An academic discipline

Our tutoring consultant looks for science to apply.

Some weeks ago our tutor bought a book about teaching online.  It was late in the day, of course, almost a year into his virtual-teaching efforts, but he’s always open to suggestions.  In fact his motivation stemmed from a magazine review he’d saved from years previously and just rediscovered.  He hadn’t planned on teaching online at the time, but the review said it was a good resource for in-person teaching as well.  He looked forward to advice, maybe structures or methods, useful tips.

In the event, it was not very useful.  Although it had lots of example teachers and classes, it was largely a report of research, and the research was rarely useful.  We’ll take one example.  There is a discussion of one group’s division of classes into online, with 80% or more happening on the Internet; hybrid, 30-79% on the net; and web-assisted, less than 30%; and whether it’s better just to divide courses into “fully online” and “hybrid.”  Our lesser criticism is that there is no indication of how to assign the numbers.  Is a page of posted PowerPoint the same as a page of printed handout?  And how do videos count?  Do you, perhaps, measure by time of interaction–but then how do you account for the fact that students read assigned material at different speeds?  Without some guide, the numbers are useless.

The greater criticism is that the division is sterile.  It might make some sense if the way one approached the course differed between the categories.  Suppose that when you transition from web-assisted to hybrid, say, it meant a qualitative shift from presenting material mostly in person to presenting material mostly online; or that in going from hybrid to online it meant giving your graded tests and quizzes online, with the security problems that entails.  But there is no mention of what the categories mean in practice.

We have no quarrel with classification as such.  Indeed, much of the work of science is coming up with ways to classify things.  Not all turn out to be informative or useful; that’s worked out along the line.  But as assistance to the online teacher, or any other, this particular matter of classification is quite useless.  It should (our tutor grumbles) have been kept among the academic journals until it amounted to something.

Here is something that would have been useful and offered connection with theories of learning, but that our tutor sought in vain.  People learn differently, and one classification has auditory, visual, tactile and kinesthetic learners.  The latter two depend on touch and motion to assimilate things.  When your only interaction is a computer screen, how do you reach them?

And there is a very practical matter arising from online grading and tests.  How do you know that the student isn’t receiving help from another source?  One correspondent of ours simply assumes they are, and that he’s testing their ability to find the answers given all the tools they can ever have at their disposal.  A bigger question is: how do you know that the person taking your test is the one you think it is?  There’s no discussion of this in the book.

There must be some useful set of lessons and advice compiled by an active teacher.  We’ll continue to look for it.