George Veletsianos, PhD

Category: futures Page 4 of 5

The 7 elements of a good online course

By

On August 31, 2020

In flexible learning, future education, futures, my research, online learning, scholarship

In June, I wrote the article below for The Conversation. Today I start teaching my Fall 2020 (online) course on the foundations, histories, myths, and futures surrounding learning technologies, and I thought it was a good time to republish this piece here under its original Creative Commons license as a reminder for myself and others. The original article is here.

The 7 elements of a good online course

It’s likely that most universities will be conducting classes online in the fall. That doesn’t mean learning will suffer. (Shutterstock)

With very few exceptions, online teaching and learning will be the primary mode of education for the majority of higher education students in many jurisdictions this fall as concerns about COVID-19 extend into the new school year.

As an education researcher who has been studying online education and a professor who has been teaching in both face-to-face and online environments for more than a decade, I am often asked whether online learning at universities and colleges can ever be as effective as face-to-face learning.

To be clear: this isn’t a new question or a new debate. I’ve been asked this question in various forms since the mid-2000s and researchers have been exploring this topic since at least the 1950s.

The answer isn’t as unequivocal as some would like it to be. Individual cherry-picked studies can support any result. But systematic analyses of the evidence generally show there are no significant differences in students’ academic outcomes between online and face-to-face education.

Researchers also find that some students perform worse online than others — and that some of those differences can be explained by socioeconomic inequities.

Advice for students and parents

The problems with media comparison studies — that is, those that compare outcomes between one medium, such as face-to-face, to another medium, such as online — are such that many researchers advocate against them. How can students who enrol in online courses in the fall know they are receiving a good educational experience? What are some of the qualities of a good online course?

Good online courses can be more personal and rewarding for students than the traditional learning in large lecture halls. (Shutterstock)

Here’s some advice for students (and their parents) about what to look for as learning remains online.

  1. A good online course is informed by issues of equity and justice. It takes into account social, political and cultural issues — including students’ backgrounds and socioeconomic circumstances — to craft a learning experience that is just. This may take many forms. In practice, it may mean a diverse and intersectional reading list. It means audiovisual materials that don’t stereotype, shame or degrade people. It may mean that open educational resources are prioritized over expensive textbooks.
  2. A good online course is interactive. Courses are much more than placeholders for students to access information. A good online course provides information such as readings or lecture videos, but also involves interactions between professor and students and between students and students. Interactions between professor and students may involve students receiving personalized feedback, support and guidance. Interactions among students may include such things as debating various issues or collaborating with peers to solve a problem. A good online course often becomes a social learning environment and provides opportunities for the development of a vibrant learning community.
  3. A good online course is engaging and challenging. It invites students to participate, motivates them to contribute and captures their interest and attention. It capitalizes on the joy of learning and challenges students to enhance their skills, abilities and knowledge. A good online course is cognitively challenging.
  4. A good online course involves practice. Good courses involve students in “doing” — not just watching and reading — “doing again” and in applying what they learned. In a creative writing class, students may write a short story, receive feedback, revise it and then write a different story. In a computer programming class, they may write a block of code, test it and then use it in a larger program that they wrote. In an econometrics class, they might examine relationships between different variables, explain the meaning of their findings and then be asked to apply those methods in novel situations.
  5. A good online course is effective. Such a course identifies the skills, abilities and knowledge that students will gain by the end of it, provides activities developed to acquire them and assesses whether students were successful.
  6. A good online course includes an instructor who is visible and active, and who exhibits care, empathy and trust for students. This individual understands that their students may have a life beyond their course. Not only do many students take other courses, but they may be primary caretakers, have a job or be struggling to make ends meet. Good online courses often include instructors who are approachable and responsive, and who work with students to address problems and concerns as they arise.
  7. A good online course promotes student agency. It gives students autonomy to enable opportunities for relevant and meaningful learning. Such a course redistributes power – to the extent that is possible – in the classroom. Again, this may take many forms in the online classroom. In the culinary arts, it may mean making baking choices relevant to students’ professional aspirations. In an accounting course, students could analyze the financial statements of a company they’re interested in rather than one selected by the instructor. Such flexibility not only accommodates students’ backgrounds and interests, it provides space for students to make the course their own. In some cases it might even mean that you – the student – co-designs the course with your instructor. This is the kind of flexibility higher education systems need.

