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Rewriting the SyllabusExamining New Hybrid and Online Pedagogies
Jesse Stommel@Jessifer
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“Unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the
physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.”
John Dewey, Schools of To-Morrow
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We need to handle our technologies roughly -- to think critically about our tools, how we use them, and who has access to them.
Online learning is not the whipping boy of higher education.
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MOOCs are a Red Herring.There is a bigger beast in the offing.
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Enrollment in online courses at post-secondary institutions:grew from 9.6% in 2002 to 29.3% of total enrollment in 20095.5 million students took online courses in 2009by 2014, this number is expected to increase to 18,650,000as of February 2013, 1.7 million had registered for a Coursera courseas of January 2014, Coursera had 21 million enrollmentsfor a total of 332 million minutes spent
Meanwhile, learning communities thrive online extra-institutionally, supported by the 1500 blog entries, 98,000 tweets, and 695,000 Facebook status updates posted every 60 seconds.
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We have to carefully build our classroom and educational space online before we start populating it, lest text, hierarchical menus, and pop-up
windows be confused with interactivity and community.
Some proposed tenets
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The openness of the internet is its most radical and pedagogically viable feature.
A course is not a reservoir for content.
“Curriculum [...] is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process.”
~ Dave Cormier, “Community as Curriculum”
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A good syllabus is not a contract. By the end of a class, the syllabus should be broken.
Students are not columns in a spreadsheet.
We need to pander to intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivations.
"When students struggle for excellence only for the sake of a grade, what we see is not motivation but atrophy of motivation."
~ Peter Elbow, “Grading Student Writing: Making It Simpler, Fairer, Clearer”
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Teachers need to talk less and listen more.
When we teach online, we have to build both the course and the classroom.
The learning management system is merely a tool.
A well-designed course isn’t overly simplistic but needs minimal instruction.
Compare: NYT site. Lots of stimulus. Lots of navigational choices. No patronizing instructions or architecture.
Now the LMS. Telegraphs where to go. Everything is in tidy boxes. The content and engagement density is painfully low.
FERPA is not an excuse for bad pedagogy.
Some simple guidelines: If you’re asking students to do public work online, let them know their work will be public, offer the option of anonymity, never post grades publicly, and don’t forget
about intellectual property (which is separate from FERPA).
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Best practices are snake oil.
“Too often, faculty design pedagogy around the worst-case scenario and then apply that pedagogy to every student."
~ Janine DeBaise, “Best Practices: Thoughts on a Flash Mob Mentality”
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Don’t wield outcomes like a weapon.
Content-expertise does not equal good teaching.
Educators at every level must begin by listening to and trusting students.
Teachers stand to learn more from students about online learning than we could ever teach. Many students come to an online or hybrid class knowing very well how to learn online. It’s often our failure to know as well how to learn online that leads to many of the design
mistakes in this generation of online courses.
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All learning is necessarily hybrid
Hybrid pedagogy does not just describe an easy mixing of on-ground and online learning, but is about bringing the sorts of learning that
happen in a physical place and the sorts of learning that happen in a virtual place into a more engaged and dynamic conversation.
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“The commitment to learners, to their exploration, their community, their authentic engagement, and their ultimate agency and
empowerment, governs our work.”~ Pete Rorabaugh, Occupy the Digital: Critical Pedagogy and New Media
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“To listen for voices that have something to say, but which may not find purchase in traditional academic venues.”
~ Sean Michael Morris, Collaborative Peer Review: Gathering the Academy’s Orphans
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“To teach as myself, I must let my students see who I am.”~ Chris Friend, Finding My Voice as a Minority Teacher
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“It doesn’t matter to me if my classroom is a little rectangle in a building or a little rectangle above my keyboard. Doors are
rectangles; rectangles are portals. We walk through.”~ Kathi Inman Berens, “The New Learning is Ancient”
“A course today is an act of composition.”~ Sean Michael Morris, “Courses, Composition, Hybridity”
“In the world of digitally networked publics, online participation -- if you know how to do it -- can translate into real power. Participation,
however, is a kind of power that only works if you share it with others.”~ Howard Rheingold, Net Smart
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Thank You!
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Additional Resources
A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age
Cathy Davidson, Now You See It
Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, “The Discussion Forum is Dead; Long Live the Discussion Forum”
Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel, “Tools for Collaborative Writing”
Jesse Stommel, “How to Build an Ethical Online Course”
Jesse Stommel, “Online Learning: a Manifesto”
Jesse Stommel, “The Twitter Essay”
A Vision of Students Today