Addendum to the note of April 2022

I am getting nowhere in turning the blog into a book…. so I decided to gradually move the posts over to my new SubStack and as I do, I will revise and edit in order to make it into a book when I have the time. I still teach full time (or at least I do now, March 2024 – with universities cutting back….. who knows how much longer?

a note

I am still busy sorting out posts and sorting them in to a book….. I was distracted by a paying contract. In the meantime, a thought occurred to me that affects both this blog and the book-to-be: When most hear ‘online teaching’ Zoom and other real-time technology immediately springs to mind. This is not the case with this blog or my future book from it.

The teaching I do online and have done since 2004 is rather an internet version of a correspondence course. For those who do not remember these, they were courses students could take before the internet began but in a distance format. You would receive a package in the mail including a text book, course notes and a phone number for the instructor and times you could telephone to ask questions.

My university was then an agricultural college and offered correspondence courses for farm kids who were working but wanted to keep their education on track. With the advent of the internet, the University of Guelph moved these correspondence courses over to the internet. They call them DE or Distance Education courses. Thus, there are course notes and possibly a text book, but no live Zoom-like classes. I prefer to have no printed text book as I wanted my courses to be wholly online. The course notes serve as both lecture and text book. Week long discussions where students in groups consider questions I pose are where they meet me – I read their posts carefully and respond in their groups. Each Monday I also post a 5-15 minute video where I discuss the main points of the week to come – other videos might come where there seems to be a degree of confusion or for a special assignment.

Anyway, back to the drawing board!

the cloud

I listened to a podcast from a CBC radio show called Spark a few years back. Unfortunately, I’ve lost the link as t his post was originally written in 2018 and not published then.  Spark looks at all things cyber and computer from as  many angles as its creative lights can conceive. This episode was a show on Google’s cloud based teaching support system which in 2018 was called G Suite for Education. Now it has the long title, Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals. Apparently an extension of Google Docs, a system whereby a number of people in disparate places connected in cyberspace can work on a single project together. It is the equivalent of a group of students sitting around a table in a library doing a group project. Many of my students have worked on group projects using Google Docs, organized on their own.

Google offered this suite of programs free to U.S. School districts and Canadian school boards back in 2018. Spark decided to investigate as there have been some concern over the safety of personal information required from students to use the suite. It is the usual uproar over new technology. Yes, there is danger of private data being hacked, but this is true of everything in our society today. Someone might grab my banking information overnight, or any conversation I have had over the years on Skype or Yahoo Messenger, or Facebook and on and on.

Simply put, you cannot stop this move to the Cloud anymore than Canute could command the tide not to come in and make him beat a hasty retreat with his throne to keep from drowning or at least a most undignifed outcome.

Don’t put anything intensely personal into cyberspace. Or at least try not to!  If someone finds your age or address, well so what?

The use for teaching is enormous. In one of my courses we now have a group project as part of the semester’s work. That is, the class is divided into groups and each group must submit their work as a group and critque each other as a group, prior to my assigning a final grade. Of course, all this is in one cloud maintained by the university but who is to say that could not be hacked?

Strange Reluctance

A while ago I listened to this podcast from CBC Radio’s show ‘Sunday Morning’, hosted by Michael Enright

How to teach the students of the 21st century

In it three pr…..

This blog post was never completed!  But, I am adding the link to the very first post in the book this blog will become. [October 20, 2012]

the lust for rubrics

“ru·bric| ˈro͞obrik | noun a heading on a document. • a direction in a liturgical book as to how a church service should be conducted. • a statement of purpose or function: art for a purpose, not for its own sake, was his rubric. • a category: party policies on matters falling under the rubric of law and order. DERIVATIVES rubrical | ˈro͞obrək(ə)l | adjective 

ORIGIN late Middle English rubrish (originally referring to a heading, section of text, etc. written in red for distinctiveness), from Old French rubriche, from Latin rubrica (terra) ‘red (earth or ocher as writing material)’, from the base of rubeus ‘red’; the later spelling is influenced by the Latin form.“

I copied and pasted this from my online Oxford that came with my Mac OS. Over the past two or three years I have had students asking me for rubrics. ‘Rubrics’, I thought, scratching my head. Rubrics are what the Oxford definition above says. So I would direct them to the page on the course website where instructions for writing essays or posting discussion comments are found.

I am rather slow as it took me until this year to learn what they meant. Apparently in High School now (and for all I know this begins in Elementary or Middle School), students are given detailed, almost line by line instructions that are nowadays labelled ‘rubrics’. I, myself, encountered no rubrics in a long school experience beginning with Grade 1 at the age of 6 in 1957 and finishing with my successful doctoral dissertation defence many decades later in 1999. I heard not a word of that word ‘rubric’ when I began teaching in 1998, until as I say about two years ago.