These qualities aren’t qualities of good online courses. They are qualities of good courses, period.

Physical proximity isn’t a precondition for good education. Comparing one form of education to another distracts us from the fact that all forms of education can — and should — be made better.

What’s the future like? Speculative Methods in Networked Learning workshop

By

On May 13, 2020

In futures, scholarship, speculative futures

Jen Ross and I are leading a workshop on speculative methods as part of the 2020 Networked Learning (online) conference. It takes place on May 19 at 8am Pacific (4pm UK) and it’s free to attend. Our session will be held in this Adobe connect room: https://c.deic.dk/aristotle/

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, United States. Unsplash.

The workshop will last 55 minutes. Our schedule is as follows:

Workshop Description

The goal of this workshop is to introduce participants to speculative methods and explore their application to the field as a way of imagining potential futures and scenarios for learning, design, and technology. We define speculative methods as “research approaches that explore and create possible futures under conditions of complexity and uncertainty” (Ross, 2018). We aim to facilitate a broader conversation regarding the future of technology and networks in education through the exploration of the use of speculative methods as research methodologies.

Recent years have seen increased interest in and discussion of education futures. Some of the emergent discussions include conversations around how technologies manifest themselves in our daily lives and educational experiences (Aagaard, 2018), and what may be appropriate pedagogies to equip learners for the future economy (Facer & Sandford, 2010). As Ross (2017) argues, envisioning futures also “inform[s] us about what matters now in the field, what issues and problems we have inherited and what debates define what can or cannot be currently thought about or imagined” (p. 220).

Considering that the current state of education, at all levels, is situated within a context of ever-evolving social, cultural, political, and technological shifts, there is a need for networked learning scholars and practitioners to explore various ways that they can imagine and design future potentials and realities. The use of speculative methods enables researchers to ascertain and discern between probable, possible, and preferable trajectories (Bell, 2017) to offer evidence-based guidance when making current decisions related to networked learning, and to explore what may or may not be possible in their own contexts. They also give us tools for taking critical perspectives on the nature of the future itself, and how we think about and work towards particular education futures (Facer 2016). In prior iterations of this workshop (Veletsianos, Belikov, & Johnson, 2019), participants appreciated being able to think creatively about the future and identify micro, meso, and macro obstacles to reaching them.

Intended Audience

Individuals interested in critically exploring and designing education futures. These include students and academics (who may be interested in applying this method to their scholarship), and practitioners such as learning designers or administrators (who may be interested in using this method in institutional change-making efforts). This workshop is appropriate for anyone with an interest in designing and developing learning environments, creating new learning experiences, exploring the opportunities and challenges created by new or current technologies, leading conversations at their institutions around potential futures for their programs and departments, and exploring a variety of other potential futures for their work and scholarship.

Speculative futures: Social media surveillance at higher education institutions

By

On February 7, 2020

In futures, speculative fiction, speculative futures

In continuing to explore speculative futures (see Gig Profs) it seems important to note that what I am posting are by no means predictions of the futures. Rather, they’re extensions of events, news, practices, and technologies that comes across my desk. To this end, I’ll include some footnotes at the end of each artifact to highlight the connections between artifact and events/news/etc. I hope to use these futures not only to highlight dystopian and utopian futures, but to explore ways for universities to aim towards better, richer, and more equitable futures.

Here’s today’s artifact. It’s a fictitious email sent from a risk and brand management company providing services to a university.

Future email describing negative sentiment toward institution and stating which individuals are related to it

Footnotes

  1. See 3/4 down the page of this news item showing a similar email from a media relations team pertaining to a SOGI event at UBC.
  2. Fama.io is a software that purports to screen for “toxic workplace behaviour.” Here’s an example of an individual whose background check included a report from this (heads up: extensive swearing).
  3. After analyzing university social media guidelines, Lough & Samek (2014) write: “Across the guidelines, framing of social media use by academic staff (even for personal use) as representative of the university assumes academic staff should have an undying loyalty to their institution. The guidelines are read as obvious attempts to control rather than merely guide, and speak to the nature of institutional over-reach in the related names of reputation (brand), responsibility (authoritarianism), safety (paternalistically understood and enforced), and the free marketplace of [the right] ideas.” — Lough, T., & Samek, T. (2014). Canadian university social software guidelines and academic freedom: An alarming labour trend. The Digital Future of Education, 21, 45-56.

