A Faculty Agenda for Online Learning
Faculty are under enormous pressure to submit to the demands of the 21st century market economy by moving course materials online and, even more importantly, teaching online full-time. To raise concerns about this trend puts one at risk of being labelled a Luddite, to use the popular slang for those who are resistant to new technologies. However, if you consider the historical meaning of the term, perhaps we all need to become Luddites.
The expression Luddite originally comes out of the 19th century British movement of weavers who rebelled against the development of cost–cutting technologies during the Industrial Revolution. The highly skilled craftspeople were being replaced by new technologies, such as the power loom, operated by low paid, low-skilled workers. Technology itself wasn’t the enemy of the Luddites; rather, it was the new market economy that sacrificed quality jobs and quality products in the interest of profit.
Like the Luddites, faculty are right to be concerned when it comes to online learning. Advances in digital technology are rapidly changing how students can interact with professors and curriculum. Many of these changes offer incredible opportunities to engage students and broaden access to higher education. However, technology cannot be used as a panacea for education in and of itself; instead, technology must be deployed in ways that protect the quality of the educational experience for both professors and students.
When it comes to online learning, college faculty must understand and collectively assert three key principles going forward: academic freedom to determine the pedagogical frameworks for online courses and materials; ownership of our course materials; and the necessary time to fulfill our primary goal as faculty, i.e. to teach, and to teach well.
Academic freedom
First and foremost, academic freedom is essential. Academic freedom is the well-recognized principle that the primary locus of academic decision-making in higher education must reside with faculty. Decisions about how online and blended learning is rolled out, including curriculum design, assessment and course materials must be made by the pedagogical experts—faculty themselves—not administrative bureaucrats or private corporations that sell curricula.
In addition, those faculty teaching already existing online courses must have the authority to modify how learning outcomes can be achieved so they can meet the needs of diverse students. When courses are “locked down,” they become stagnant and the teaching faculty are reduced to technicians whose creative power to engage students is stripped away. Education is a living, dynamic relationship between the student, the curriculum and the professor. This requires faculty who can utilize their own creative expertise and autonomy, not online data entry operators tied to an archived script.
Intellectual property
A second core concern centres on intellectual property rights over our course materials so that we can determine how, where and when they are utilized. Without such ownership, our materials—the fruits of years of research and development—can be seized and outsourced to third parties in ways that undercut the very existence of our own jobs. Consider, for example, that a number of Ontario’s colleges, including Cambrian, Lambton and St. Lawrence, have agreements with for-profit, private colleges to deliver the public college’s curriculum. Individual professor’s materials, including online video lectures, are licenced without faculty consent to the private college, which operates in direct competition with the public system. Three of these private institutions have campuses within 5 kilometres of Centennial.
Online course materials can also be used to facilitate the transfer of teaching to low paid contract faculty within our own institutions who can be easily slotted into an existing shell. This problem already exists with the increased use of learning management systems like E-Centennial, and is exacerbated by the deployment of the centrally controlled Centennial Online Course Outline system (COCO).
Another equally disturbing trend is the wholesale replacement of actual faculty teaching hours with “self-directed” online modules. In these cases, faculty or publisher materials are pre-packaged and offered to students without the guidance and support of an actual instructor.
Concerns about intellectual property will only accelerate as more online course materials are uploaded and centrally archived.
Workload support
And lastly, as any online instructor will affirm, more time is required. It is easy to teach an online course poorly. However, it is incredibly time consuming to do it well. Faculty who have taught online understand the effort that goes into producing an engaging course. Just consider how much more time it requires to answer a question like this electronically instead of in a face-to-face interaction: I don’t understand the reading. Can you explain to me how genome annotation works? Or, Why did I only get a C+ on my essay?
Numerous studies show that the most successful forms of online learning involve intensive forms of relationship building between the faculty and student, and among students themselves. This requires a time commitment not built into the current model.
Bargaining for a future
Online learning is not going away. A scan of E-Campus Ontario, the Ontario government’s new portal to all online courses in the province, shows that the 24 public colleges offer an astounding 11,420 online courses compared to only 2984 in the universities. In effect, Ontario now has the equivalent of a large 25th online shadow college in its system, largely staffed by underpaid contract faculty.
Collectively bargaining for more ownership and control over our courses, and more time to give Ontario’s students the intellectually challenging and engaging education they deserve is crucial for the future of quality learning and quality jobs in this province.
RM Kennedy is a past President of Local 559