A cliffside view of Santa Cruz Island in the Channel Islands.
The most common question I’ve been asked over the past four months is a simple one: what do you think the future of online learning is in higher education?
It’s one of these million dollar questions that almost everyone working in higher education technology, teaching, and learning spaces hears. But it’s an impossible question to answer because I don’t know what “online learning” even means anymore. My line (mantra?) for years (even prior to the pandemic!) is that, to some extent, all learning now is online learning. With some rare exceptions, most college classes require students to log in to an online portal of some kind to access course materials. For the most part, students submit their assignments to learning management systems and likely engage in a number of learning activities online from reading to writing to problem solving and research. While college students and faculty alike may profess preference for “face-to-face” classes, the reality is much more nuanced insofar as faculty and students alike tend to experience something that’s really more of a mix of online and face-to-face experiences (EDUCAUSE and Bay View Analytics both have some good data on this disconnect between preference and reality; since 2012, in fact, the Bay View Analytics research group has pointed out the “paradoxes” in faculty preferences towards teaching modalities and lived experiences).
Indeed, there remains an imaginary of what college is (a “pure” intellectual enterprise disconnected from the messy, interconnected realities of being plugged in and online) and what the reality of college is (a highly interconnected, fully lived experience, inseparable from a reality where our civic lives and our online lives are increasingly, if not fully, intertwined). And while I think that higher education is and can be a special, protected space to explore ideas and be committed to the work of learning, it does us (students, faculty, and higher ed staff alike) a disservice to try and imagine a higher ed that is fully isolated from global contexts, like the trauma of living in a worldwide pandemic.
So, when I was asked to be the virtual keynote the Online Learning Consortium’s Innovate conference this year with a theme about “reimagining education,” I was excited for the opportunity to reflect on how we can define what a future for online learning is at this critical juncture in the wake of massive focus on teaching with technology.
In a later post (to be linked here), I’ll share the slides and an overview of what the keynote is actually about. But that’s not really what this post is for: this post is to offer a few reflections leading up to the keynote, to inform the decisions I made for it, and importantly, to tackle some qualms I have about a future of online learning events that are sponsored by predatory EdTech companies.
Why “Imaginative, Strategic, Sustainable?”
Let’s start with the three key words in this keynote: imaginative, strategic, sustainable. Why are these three words such important anchors in defining what a future for online learning can and should look like?
- Imaginative: A lot of the online teaching practices that emerged in the pandemic were attempts to recreate what happens in an on-campus classroom, which quite simply, didn’t and couldn’t work online. I get why that happened: it was enough cognitive load to learn a whole bunch of new technologies, much less to reimagine pedagogical practices in a quick pivot turn in 2020. Yet that attempt to fully recreate the lecture, the instructor as full room controller, the desire for student compliance to have cameras on, to appear attentive all indicated to me a lack of imagination about what a learning space could be. I am still having conversations about exactly the same topics over and over again: the prevalence of online cheating, whether “camera-on” policies are “OK,” whether students plagiarize writing more online. The endless deja vu hand wringing over student compliance made me feel kind of depressed because it felt like we still hadn’t learned that successful learning experiences are not compliance exercises alone. And sure, we want students to take their work seriously and to complete their efforts honestly. But making learning all about policing felt like exactly the wrong approach, and that turned out to be the approach that so many leaned even more heavily into during pandemic instruction. So, I’ll be addressing what it means to design learning experiences that are transformative, creative, and imaginative, to reconsider ways that we re-center students’ experiences that don’t demand rigid compliance, but rather, that welcome open and honest participation.
- Strategic: Technology decisions in higher ed are often what I like to call “red-alarm” decisions. Someone somewhere needed a tool yesterday and now we just need to buy it, no questions asked! But we should be asking questions about the technology procurements we make, and lots of them. There is a tremendous amount of labor that can and should, but often doesn’t, go into understanding the full implications of adopting new technologies for teaching and learning. Given how vulnerable the learning experience is, we truly cannot risk adopting tools that would put student privacy, accessibility, or inclusion at risk and, yet… That’s exactly what we do much of the time. That’s why so many institutions reactively adopted surveillance-based tools during the pandemic. That’s why so many institutions continue to support technologies that simply do not work for everyone: because someone in a position of power wanted it and got it. So, in the future, we need to reimagine infrastructure that makes strategic decision-making possible, that re-aligns pedagogical and technological needs. Examining the relationship between pedagogical decision-making and technology adoption can and should be iterative, too: there is no linear decision-making in this space because it should be about regularly assessing what the tool does, how it works, who it serves (or hurts), and what the impacts of the tool are on faculty, students, and staff alike.