Flexible learning as a value

By

On January 28, 2020

In flexible learning, future education, futures

The quote below argues that flexible learning is not a modality, as is often suggested in the literature. Rather, it is a value – a guiding principle. others have argued the same way about openness – that it is an ethos. This is a helpful way to think about flexibility. Inevitably though, it raises questions about its assumptions and outcomes: Is flexibility always “good?” For whom is it “good?” Arguing for making education “less flexible” is of course nonsensical, but the point isn’t to argue for something to be less than. It’s to ask how to think about and mobilize flexibility for education to be more equitable.

Flexible learning is a state of being in which learning and teaching is increasingly freed from the limitations of the time, place and pace of study. But this kind of flexibility does not end there. For learners, flexibility in learning may include choices in relation to entry and exit points, selection of learning activities, assessment tasks and educational resources in return for different kinds of credit and costs. And for the teachers it can involve choices in relation to the allocation of their time and the mode and methods of communication with learners as well as the educational institution. As such flexible learning, in itself, is not a mode of study. It is a value principle, like diversity or equality are in education and society more broadly. Flexibility in learning and teaching is relevant in any mode of study including campus-based face-to-face education.

Naidu, S. (2017) How flexible is flexible learning, who is to decide and what are its implications? Distance Education 38(3), 269–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/01587919.2017.1371831

Speculative futures: Gig Profs

By

On January 20, 2020

In futures, speculative fiction, speculative futures

The future that Tim Maughan describes in Zero Hours – involving zero contact hours, bidding on multiple contracts with multiple employers, pitting workers against each other, lack of transparency, unknown work hours, and so on – is one that (unfortunately) isn’t too far off from the current path that sessional and adjunct faculty are currently placed on.

In imaging what the current situation may look like in the near future, I came up with the dystopia shown below. I’d love to hear your reactions to this. Is such a future far-fetched?


Speculative fiction in edtech and digital learning research

By

On August 21, 2019

In flexible learning, future education, futures, sharing, speculative fiction, speculative futures

https://twitter.com/veletsianos/status/1161317005418516480?s=20
Speculative fiction

I am increasingly drawn to the writing of speculative fiction as a way to study, imagine, and critique the future of education. Jen Ross (who, incidentally and fortuitously, is developing an Education Futures pathway, and would love your feedback) recently argued for engaging speculative methods in digital education research, and that work has been very helpful.

While some may discount these approaches and view them as a far-cry from “serious” scholarship and “real science,” Plowman argues that “narrative isn’t just a shaping device: it helps us think, remember, communicate, and make sense of ourselves and the world…The role of narrative is not therefore simply aesthetic, it is central to our cognition from earliest childhood.” Importantly, many fields already engage storytelling and narrative for both pedagogical and knowledge-discovery purposes. For instance,

  • one of the most popular books in instructional design is the ID CaseBook which presents numerous case studies of individuals engaging with typical instructional design problems and issues
  • here’s a bit of work done on using story completion methods in qualitative research
  • and some work in sociological fiction, including some speculative fiction

But, what would speculative fiction concerned with the future of education or some aspect of digital learning look like? Here’s just a few examples:

What are your thoughts the use of fiction for scholarship? Have you read any other fiction set in the near-future that deals with education?

Strategies for addressing the Canadian post-secondary sector crisis

By

On June 4, 2019

In flexible learning, future education, futures, Ideas

I was on a flight from Toronto to Vancouver on Saturday morning, and spent some of my time thinking about the strategies that Tony Bates believes may be helpful in addressing the coming crisis in Canadian post-secondary education.

I share Tony’s qualms concerning the future of higher education in Canada. In this post, I am going to share some thoughts in response to one question that he raised: What other suggestions would you have for making our institutions more relevant for a digital age?

