The Scariest Trends in Education.

Accountability: Whenever a politician starts talking about accountability it usually means someone besides Congress has to be held accountable for something they have no control over. This is political code for stripping educators of tenure or their right to  bargain collectively. Click here to see how this is playing out in Fairfax County Fairfax County Firing

Accountability in education is revolving around cost. The same can be said for School Choice. School choice can be subtitled; “we’re going to strip the schools in the poor neighborhood of resources because they’re lousy and give them to better schools in better neighborhoods to reward them for having wealthier, more politically active parents.” In Washington D.C. this threat led to widespread test score fraud with the architect of the sneaking out of town to avoid getting smeared with the mess she caused (D.C. Test Fraud story).

The same cost/market forces approach is behind the concept of merit pay in education. The problem is, all consumers in the education “market” are not equal. For a market approach to really produce success, consumers (parents of school-age children) have to have equal access to schools. They do not and they never will. Low-income families live in impoverished, politically impotent districts that depend on the charity of their better-off neighbors, the state, or federal government for funding.

Why not have merit pay and unions? Or merit pay and tenure? That idea never seems to come up because the real reason for discussing merit pay is to reduce costs. Period. Cheaper education is only better education if you are being taxed to pay for someone else’s kids schools. the wealthy in America do not want to pay for the education of the poor and they are working very hard to elect political factotums who are working toward an end to public education. Unthinkable? Our government is working to privatize highways, prisons, utilities, and through voucher programs and school choice, education.  Recently a New york candidate for U.S. Congress advocated ending public education.

 

Blended Content and Assignments

I have two real biases when it comes to designing content and assignments regardless of delivery mode. These biases definitely shape the kinds of experiences I encourage faculty to use in the courses I help design. They also inform or affect the courses, workshops, and seminars I design and teach myself.

First, I (as previously mentioned in this blog) believe that learning occurs as a direct result of interaction. Second, I believe that project based learning offers the best opportunity for student learning, retention, and far transfer of knowledge.

Please understand that while I acknowledge these biases and hold these beliefs dearly, I do not hold them to the exclusion of other approaches or ideas about learning. I just think these two generally for the core of a solid, pedagogically sound approach to creating meaningful instruction, especially online where a more transmissive approach loses some of its spontaneity and drama but virtue of the fact that it is recorded and id delivered in a small video player, not fortissimo in a lecture hall.

As a result, the courses I design tend toward learn by doing. For example, in the faculty development course I am currently designing, instructors will be creating their courses as the culminating “assignment”. The finished course is the final project. The components of the course, the technology integration, course plan, goals and objectives, etc. are the assignments. The “students” in this case the faculty here at GW, will be learning by doing.

Assessment is in the form of formative feedback and a course review which I perform on every course before it runs a survey we perform mid-semester, and a faculty debrief I conduct at the end of the semester. In the first review I make certain predictions about how various elements will perform and the level of effectiveness of each. During the semester, we poll faculty on about a dozen issues or factors related to their course and make suggestions if the poll turns up problems or potential problems. After the course runs, I discuss these predictions with faculty during the debrief and we see how accurate we both were in terms of how students learned and “took to” the various assignments, technologies. How effective they were. How student performance in the call compared to previous online classes and to face-to-face classes as well.

In this way, I urge the creation of courses that best leverage both new technologies and well-proven learning strategies and ensure that these approaches are both effective and practical for the faculty I support.

Thinking About Teaching

I read an interesting article by Diane Pike on the topic of how we cling to dead ideas in teaching. More accurately, how we cling to ideas proven to be ineffective; for reasons we can not articulate. For example, we know grades do not motivate learning, but that is how most faculty and institutions assess learning. The current national obsession with accountability in education, focused mainly in K-12 but creeping into an insistence that colleges focus on creating “job-ready” graduates; demonstrates this insistence on using an idea we know to be false to make current policy.

Every year faculty grumble that students are not as prepared as they were 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago. First, Pike reminds us this can not possibly be true. Such an escalating lack of college readiness would have us teaching Dick and Jane in doctoral programs by now. Second, Pike says, so what? Why not focus on where we are rather than where any one administrator, faculty member, or politician says we were or should be?

My favorite part of the article was where Pike addressed the role of technology in teaching and learning. Most edtech professionals are already in the place Pike thinks higher ed should be, but it would be nice if everyone else joined us. Pike mentions a quote from an unnamed Minnesota governor expressing a prophecy that in the near future students will be buying their education from iTunes at $199.00 a course. The idea is that technology will rescue education and make it make higher education accessible, cheap, and decentralized. It won’t. Good online courses are expensive to create and time-consuming to teach.

Using technology in face-to-face courses, Pike suggests, is probably the biggest opportunity to affect learning but largely goes unexplored. Colleges an universities hire instructional design professionals for their online programs but not to work with faculty who teach traditionally. Those faculty educate the most students. Technology in the service of pedagogy, used to expand pedagogies, is a good thing. Technology for its own sake, not so much.

Pike, as a sociologist, understands that education takes place in a socialized context, not isolated from one. Politicians have done a great job of politicizing education. Based on the comments of most elected officials, injecting themselves and their ideological outlook on the process of learning seems to be more important than actually creating opportunities for citizens to get an education.

The article can be found here, and I urge anyone interested in teaching and learning in higher education to read it.

The need for institutional vision

When plotting a strategy for creating online and/or blended learning at a college or university, a strategic, institutional vision is cricital for success. At this point in time any number of institutions; large and small, first tier research universities and for-profit technical schools; have invested in online and blended courses.

One of the main questions faculty ask, especially those not enamored of the idea of abdicating their lecturn, is; “Is this hybrid stuff as good as traditional methods?” The honest answer is; It depends. It depends on the rigor of the instrucitonal design, the quality of institutional technology infrastructure, the skill of the instructor, and the quality of the courses developed.

This brings us back to the concept of institutional vision. This is important because without vision distance education can easily become the very nightmare Luddite’s fear most.

Good hybrid courses depend on good instructional design, but without institutional support there won’t be instrucitonal designers and technologists to assist faculty with the creation and maintanence of their online and hybrid courses.

Good hybrid courses are dependent on technology infrastructure. Without a clear, vision with regards to infrastructure, incorporating rich media, 24/7 access to course materials and other mainstays of a quality hybrid environment are not possible.

Finally, good hybrid courses are dependent on the skills of the instructor. By skills i mean both pedagogical understanding of hybrid education and technology skills to create and incorporate rich media into course offerings. If faculty are going to be skilled, the institution has to invest in faculty training and development. Which means staff and resources to train faculty who are experts in their field but often have no or only rudimentary backgrounds in pedagogy.

If any of these components are missing, any hope of creating a quality hybrid environment disintegrates rapidly.

I had to ask

 

I wanted to try to add a poll. Trying to learn the features that will make the blog more interesting.