- Sustainable: I’m in a unique role in higher education where I really straddle multiple worlds: I’m an administrator, an educator, a peer, a direct report, and a leader all at the same time for different groups of people all at once. And from that vantage point, I see just how hard everyone is working. I think it’s safe to say that I don’t know a single person who has not been racing to work at full speed (and then some), even prior to the pandemic. Constant hard work is not sustainable, nor is the work that I see go into a lot of teaching. Faculty and staff success is student success, and if we can’t get a handle on workloads that are humane, balanced, and, yes, flexible, I’m not sure we can sustain the energy of so many good people who want to do the valuable work of advancing educational goals. I’ll speak to ways that we can sustain our energies and support student success without burning ourselves out.
On Predatory EdTech Conference Sponsors
About three weeks ago, I received several messages on Twitter asking if I was aware of the sponsors for the OLC Innovate conference. Several of the highest-level sponsors of the conference where I’ll be keynoting are notorious EdTech companies that have a clear track record of engaging in predatory practices that exploit student privacy in particular (the Electronic Frontier Foundation has done a great job of tracking the multiple lawsuits and privacy infringements from a particular remote proctoring company).
I am convinced, at this point, that there is no good pedagogical reason to adopt remote proctoring software (especially if there is no human intervention, as many of these tools are designed to run automatically based on facial-detection algorithms). I am equally as convinced that there is no good pedagogical reason to adopt plagiarism detection software (which mines student data to create datasets that can detect “academic dishonesty”). But the pedagogical efficacy of these tools is not why they exist: they exist because faculty are over-worked and are eager to find solutions to solve sticky pedagogical problems like cheating and academic dishonesty.
If faculty had reasonable working conditions and sufficient teaching training, there probably wouldn’t be such a large market for “quick-fix” academic dishonesty tools. Yet here we are. And here we are in a situation where major academic technology conferences are often sponsored (and powered by) vendors that have exploited the gaps in faculty labor conditions (and the gaps in higher ed admin and faculty understandings of how a lot of edtech actually works).
I’m going to be very honest when I say that I felt torn about whether to retain my speaking role at OLC because of the sponsorship. The analogy I used with friends and family to explain my dilemma was that it felt a bit like speaking a wilderness preservation conference sponsored by animal poachers. A lot of edtech can be marketed as “student-centered,” but if the tool’s core functionality is to extract student information and to detect signs of “cheating” with actions as innocent as glancing away from the screen momentarily, then it’s a tool that’s rotten at its core. It just doesn’t feel right to support, even implicitly, things that we know don’t work that well and that may, in fact, actively cause harm.
But I’ll still be speaking at OLC today. I’ll use the platform to be explicit in criticism, to make the space a space for discussion, and to point out where the harm is being caused from within a community of online educators that may be part of (unknowingly?) causing harm to students, faculty, and staff alike. Honestly, I don’t know how effective it will be to take this approach. I’m still not sure if I’ve made the right decision. But I know that I can use the position of relative privilege and power to ask questions, to point out areas where change is desperately needed, and to add one more voice of alarm and caution about uncritical edtech adoption to the conversation.
My decision ties back into the three keywords that I’ll be expanding upon in my keynote today: much predatory edtech exists largely because don’t think imaginatively about what teaching and learning can look like, because we aren’t strategic or thoughtful in our tool adoption, and because we haven’t adopted enough sustainable practices to make student-centered teaching really work. The “imaginary” college experience is quite rigid: we need to break beyond our assumptions and expectations about what college can be, and look at what it really is to make it better. That’s what I’m going to try and advocate for today.
My approach may not be enough. I’m open to dialogue about this. But I hope that in being open and transparent about how I’ll approach this keynote and what changes I’d like to see a future for higher ed make, I can at least amplify the myriad concerns about predatory edtech that have been echoed by many, many others before me.
With Gratitude
I want to briefly thank the following folks for dialoguing with me on this topic: Maha Bali, Rajiv Jhangiana, Karen Costa, and Valerie Irvin. Each of you spent significant time writing and sharing your ideas with me. I’m grateful for our conversations and for your care.