This year I began work on transferring a facetoface course into Distance format. The shock deepened because new online courses require these extensive charts of rubrics for marking every aspect of a written assignment. It is dreary and depressing and to my mind, indicative of the abject failure of public education. But, I need the money so I trudge through the charts of ‘rubrics’. ‘They should at least be printed in red’ I thought.

endings and beginnings

I have been writing this blog for some time now. It grew out of a limited term Fellowship I was awarded at the University of Guelph, in Ontario Canada. I proposed to develop techniques for online teaching. University politics got in the way and altered what I had originally planned. But it has worked out well in any case as far as i am concerned. I thought and studied, attended a conference and then presented before some interested faculty in May of 2012. The blog was part of all this.

Although I will still post occasionally in the blog, it has now become time to sort and study these blog posts and shape them into a book – an eBook, of course!

This blog post as we approach the end of January 2021 and a year since we entered the newest plague to afflict humanity is both an ending of a blog and the beginning of a rationalization of the impressions I have been posting here for eight years.

The Ivy League Online

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/harvard-mooc-online-education

This article began with a look at the change in culture in the U.S. Here in Canada, I have experienced some of that over my lifetime thus far. I worked for 20 years as a clerk in the head office of a large manufacturing corporation. When I began, the company had 11,000 employees in Canada and about 750 million a year in sales. I recall clearly as a 20 year-old looking at my first pension statement with a retirement year of 2016. So distant! So far into the unimaginable future! The department where I worked had about 20 staff back in the early 1970s. When I jumped ship in 1992, the head office staff had shrunk from 600 to about 80 and my department from 20 to 4 workers. Three, after I left. My lifeboat was a BA I had earned at night school while at this company. I earned this sitting in classrooms from 6:15 to 9:15 pm taking notes in pen on paper as professors, most of whom were good teachers, taught me how to think critically. I didn’t expect ever to need this degree; it was a labour of love. When I saw that the company would sink soon, I managed a bronze handshake and jumped into my BA lifeboat. I rowed it through graduate school, finally achieving a doctorate in History at a mid-level university. There I found myself standing on the deck, or sleeping third class. I tried numerous times to find a permanent berth on nearby ships, but found no place. So now, I live as an unwanted, but somewhat needed deck swabber in the same ship I earned my graduate degree. I now see the same signs I saw in the early 1990s at my former ship. Huge waves swamp the decks where I live and work. So far I have held onto the rail and managed to avoid being swept overboard.

The linked article is about the turn to online learning at even the top American schools, due to the pandemic, but also due to the gradual unaffordability of a college degree in the United States. The situation there is more dire than Canada at the moment. Colleges and universities there have only taken on temporary deck hands for years and offer them fewer places to hang onto rails as each wave washes over. The pandemic is a mighty storm that has swamped many and threatens many more. I began teaching online in 2004, alongside some classroom, face-to-face courses. For the past few years, however, I have taught only online. These are my deck railings that have kept me on board for years now. The big universities in the States are frantically installing more railings as waves wash students – the passengers who pay for these great ships – over board too.

I surveyed MOOCS just as the author of the article has and could not believe the poor quality of education on offer. I recall watching one such course that consisted of a video camera with poor sound pointing at an instructor in a lecture hall, who droned on and on, while referring to notes on a white board that the camera could not show. Not only the poor technical use and poor design of the MOOC, the instructor did drone and would have provided a poor experience for the students actually present. The MOOC surveyed above in 2020 and supplied by Harvard is of better quality in technical terms, but the content is worse than that offered by the droning instructor. But, a student can say they sailed on the good ship Harvard for a while, without financially crippling their future.

What I set out to write here was two-fold. One, the realization that the ships upon which middle class and poor people sail are ancient and leaking, barely staying afloat in the massive storms raging since the oil crisis of the mid 1970s. Meanwhile, the class of sailor and passengers who are in the elites, sail smoothly in their large, well appointed ships, scarcely noticing the storms that have wrecked lives or made life extremely tenuous for the rest of us. The second point I wanted to make was to point out the disastrously poor quality of much of online education. MOOCS were a good idea that, if Harvard as described in the link above is correct, have scarcely improved since their introduction eight years ago. Even worse, the ships with fewer resources and lesser names than Harvard, employ ZOOM to teach which make Harvard’s MOOCs look good indeed.

I will have to say, that the form employed by the ship where I grip the railing so desperately, is good, or can be good. That depends on the instructor more than the course designers. Will the instructor interact with the class frequently? Or will the poor deck swabber, swab mechanically and ignore the paying passengers except when they board and when they debark or when they get in the way of the sweeping motion of the mop? I don’t know. Up to the point of this new storm, the pandemic, I suspect that the permanent crew pretty much ignored us deck swabbers and did not care at all for the promise and the problems of online courses. Now they must.

