The future in online education looks exciting. It has the potential to open information and knowledge to people in a way unprecedented historically. It offers learners the power to learn when they want and learn how they want. Online access learning offers educators and learners a new realm to explore that may bring great achievements but runs many risks. Open online education will need to address and meet the realities of the K-12 student if it hopes to succeed. It will need to address at what level corporate interests can and should take part in the knowledge that is delivered.
Corporations & Education
Corporations getting involved in education could have some terrible ramifications and should be closely watched. There very easily could become a multi-tiered education system based on wealth and access. Furthermore, if not regulated, corporations could endorse beliefs that help them but not necessarily their students and have a hard bias. This needs to be watched closely to make sure that ethics requirements are being met and people are not being duped into bad or misleading education.
Current and Likely Future K-12 Educational Realities
Open online learning sounds great for the post secondary level but I’m not sure it meets the reality of the K-12 education system or the abilities of most students. Non-traditional learning methods, such as flipped classrooms, require students to be disciplined enough to do learning outside the classroom. I have not seen that discipline in most of my students. I have experimented with self paced learning with high school students as well and have discovered the, again, most students cannot regulate their time if there is not a strict deadline and will perpetually procrastinate if they think they can, much to my frustration. Perhaps with practice this habit could be broken but it would take a lot of work.
A concern of flipped classrooms and similar methods of education is that students need the time outside of school to socialize, work, and participate in other activities that are not school related. This is a personal belief, but I do not feel students should be getting a lot of homework from their classes. If a student receives 20-30 minutes of homework from 4 classes that is 1.5-2 hours of homework a night. This is time that should be spent developing social skills and trying activities outside school. If I tried to “flip” my classroom and have them watch a 5-minute video at home to be better prepared for the next day, I can almost guarantee that we as a class would have to watch that video together as many students would not take the time to do it. And what can I do? Not play the video for them?
Future of Online Learning
The applications listed in Future Technology Infrastructure for Learning by Siemens, Gasevic, & Dawson (2015) and the technology described by Downes (2019) in A Look at the Future of Open Educational Resources, show an exciting push to open education to learners of all types and backgrounds. ProSolo sounds like a promising educational system out of the many listed. It appears to address my concerns of giving students all the information they need to be successful. As these new technologies and methods are refined and find greater acceptance it may very well change the face of some educational forms as we see them. There are some limitations that I think should be noted. Learning a subject, such as woodwork, cannot be done well and realistically by students using a strictly online setting. A centralized location would likely still need to be used to offer all students the same tools and equipment.
Reading:
Siemens, G., Gašević, D., & Dawson, S. (2015). Preparing for the Digital University: A Review of the History and Current State of Distance, Blended, and Online Learning. Retrieved from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation website: http://linkresearchlab.org/PreparingDigitalUniversity.pdf * Please read pages 199-230, Future Technology Infrastructures for Learning
Downes, S. (2019). A Look at the Future of Open Educational Resources. International Journal of Open Educational Resources, 1(2). Retrieved from https://www.ijoer.org/a-lookat-the-future-of-open-educational-resources/
Virtually Connecting. Accessed October 17, 2019. http://virtuallyconnecting.org/virtually-connecting-manifesto/
Open online education is in its relative infancy and with that come many problems and growing pains that need to be addressed. It is important to be conscious of the way online technology bring us together socially both positively and negatively. We need to explore what work and what doesn’t and challenge ourselves to ideas that are different to our own to expand the conversation in search for truth and a better society. It is also important to consider the thing outside the social side of online education, such as data collection and the environmental and labour impacts of making technology.
Cliques and Closed Academic Communities
Academia has been accused by some of being too politically correct to the point of stifling debate before it has begun, sometimes stopping debate on subjects of merit. In Funes and Mackness’ example of Richard Dawkins coming to speak at the University of Berkley in 2017, Dawkins was likely not going to speak about Muslims and more likely on science and evolution (his subject area). Given that, it could be said that letting him speak about his subject matter does not equal hate speech despite his opinions on other subjects (as unfortunate as they may be).
On the other hand, I believe it is important that there should be room to shut down certain topics for debate. I think most people would agree that white supremacy is wrong and would likely not wish to welcome a debate of its merits. The only thing this would do is make a bunch of white people feel some power and victimize people of colour for no good reason. Perhaps universities need weigh the benefits versus the drawbacks when disputed speakers come to their facilities and then make the judgment call.
I sympathize with the University’s as well who have to consider the school population at large. University’s have been working hard for some time to make minorities feel welcome. It does not serve that interest by alienating them with speakers who may espouse views that could be seen as offensive or even hate speech.
Non-physical Communication and Detachment
I have always felt that people are willing to say worse things on the phone than in person and that goes doubly so for texting and the internet. As technologies distance us from each other and separate us physically we lose a context sometimes that the person on the other end of the communication is a person and that we would likely never speak to them in a harsh, mean, or rude way in real life.
Also, what makes online communication arguably worse than oral communication is that we have time to concoct a rebuttal and be our most clever and (sometimes) informed than we can in the moment of an in-person conversation.
Reading:
Funes, M., & Mackness, J. (2018). When inclusion excludes: A counter narrative of open online education. Learning, Media and Technology, 43(2), 119–138. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2018.1444638
Knox, J. (2019). What Does the ‘Postdigital’ Mean for Education? Three Critical Perspectives on the Digital, with Implications for Educational Research and Practice. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-019-00045-y
Caines, A., & Glass, E. (2019, Fall). Education before Regulation: Empowering Students to Question Their Data Privacy. EDUCAUSE Review, 54(4). Retrieved from https://er.educause.edu/articles/2019/10/education-beforeregulation-empowering-students-to-question-their-dataprivacy