One day you’re a sage on the stage; and the next, you’re struggling for more hits on YouTube, more followers on Twitter, or more +1s on Google+. Or maybe, as an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education recounts, you spent two years creating an online course, and the administration decides to assign it to someone else to teach. Whether you are a teacher in K-12 or a university professor, the demands on your time and the challenges to your skillset have risen yet again.
That roles are changing, or evolving, is clear. How can we support the necessary, ongoing, transition in roles while maintaining the quality and dignity of the players?
Flip Your Classroom or Flip Out
It should be clear by now that your students need you. How they need you has shifted, but we still need talented PEOPLE to facilitate the learning experience across the educational continuum. As information becomes more ubiquitous, teaching requires more in the way of curating and guiding students through the information rather than being the source of it.
Leading students to independence
In high school and in the years building up to it, we should be supporting kids in developing critical thinking skills by allowing for more experimentation, failure and hands-on mentoring within the classroom setting. Let students come to the class with questions of their own and provide the guidance necessary for them to work through problems alongside their peers.
Building up to deeper and slower thinking
By the time kids get to college, they should be ready for deeply immersive learning experiences. These classes should be led by instructors who not only have subject-matter expertise to share but who are also ready to guide students through the highly analytical discovery processes required at this step in the educational process.
Define Roles for Course Authors, Developers, and Facilitators
As institutions of higher learning provide more online offerings, there needs to be further clarification of roles within the process of creating and delivering the courses.
The process of deconstructing an existing course and developing it for online delivery is complicated, if done in such a way that provides for maximum interactivity and engagement. The upside, of course, is you have content to work with.
The process is also complex if starting from scratch, but there is the added effort of locating and developing new content.
In either case, you have complex process of parsing out instruction into cognitively digestible morsels, a process that requires expertise that is frequently outside of the skillset of most instructors used to delivering content via traditional means of lecture.
Many universities are building out their own instructional design departments to help support this process, while others are engaging the services of outside development teams. In either case, the instructor working as a subject matter expert on the development of a new online course will have to devote many hours to the process. The entire effort is streamlined if the instructor is paired with a trained instructional designer to support the process.
Should the course author automatically be assigned the role of course facilitator? We know that more institutions, both corporate and higher ed, are looking for more of a human touch in their online offerings these days. These synchronous or asynchronous online courses require then, skilled teachers to engage with students in online discussions and provide feedback on assignments.
The challenge for many institutions is how to make the best use of their resources. An instructor may need to devote up to six months working as part of a team to develop an online course. The case of Jennifer Ebbeler at the University of Texas at Austin, where it is reported she spent nearly two years developing the course should be an anomaly these days. It’s not clear whether she was working alone, as part of a team, or what guidelines were in place to ensure an efficient development process.
So, between the required effort for development and the goal on the part of many to insert facilitation back into online learning puts an extra demand on school administrators to assign the appropriate resource for this task. If it can’t be the course author, it needs to be someone trained effectively for the task, someone familiar with the content, and someone willing to work within the compensation limits placed on such roles.
If scheduling and finances permit course authors to be course facilitators, that may be ideal for those who desire to and have the skills to play that role. If not, a course author can also play a role in managing a team of graduate students, for example. Decisions around who does what need to be made early on in the process so that expectations are clear.
Unbundling of the Teaching Profession?
As education evolves, we are seeing “a la carte” offerings beginning to disrupt all sorts of institutions, with certificate offerings and alternative, professional educational services on the rise. In College Disrupted: The Unbundling of Higher Education, Ryan Craig says that this unbundling is possible in higher education because, unlike K-12, “there is no countervailing force to stop it.” But I wonder if the change in K-12 is coming from within. Teacherpreneurs who may have previously stayed and fought for the profession are leaving K-12 to work for or found their own companies to offer technology-enabled teaching resources. They may not be “teachers” according to the old definition, but they do still “teach.”
Teaching is changing from K-12 through university, and we need to be creative about how to best continue to train, recruit and motivate those who will continue to play a vital role in the classrooms of tomorrow, whether they are face-to-face or virtual, whether they are part of an institutional “package” or not.