The Plague & Online Teaching/Learning

The massive international shutdown of much of ordinary life occasioned by the arrival of the latest plague Covid-19 to, well, plague humanity changed much, at least temporarily. One effect is an increase in online teaching at all levels of the educational system.  My university is heavily invested already in this respect, with a large department devoted to designing such courses and assisting professors with effective techniques.

Some reports in the media have focussed on the inadequacies of online education. When I say ‘media’ I mean the whole modern range. When I say ‘inadequacies’ I mean they do not define online teaching clearly or exactly, other than computers are used. One report I read was in the old media New York Post, another was a Facebook post by a senior professor in my university – both highly critical.

Here is the April 7 New York Post article: https://nypost.com/2020/04/07/what-you-miss-when-teaching-online/ . Most readers, I suspect, would have agreed with his critique. What I saw was an article listing everything that his institution has done wrong in establishing such a course. This instructor’s school is using a platform called Webex. This tool was designed initially for business distance conferencing, but has expanded to include an educational component. As a conferencing tool it seems quite good and possibly a rival to the currently popular Zoom. As described in the Post article, an instructor lectures as though in a lecture hall but to students who sit at home in front of their computers. This is exactly the wrong way to teach online. In the Webex website, they mention that their system can be used as a component of an LMS (Learning Managment system). This is useful advice which seems to have been ignored by this professor’s institution. I am not saying that a live interaction online between an individual instructor and a class scattered about in their homes is not useful, but should be utilized as an adjunct to, or a single aspect of, an overall system.

The Facebook post assumed a similar situation as far as I could tell, but from the point of view of students as unwilling online learners. The post is based on a shared article in the Guardian, the English Left-wing newspaper. This article focussed on those who cannot afford computers, or who have special needs. Given the time most young and for that matter, older adults and children spend on computers, I find this an odd critique. Perhaps the situation in the United Kingdom is very different than in Canada, where all students at university have smart phones, tablet computers, laptops and sometimes all three. Every face-to-face class here has a course website also. Statistics about students being unhappy with online learning are mentioned, but no comparison made to the degree to which students also dislike sitting in a lecture hall, or whether the UK is technologically behind Canada in personal terms and university terms.

Here I will state my mantra about online learning: Do not put new wine into old wineskins. (Matthew 9:17; Mark 2:22; Luke 5:37 -though Luke does go on to say that the old is better, so I had better stop with the Biblical referencing!). Despite Luke, the point I am making here is that online teaching cannot be made to fit old style face-to-face pedagogy in the classroom or the university lecture hall. Online teaching and learning is ‘new wine’ and requires ‘new wineskins’ to be effective. The lecturer in the law school in the New York Post story was attempting to teach as though he were in a lecture hall. This does not work well as he noted. But it does not mean that online learning cannot work. The students referenced in the Facebook post who were unhappy are probably suffering from the same problem.

There is a very large literature on the theory and practice of online learning. I am not writing here from that perspective and can only comment from personal experience as an instructor of 16 years in the cyber trenches. The first rule is to require of yourself a high degree of interaction with students individually. I devise discussions focussed on questions I ask to be the main portal to interactivity. I post a question that asks students to evaluate historical issues or events or physical artifacts in context. The students are organized into groups of 15-20. They have a week to post a response and to respond to others in their group. During that week, I interject, praising, correcting, and mostly guiding individual posts by students. To this I add summary videos posted to the main course site. In these I will give an overview of the week’s work to come, or post overall comments on other assignments of a more static nature such as essays. Essays, although a feature of old wineskin learning are a necessity to teach contextual critical thinking. The videos are actually part of my plan to damage if not destroy the feeling that many students get that they are floating alone in cyberspace. I have had comments from students over the years that they are surprised that the prof is actually reading and interacting with their work online. This makes me think back to an overheard meeting of Teaching Assistants with another instructor. As part time faculty, I have to share a room of several desks with other part time instructors. He was meeting with the graduate students assigned to his course as teaching assistants. I overheard him telling them to set up an hour a week as an office hour and that they were to communicate with students only in that one hour each week. [Buzzer here] WRONG!

Do not put new wine into old wineskins!

Open Educational Resources

I will write this post after listening to this podcast and researching David Porter:

 

Michael Geist Podcast Episode 45

At long last I have time to comment on this – essays and exams marked, final grades off to the Registrar, so here I go!

I will begin in an unusual way by posting the notes I made while listening to the podcast a second time.

