Thursday, January 30, 2020

Distance learning

Herb Childress:

Good teaching and learning have always been labor–intensive processes. As one of my correspondents, a provost at an elite undergraduate college, said, “When the movement to MOOCs was at its rabid peak a couple of years ago and some members of our board were talking about starting to do more distance education, I regularly told them that at our school, distance education is the length of a table.”

The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
Childress offers a frank, clear-eyed analysis of what’s wrong with American higher education. And he has recommendations for improvement.

Related posts
“A fully realized adult person” : Colleges and bakeries : The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else : Offline, real-presence education

[MOOC: massive open online course.]

comments: 4

Anonymous said...

Definitely need to read this!

I occasionally teach an online course at a West coast school and find that it can be very difficult at times.

One thing that I never see in these discussions is the missing out on in-person exchanges which can tell you a lot about your co-students: ones you'll avoid in the future, ones you send family to for assistance, etc.

Kirsten

Michael Leddy said...

The last “related” post has a link to an essay about online education’s “individualist fallacy” that you’d probably find esp. interesting. I just fixed the link — Inside Higher Ed has made a new URL, with no redirect.

I notice too that there’s never any mention of access to library resources.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I would agree that access to library resources is never discussed. But then again, aren't we always told that all of the information you need is on the internet!!!

After reading the last "related" post as well as reading more about Herb Childress (his website and an interview with him), I find myself even more disillusioned about upper education in this country.

Why would we have age cut-offs for entering the educational system as well as perpetuating loads of PhD's who won't be able to enter the system? No one ever talks about that. No one ever told me or anyone I knew that if you wanted to go into teaching you needed to follow X path. You couldn't decide that at 40 or even 50 if you wanted to go into higher education teaching, you were too old.

Audrey Watters, who writes about education, is currently writing a book titled Teaching Machines as well as a weekly newsletter.

Kirsten


Michael Leddy said...

There is discussion about doctoral programs, but so much of it is about alternative careers for students. Yet you don’t need the highly specialized work that leads to a doctorate to be able to read, research, and write well. And so many of those alternative careers are the result of personal connections among already privileged people. The truth of course is that doctoral students, at least in most programs (mine was a beautiful exception), provide cheap labor for intro-level courses.

HC’s book has a checklist in the back to gauge your chances in academic life (like the checklist in Paul Fussell’s book Class). I won’t tell you my score (or HC’s). Suffice to say that I too started out with considerable naiveté and was very lucky.

Thanks for reminding me that Herb Childress has a website. I’ll add a link to the post. I used to get Audrey Watters’s newsletter. I’m not sure where it went, but I just signed up again.