

Offering Seminar Courses Remotely
Wendy James, Educatus, 2020/06/05

This is a very matter-of-fact description of what a seminar course session requires and how to offer it online. Here's what it requires (quoted):

1. A prompt or text(s) that the student considers independently in advance
2. Guiding questions that require analysis, synthesize and/or evaluation of ideas
3. The opportunity to share personal thinking with a group
4. Ideas being developed, rejected, and refined over time based on everyone’s contributions

Each of these is described in an online context in some detail. The considerations are worth reading, though I would prefer a slightly less prescriptive approach. But the main thing here is to focus on these four basic requirements and to think about how they can be supported online. Do you really need to have everyone go to a multi-million dollar building to do this?

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Academic Freedom in a Pandemic
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2020/06/05

Alex Usher makes the point that while universities may be promising high quality learning experiences in the fall, there's no way they can actually guarantee this, because "they have no teaching quality standards for their courses, online or otherwise. This was outsourced to individual faculty members long ago." He recommends that university Senates take the step of imposing three conditions on faculty (quoted):

• lay out a comprehensive plan that pays for every professor to take some kind of instruction in online pedagogy,
• ask Senate to require every professor teaching this term to take such a course, require them to lay out a plan for a revised course delivery... and empower department chairs to reject plans, and
• empower Deans to revise faculty workload expectations for the summer, favouring course preparation over research, and adjusting tenure/promotion/merit assessments accordingly.

The problem (in my view) isn't the plan, the problem is the precedent it would set. If the central authority (Senate, government, whatever) is in a position to stipulate on such matters, then it is no longer the academic who is offering the course, it is the central authority. Maybe in the end that's the only way to do it, but I can't for a moment imagine academics agreeing to this.

You see, one thing online learning has never come to grips with is the fact that being an academic, being a university professor, isn't the same as being a teacher (despite the commodification and institutionalizing of that part of their work over the last half-dozen decades). Their primary work is to be researchers (whatever than entails). Nobody gets into (say) quantum physics because they want to teach. For online learning to more forward it is necessary to devise a mechanism that allows professors to continue to be researchers (and therefore, at times, teachers of indifferent quality) while at the same time enabling students to take advantage of (some) access to these researchers in an effort to support and pursue their own learning. But I don't see anybody (except maybe me) talking about supporting learning in this way.

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