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.
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.