I have been thinking about education a lot these days. Mostly because the sharpened cleaver that is student loan debt hangs over my head at all times. I think about my experience personally as well as my younger family members and family friend’s children as many of them are graduating. I’m proud of them and most of them are actually pretty bright kids (one of them is God’s dumbest creatures but their heart is pure so they’ll be alright). I was thinking about all this technology advancement and stuff and I was just curious what would it be like if education online didn’t suck.
The hooks and fangs of the private sector are all over online education. Countless for-profit websites, applications, and services that gamify learning. Even most textbook publishers have their own online learning platforms (which are all “AI POWERED™®©” for some reason) . They vary in quality but all uniformly paywall education which could also be said of traditional higher education system but at least traditional education is built on the premise of social reproduction and social utility rather just the profit motive alone.
There also non-profits organizations that provide some education online, though to be frank the term “non-profit organizations” can be a box of vipers. Some are groups are rock solid and genuinely want to do good, others are hedge funds that help people as a side gig. I don’t know how I feel about places like Khan academy for example. I think it has probably helped a lot of students but also if that’s the goal supposedly why not just make open?
There is an existing patchwork of open/free courses universities all over the globe. all manner of courses which is of course rad as hell. There also Shadow libraries and other 🏴☠️Yarharr 🏴☠️ sites that provide substantial academic resources. There also of course tons of venerable and good hearted teachers and instructors of all fields that put their know-how on places like YouTube and share pretty freely and openly. Which is also cool and good.
I feel like online education with a more open internet type mindset would be a great way to get people to learn, or at least supplement their learning. There is so much human knowledge that is locked behind gates when it ought to just open and out there. The free exchange of information was one of the core principles of the advent of the internet and it just seems like a good fit for education. It seems like a good counter to everyone using the machine to learn for them.
I don’t know just sort of thinking out loud on the internet but what do you think? I feel like internet/online learning could be a real boon for students and people everywhere and implemented in some sort of PBS-style open not for profit way. Like a local library for everyone on the NET.
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I don’t have a particular insight to share, but I would like to share my perspective as an educator.
A large portion of my work specifically is curriculum development for new online programming that was hastily cobbled together in the wake of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. The immediate need for a complete switch to online learning shifted a lot of priorities. With the return to face-to-face, we’ve made it a commitment at my organization to fine-tune and develop online and hybrid coursework in response to something that was made glaringly obvious: the Internet provided a massive benefit to learners facing a wide variety of barriers.
Childcare, work commitments, dis/ability, adherence to rigid class schedules, transportation, location, addiction, criminalization (and the multitude of access barriers that come with that), spoken language proficiency, social comfort: the list of barriers that can be overcome or reduced by the application of online/hybrid learning is unbelievable.
Sure, there’s a whole host of other barriers that come with online learning–device/web access, proficiency, the digital divide, a need for greater internal motivation, different learning styles/skills–but the benefits are impossible to ignore.
However the implementation of online learning is really all over the place.
Distance education’s origins lie in correspondence schooling, which was introduced largely to target rural areas and played a massive role in early educational efforts for women, as they were able to access education while at home. This evolved with radio, and later, television, educational programming. This was supported by governments/granting bodies so far as it was economically beneficial to raise women and rural workers’ educational level. But no farther. Online education was adopted rather quickly, but it primarily followed the correspondence education model. The field of pedagogy (and the newly burgeoning field of andragogy) was slow to incorporate models of education that could fully make use of the unprecedented interactivity offered by online distance courses.
Development on this front was generally slow (though of course more rapid in locations with large educational deficits and rural populations). You can probably already see why: distance education was revolutionary because of its ability to reach otherwise marginalized learners. Providing access to education for previously unreached communities is exactly how bourgeois education does not want to function. The barriers are a function of the system specifically to ensure that certain parts of the population are funnelled away from pursuing education beyond what’s needed to socially reproduce the workers required for any given area based on the level of industry present. Efforts to improve distance were met with low funding, and derision. The popular conception of distance education as inferior was essential to undervaluing the potential of online education.
Then came 2020 and suddenly the educational access of the people who were meant to be educated to maintain the status quo was threatened. There was now a rapid expansion of online education programming. Distance education needed to be folded into the educational models of the institutions that had been underfunding them, and people had to be convinced that actually distance education was valid. But at the same time, there was always an eye to what would happen next, when people would be back in classrooms. So distance education couldn’t be too good, it had to always serve as a stop-gap.
What we got instead was a haphazard implementation of mass online education programming being slapped together on no notice by overworked, underpaid, and underqualified educational workers. Online education requires an entirely different educational praxis, but the pedagogical models that educators had been working with had largely (and purposefully) excluded any in-depth understanding of that praxis.
Educators who had no knowledge of delivering online curricula were trying to convert in-person education into online education. Types of learning that actually work really well online weren’t being implemented or focused on, and types of learning that are completely abysmal online were being shoehorned in. And just as educators were starting to figure out what changes needed to be made, and what learning they needed to undergo to update their practice, that influx of funding and attention for online education dried up in the “return to normal.”
There is some really amazing work being done in the fields of pedagogy and andragogy to develop online educational models (ones with implications for its ability to function as a radical democratization of learning), however, as you said: education at large is seen as an investment in human capital. There is always a struggle between the desire to build powerful revolutionary educational praxis, and the complete dearth of resources allocated to anything that threatens the status quo.
I also want to say that aside from online requiring way different skills and approaches both for the learner and the educator, there is a tendency to use online education as an excuse to pack classes to an overwhelming degree. So you have educators who do not have curricula adapted for online, who do not have the training or skills to adapt it, who are often also unused to the technology, and who have three or four times more learners (at best) than they do in person for the same time period. And no one interested in allocating the resources to do anything about any of this, because it’s just good business to treat educational workers this way and to never care about the learners to begin with.
I agree with everything you said and just want to add a dismal example: the institution I work closely with essentially says that online courses have infinite capacity, so long as they can get enough TAs to cover expanding the class. Which they always can, because students are desperate for work that allows them any sort of flexibility for classes. This is especially true in the engineering department, where most of the resources are allocated. So you have 1 instructor who isn’t trained in good online teaching methods with a class of 500 students, 1 course designer trying their best to help them but who ultimately can’t enforce anything upon them if they choose to go against best practice, and 20 TAs actually grading your work that instructor never actually sees.
Some courses on Udemy are unironically better than college-level Computer Science courses when it comes to teaching methods, but lack any sort of feedback mechanism outside of things like code tests.
That situation is less dire for the humanities, but a lot of the same issues are present. Discussion forums are absolutely not a drop-in replacement for discussion and debate in a classroom setting, especially a small-group seminar where you’re discussing the content very deeply with maybe 5 other people for several hours every other day. It’s like comparing reading Hexbear posts to attending your local Marxist reading group. Yet it’s the most common format you will find for online humanities courses. Read the material, post about it, maybe respond to a post about it, and take an exam or write an essay.
Exactly! And I want to stress the part you said about discussion forums in humanities.
Because get this: the university courses that are teaching educators how to deliver their education uses that format and so educators are learning through that format themselves and so at best that ends up being the format they replicate in their own educational practices. And yeah, it is better than some other online formats, and often-times is the “best” you can get in an asynchronous class (which is often necessary since these are not full time students, they have full time jobs and families). But it’s a far cry from a comprehensive use of the best the Internet could offer if we ever had a chance to truly leverage its potential.
online learning is basically the only way i’m getting an education right now cause
but i also kind of like it in general. i do wish it was better implemented though like you say.IDK, seems to me that it requires an amount of discipline and interest that just isn’t realistic for the general population under current social conditions.
it was promised as a massive democratization of higher education specifically. the costs associated with asynchronous, online education are considerably cheaper than in person at an institution. and large in person classes are already a massive revenue generator (charge per credit hour * number of students * number of credit hours - whatever bunk overload they give the adjunct teaching it). but with online, there isn’t even the opportunity cost of the classroom space, its maintenance fee, or any of the fairly significant costs of infrastructure for a school.
not to mention, the instructors can be anywhere, so they can pull from a huge geographic pool of workers with various surplus capacity to teach an extra section or two here and there, as needed.
of course, no school I’ve heard of is offering discounts for online coursework, because ostensibly the value for the student is the same (even though it isn’t always, tbh. some instructions forms still benefit greatly from in-person).
it’s really the sort of situation where there needs to be government regulation to stop schools from taking advantage and distribute the savings (or the value) more equitably to staff and students. but for now, it seems to be the Wild West where the least scrupulous administrators are chasing the mercenary money at the expense of all of us who would benefit from more widely available, even universal formal education.