OER Geist podcast 45

• BC began it with open textbooks by 2012
  • there a creator is paid by the government to create a CC OER but does not receive royalties
• Ont has an open library that includes already created resources & new resources created  but no payment for creators
  • eCampus Ontario is the vehicle for this
    • functions to aid institutions in developing CC OERs
  • some created by nursing students for that specific area as an example – new resources that practitioners and teachers have identified gaps
• CC licensing is the back bone
  • these files can be altered and adapted by instructors to suit the course or subject 
  • open copyright
  • if a traditionally copyrighted item is needed, then the resource is the school library – fair dealing is the avenue here but it is difficult to negotiate
    • David Porter’s advice is to avoid traditional copyrighted material and go only to open access CC material where it exists and to create new CC material where needed
    • currently available OERs
      • BC campus
      • SUNY Open
      • eCampus Ontario
      • Open Stacks

 

The shut down of all in-class educational activity was the spur for this conversation on ‘Open Educational Resources’ (OER). I assume they say ‘resources’ rather than books, or publications as these resources include material created online without ever having a physical presence. I assume these could also include physically published material put into digital form. David Porter has been involved in this area of education far longer than I have, since the 1990s,  but from the theoretical, design and implementation end of online teaching, where as I have served in the trenches since 2004 as a teacher. My blog is focussed on teaching online from the perspective of the teacher (or as we say now, ‘educator’). I read theory and listen to podcasts such as this, but only to get tips  for teaching. I have students who  made me aware of the British Columbia online textbook program, and I had heard mention of eCampus Ontario, but was not aware of the other two mentioned.

Back in 2003 when I worked with University of Guelph Instructional Designers to create World Religions in Historical Perspective as an online Distance Ed course, I was determined that it should be entirely online. This presented some difficulties back then. Only academic journals were all online through the university library, where I might add they have to pay huge sums of money to allow students and teachers to have access to these. There were very few monographs in digital form and most websites dealing with academic subjects were very poor in quality. But, as time has gone by, I have found more and more good academic resources online. For example, I used a project created by the University of Cork in Ireland dealing with Irish history. This website contained archival images and university level essays on each aspect of Irish history. The site vanished a couple of years ago. But, I found it archived using the Wayback machine on the Internet Archive and was able to restore the links. My suggested reading list for all three of the courses I teach online grows longer each semester as more and more full academic books are available in good quality digital form.

I say ‘good quality’ because at one point about ten years ago I had an idea to do an academic monograph on religion and society in the Atlantic world. I had a conversation with the Acquisitions Editor at the University of British Columbia press. He requested a detailed outline and I provided that and his interest continued. But, when I asked him if it could by done as an eBook, his answer was, no, they had a few out of print books that they converted to pdfs and put them online but not for new books. I ended the conversation myself as a result. Most academic publication is done by tenure track or by those hoping to get onto the tenure track as ‘publish or perish’ is true in the university world. I had, at this point, already given up on that and was focussed on constructing a career as a contract professor so did not and do not need to publish.

I wanted (and still want) to do this book because it interests me. My vision of the book was an eBook that includes links and images, but especially internal links. For example, in one part that I have already done the rough writing for, I mention preaching techniques used by St. Francis of Assisi. I wanted a link to a mention there of his canticle of the sun that would take the reader to a page where an Italian friend would  read it in the original with text in both English and the original Umbrian dialect accompanying this. Even though my friend who lives in Milano does not of course speak that ancient dialect, it would sound more authentic with a native Italian speaker doing the audio than myself. My goal since 2003 (and 2004 when the course went live) was to break the linear mold to a degree. This is part of my philosophy that one cannot put new wine into old wineskins – that is, teaching online should not attempt to be an pale image of classroom teaching, but something new and different.

I am glad then to have encountered this podcast and will to investigate the sources mentioned above to see what is available that is equivalent in academic rigour to journals and monographs by historians and other academics.

scrambling

Well, here we are in the midst (or the beginning) of the Covid-19 virus panic, or as historians may well call it one day, the Great Toilet Paper Panic of 2020. More seriously, the economy has taken a nose dive, with those least able to ride out this storm taking the greatest hits. As for me, I am still teaching online so nothing has changed other than the quarterly worry over contract renewal, though I am employed until the end of August.

Ok, now the title of this piece. Because of the panic, the university decided that all courses and exams had to be taught online for the remainder of the term. This meant that the term was extended a week so last week could be set aside for the profs to scramble to convert the remainder of their teaching to the online format. This university has a long history of online teaching and before that correspondence courses. This means they have a whole department of specialists to effect this transition. I offered to help any of the full timers cast into this outer darkness find some light, but was answered politely. In Canadian this translates as ‘no’, or maybe ‘no, thank you’.

I am wondering if this is the beginning of a new normal. The University of Guelph and its progeny the University of Guelph/Humber are three semester schools but the summer is entirely online usually anyway. But will the number of online courses increase now? Or will the pre-Covid normality return at some point. The best guess now is about 3-5 months.  If the problem continues after that point, then online will become more common and perhaps one day, the primary was of teaching.

Anyway, I am glad I teach online!