People sitting on grass having a conversation
People sitting – by Ben Duchac on Unsplash

Before I go further, I should clarify two points:

I agree with Tony that we need radical curricular reform and compulsory training for every faculty member on how to teach. I also agree that we need new digital universities, which incidentally says nothing about the appetite for and/or challenges of such an endeavour. I imagine that Tony calls for new digital universities because a blank canvas offers space room for new/different ideas than revisiting henceforth established practices. While the BC government is exploring such a feat with the expansion of post-secondary opportunities on Vancouver Island’s West shore, these opportunities aren’t bountiful. So, within the existing system, what may be some strategies for current universities beyond the ones that Tony proposes?

1. A team-based approach to every course. A team-based approach invites the knowledge and expertise of multiple groups of people to the design and development of a course. For instance, this might involve every single course employing the services of an instructional designer in a meaningful way. To truly involve an instructional designer, as opposed to merely asking for input that may or may not be taken up, we need to restructure course design, development, and evaluation practices. At a fundamental level, this requires involving faculty, instructional designers, learning scientists, evaluation consultants, and media professionals in what is typically a solo approach.

What problem does this address? Improving teaching and learning. This proposal works in conjunction with Tony’s recommendation to provide compulsory training in digital learning. Such training will be invaluable in the act of teaching and facilitation, and will be helpful in having conversations with a team of professionals about course design, but we need to do more.

2. An education that is flexible to the needs of society. Our institutions are often grounded on structures that invite students to fit neatly within a template that we’ve created (e.g., courses start in September) or make drastic changes to their lives in order to fit that template (e.g., moving to a different city).

How much flexibility is there in typical degree programs? How many courses are electives? In how many courses do students select from a menu of assignments, assessments, or outcomes? This is not to satisfy mere preferences but to provide education that is responsive to needs and and realities that people face – people who have multiple and competing responsibilities.

I’ll use the practice of flexible admissions here to illustrate. Imagine someone who ended their undergraduate studies ten years ago in order to care for a family member. Or someone who holds a diploma and has been working in their chosen profession for the last 15 years. Or, someone who holds multiple diplomas and has 3 years of work experience. Now imagine these three individuals desiring further learning through an undergraduate or graduate degree. Institutions that are relevant to the needs of society should be able to offer paths to credentials that not only recognize prior coursework, but value prior experiences, learning, and knowledge. We know that universities do not have a monopoly on learning and knowledge and that a classroom of people from diverse backgrounds may provide an enriching learning experience for all. Why then exclude learners who may not have followed a typical path to learning? Flexible admissions policies address this issue by providing alternative paths to education. While some universities in Canada do this (including Royal Roads University, UOIT, and Athabasca University), flexible admissions that recognize prior learning, competence, effort, and accomplishments are not the norm.

What problem does this address? Life is complicated and many people follow non-linear paths to education either by choice or due to forces outside of their control. A relevant higher education institution is inclusionary, and flexibility is one approach to eradicating exclusionary and limiting practices.

This area requires caution: There might be a tendency here to eliminate student barriers without concomitantly providing supports that will enable students to succeed. One form of flexibility for example may be a self-designed, self-paced, and self-guided program of study that imagines students as individualistic and autonomous individuals who succeed without institutional and societal support.

3. Rapid engagement. Imagine that your institution wishes to launch a new program, perhaps an MA degree on Indigenous Knowledge or Educational Entrepreneurship or Critical Animal Studies or FinTech or Climate Emergency or any sort of programming that is new to your institution. Is it possible to go from concept to launch in matter of a few months? Probably not at present, but that’s what we should be striving for. To do so we need to eliminate bureaucracies that impede innovation both at the institutional level, but also at the provincial level (where programs are approved). This is not to say that institutions should strive to chase the next high-enrolling program or to abandon the deep critical work that universities do, but to say that innovation is a staple – a characteristic even – of universities, and we should strive to reduce the barriers facing it. Removing such barriers may also do something else: it might enable academia to set the stage for discussion rather than respond to a discussion.

What problem does this address? Slow responsiveness to changing societal needs and barriers to innovation.

There’s little in the notes above regarding research, commitment to research, affordability, social justice, and so on, which are issues that I believe are also at the core of this conversation. Over to you: What are your thoughts, recommendations, and suggestions on this topic?

Page 4 of 5

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén