A Vision of Elearning Focused on Pedgagogy

I've been a student and then a teacher through the earliest iterations of online learning.  At university I took one of the last mailed correspondence courses in the mid-nineties and I've been online since BBSes and user-groups in the early 90s.  That whole time I was working summers and holidays in IT jobs, though they weren't called 'IT jobs' yet.  For two summers I helped Unitel Engineering digitize their paper based parts ordering system at their electronics shop in Scarborough by moving everything in their decades old paper based system from filing cabinets to Lotus123 on DOS/early Windows.

After graduation I got my first full time gig at Ontario Store Fixtures where I was attached to the programming team that was converting their old DOS based manufacturing system to JDEdwards OneWorld integrated management process.  This was a very early server based system that was the step between desktops and the cloud based systems we use today.  Two years teaching overseas in Japan showed me the technology that was soon to arrive in North America, such as digital cameras and high speed home internet.  I played Diablo with a friend in Mississauga from my apartment in Akita City and watched Y2K pass over us at a thousand year old temple.  When I wasn't doing that I was helping engineers and doctors translate their work for international consumption, working on everything from electronic/robotics systems that helped parallelised people move their limbs to the latest in LCD technology coming out of the NEC factory near where we lived.

By the early naughties we were back in Ontario and I was a certified IT and network technician and working full time in the field.  I changed directions into teaching in 2003/4 and my first teaching job in Peel Region had me setting up the first wireless router in the board in our library so students with their newfangled Blackberries and wireless laptops could get online - it would be years before board IT caught up with us.  The next summer I got a job in their new elearning summer program.  We were using the Angel online system which was a rudimentary webpage with such basic media that you had to hand code the html if you wanted it to be anything other than text.

One of my favourite elearning experiences came in those early days.  Peel didn't run elearning as a credit factory.  They focused on strong students with digital experience and then pushed for advanced course delivery.  In our Grade 12 academic class we had students from across Ontario as well as international students from Bangkok, Tokyo and Shanghai who were taking the course to prove they had the English language skills necessary to attend university in Canada.  Working with this international group felt like what the future of teaching could be.

A good example of the above and beyond nature of these students was the final exam, which happened in a live two hour window.  The students overseas were up in the middle of the night and when the internet went down in part of Mississauga my student who was in that blackout called around, found a friend with working internet and rode her bike over there to complete the exam on time.  Back then elearning wasn't an excuse to do less, it was a reason to do more.

I continued to teach elearning in summer school for the next five years as I moved to my current school board and they started up their own elearning program (I volunteered to be in the inaugural group and was the only one in it who had actually taught any).  This branched out into blended face to face and elearning classes ranging from career studies to a specialized locally developed media arts program for at risk students as well as the usual online English courses.  Early versions of video conference like Adobe Connect came up and I always seized this emerging technology to develop better learning relationships and bandwidth with my students.  One day we were all on a live video conference working independently when one of the student's moms came in and asked if he wanted takeout hamburgers for lunch.  She laughed when we all replied that hamburgers sounded great.  That was in 2008 before unions and school boards conspired to take video conferencing off limits.  It took the education minister in a pandemic emergency this past spring to get Ontario's education system to begin using this technology again... twelve years later.  Sabotage by political interests in Ontario education are a big reason why we are still so bad at elearning.

Rather than focus on students who needed access to courses and had highly developed digital skills and resilience, elearning devolved into a way of offering credits for at risk students that didn't want to attend school.  It was then decided to give elearning sections to teachers in smaller schools that were losing population instead of giving those sections to teachers who had the experience, skills and interest in making this challenging emerging learning situation work.  The end result was students and teachers who didn't want to be in elearning.  As that all happened I found myself removed from teaching it and by 2012 I was no longer doing any elearning at all.

In the meantime I've developed a very successful computer technology program, so my journey into digitally enabled pedagogy has not stopped.  My students and I built some of the first virtual reality systems used by students in the province and we've tackled all sorts of IT challenges including Skills Ontario and then CyberTitan and cybersecurity.  We've created a unique software engineering/video game development program that has already launched a number of careers and we have grads working everywhere from Tesla and Google to Electronic Arts while others have started their own companies.  In aid of that I've become a Cisco Netacademy Instructor which offers my students one of the most advanced elearning management systems in the world, and I'm constantly exploring online coding LMSes such as code.org and codehs.com for my students.  If anything, stepping away from elearning, especially after what it had become, gave me the flexibility to explore digital pedagogy more than staying in it would have.

***

Elearning implementation has always suffered from a lack of vision.  It stumbled into existence as a substitute for mail order courses in the late 90s and early Zeroes because it was cheaper and faster than all those stamps.  In the early days it was tentatively adopted by programs like Peel's independent summer school but it has never been adopted into specialized virtual schools and was still struggling for acceptance up until this year when suddenly everyone was an elearning/remote teacher.

Even in 2019 unions were attacking elearning as a 'lesser than form' of teaching in an attempt to stop government attacks on public education.  That Ontario's anti-education government was suggesting stuffing 40-50 students into elearning classes shows how this scalable system is prone to abuse and pedagogical deflation.  Those union attacks annoyed many members like myself who have been working on developing this emerging medium of learning for most   of our careers.

There is nothing education does better than look backwards and poorly handle change.  If it does adopt technology it's usually to try and redo what it has been doing for decades as a cost saver.  Google Docs instead of photocopies, online forms instead of quizzes, worksheets on screen instead of paper; educational adoption of digital tools is all about the Substitution in SAMR; use it while keeping things as much the same as possible.  As I said earlier, elearning implementation has shown a startling lack of vision and leadership.

***

There was a time when you had a choice...

I recently didn't get an elearning job, but that's OK because the last thing I want to be doing is middle managing to the status quo, What I want to do is explore and expand our best digital pedagogical practices; seeing how cheaply we can do the minimum doesn't do anything for me (or anyone else not in management).  There still seems to be a lot of pressure to overload elearning classes with students and then using limited corporate walled-garden systems from attention merchants like Google.  This is baffling from a f2f teacher perspective where I'm seeing people getting paid teacher salaries while not actually doing any teaching.  We could leverage the influx of teachers into the system much more effectively than we are to quickly create smaller remote classes that would involve teachers actually teaching and supporting learning instead of babysitting.

I'd want to advocate for smaller class sizes in elearning, especially in higher needs classes where remote teachers are also doing the jobs of guidance counsellors and special education support in a dangerous time.  I'd also want to advocate for an efficient system for vetting alternative online systems that offer greater bandwidth with our remote students, but most boards have equated student privacy and cybersecurity with exclusive deals with tax dodging advertising/technology giants rather than looking to create a diverse yet secure ecosystem of online digital tools for learning.  Signing an agreement with an attention merchant to indoctrinate the students in your care in their advertising systems so you can hand them graduates familiar with their products is an easier box to check.

***

What would my dream elearning job be?  Let me take my digitally expert senior students in software engineering/game development and computer engineering, give us leading edge tools and let us see what digital learning is capable of in 2020.  By exploring emerging technology we could not only make elearning more effective, but also ease the social distance anxiety many people are feeling.

Just before school started this year in its masked, socially distanced, quadmestered and frankly diminished capacity, I saw this tweet from Jon Resendez.  It stayed on my mind as we launched this uneven and unsustainable (for the people doing double cohort, double classes remotely and f2f all day every day simultaneously) quadmester.  More pedagogically sound elearning processes wouldn't just help remote teachers at the moment, they'd help everyone since we're all remote teaching in one way or another, it's just that some of us are trying to do it while face to face with students at the same time.

There are two sides of elearning I'd want to explore with my digitally skilled students.  My computer engineers could focus on the physical hardware that might improve remote learning outcomes and my senior software engineers would be able to explore and even write the software we need to explore and expand communications between remote teachers and their students.

One of the exciting evolutions happening right now is in virtual reality.  We've been exploring this through our board's forward thinking SHSM program since 2015.  As the technology has matured prices have tumbled.  The Oculus Quest 2 runs at a resolution that would have required a $1000 VR system connected to a $2000 high speed PC back in 2015, but it now costs less than $500 (very close to what a Chromebook costs).  What might a class equiped with immersive, fully interactive virtual and augmented reality look like?

Experiential learning takes a huge leap forward in VR.  Giving students a chance to virtually explore Anne Frank's house instead of talking about it or passively watching a video makes the benefits of immersive experiential learning obvious. 

If you're more future thinking how about a detailed 3d model of the ISS that you and students could explore:

... or a universe simulator that lets you create gravitationally accurate solar systems?  You can explore the deep ocean or amaze yourself in Google Earth VR, which is so engaging that you often forget you have the headset on while you're in it.  It was a lifesaver for me during lockdown when travel wasn't happening.  Seeing parks on the south tip of Africa closed for COVID also brought home for me the world wide nature of what's happening.

The benefits of experiential learning in VR can even extend to giving everyone a feeling of what it's like to be autistic.  Students who experience VR tend to feel that they've actually experienced it.  This is a big step away from passively reading a webpage or watching a video, which is about as far as elearning goes these days.  Bringing experiential and immersive experiences to elearning will revolutionize the process and radically change what our ideas of a field trip is (elearning students don't currently have field trips).

Beyond the experiential benefits of elearning, what I'd really like to go after is using virtual and augmented reality as a work around for social distancing.  This is leading edge stuff - labs are looking into it now, but from a business perspective.  Education won't stumble into it for years, but wouldn't it be something if we could leverage this current technology in time to help us all manage the social isolation we're all feeling?

In 2018 Nick (our national finalist CyberTitan) led a team that developed a VR title they called a 'virtual classroom'.  The idea was to let students use 3d avatars to meet in virtual reality.  All VR headsets have microphones, speakers and cameras build in, so they're already inherently designed to be communications tools... and that was more than two years ago...

Our kung-fu in the software engineering class has only improved since.  Not only could we explore existing virtual and augmented software opportunities for educational use, we'd also be capable of developing our own VR classroom 2.0.  We just need the room and support to make it happen.  What would room and support look like?  I'm currently looking at 31 students with a waiting list in software engineering next semester.  If we're still waterboarding everyone with quadmesters in semester 2 then splitting that massive class into two sections of 20 each would mean we could all meet face to face in the morning to resolve problems and take aim at new ones and then go virtual in the afternoon to test what we're working on instead of the current schedule that would have me trying to be in two places at once while depending on another teacher who has no idea what we're doing to 'support' the remote learning.  In short, it would mean arranging the class around pedagogical effectiveness rather than seeing how many students we can stuff into one section.

*** 

Beyond the hardware and software research, I'd also like to address the massive gap we're experiencing in our current elearning charge.  The digital divide is deeper and wider than you think because it's not just about a lack of connectivity and available technology at home, it's also about technological illiteracy because Ontario education assumes that students and staff all know how to use digital tools rather than training and teaching them in it.

We hand students digital technology in the early grades and just assume they understand what it is from home use, but that home use, if it exists at all, is usually habitual and very limited.  Just because students aren't afraid of technology doesn't mean they understand how it works.  Every year I see grade 9s who think they're digital experts because they've owned a series of game consoles since they could walk.  Their parents' choice to digitally impoverish them by only ever handing them toys instead of tools makes it even more difficult to teach them computer engineering because they think they know everything when they don't even know how to share a document, or unzip a compressed file.

It would be a satisfying thing to develop a hands on mandatory technology curriculum that makes all students literate in technology use in the same way we expect them to be literate and numerate in languages and mathematics.  Like those other foundational literacies, digital/media literacy is a foundational skill if we're using this technology in every class (as we are).

***

There is much to do in remote elearning in order to make it a viable learning strategy both during the COVID19 pandemic and beyond, but we need vision and the will to explore where this is going instead of just waiting for business to hand us down their leftovers or an uncaring government to use it as an excuse to Walmart education into pedagogical irrelevance.

I was once talking to an administrator who said, "I hate the word pedagogy, what does that even mean anyway?"  The complexity in the concept is exactly what we should be protecting as we continue to evolve learning in our digital age.  Pedagogy is not a concept that plays well with a management approach that is looking for cheap and easy solutions.  Perhaps that's why I always feel like I'm the one fighting for it when I'm talking to educational management, but we should always be working toward it even if it's difficult.

Developing a more pedagogically powerful elearning system won't just help us manage this pandemic crisis, it would also help us manage the looming environmental crisis of which this pandemic is just a symptom.  If we could get elearning to begin approaching the pedagogical complexity and interpersonal bandwidth of in-class learning we could be restructuring education so it isn't pumping millions of tons of carbon emissions into the air from bussing students to remote locations every day.  A truly digitally empowered local school could be a k-12, walk-in experience for all but a few students because engaging, high bandwidth virtual communications and connectivity would mean we'd no longer have to burn the world to keep education looking like it did in the 1950s.

There are so many reasons why we need to develop vision and stop reflexively supporting status quo thinking in Ontario education.  Leveraging experts in the system for their expertise rather than populating the system with middle managers intent on maintaining the status quo would be a great place to start.

***********************************************************

FOLLOWUP...

I was having a chat with one of our business teachers last week about this article that she shared about a student's response to emergency remote learning in the spring.  I liked the student's resiliency in the face of that emergency situation.  Many others (staff and students) did as little as they could under difficult circumstances.

The only part I took exception to was “Obviously it’s no one’s fault that learning loss occurs when classes move online."  The only obvious thing is that it is specific people's fault that elearning failed us so completely in the spring.  We could have had a mature, well developed elearning system with experienced, expert teachers and administrators and, perhaps most importantly, a well thought out system of ensuring technology distribution to close the digital divide in an emergency situation.  The mess we had was a result of the failure of Ontario education management to develop elearning as a meaningful avenue of instruction.

The public education system has no interest in developing elearning as a meaningful alternative.  The system is committed to its status quo because the people who run it are paid that way.  Changing things might put management jobs at risk, which it the primary function of the system:  to protect the lifelong management jobs people who run the system occupy.  Keeping Ontario schools as much like 1975 as they can is their goal.  The atrophied elearning mess we were handed in March, with systems that are radically different in each school board because there has been no central development from years of liberal and now conservative political mismanagement, was an intentional fumble.

Unions have no interest in developing elearning and were attacking it during the lock down even while they had (a few) members trying to make it work.  With no advocates for effective development of elearning within the public education system, that business teacher suggested something shocking: privatize it..  My knee jerk reaction was, 'no way!', but incentivizing elearning only doesn't work if we incentivize it the wrong way.  We need to aim it at student learning success and not plan it as a credit mill.  In any case, even the worst private management of elearning would probably be better than what the public system has managed in the past fifteen years.  In the past ten years of teaching I've come to believe that the best thing that could happen to public education is that it gets unhooked from the selfish and vindictive politicians that mis-manage it.

If we incentivized privatized elearning around student learning success with regular testing of elearning students against their in class peers, not only would private business focus on pedagogy and learning effectiveness, they might actually cause the monolithic public education system in Ontario to move with the times.  At the very  least we'd see an end to post-secondary institutions treating elearning students like second hand graduates.  Instead of giving bonuses to middle managers for fumbling their way through a poorly planned reopening that's costing them millions, we'd see bonuses based on positive student outcomes.  Wouldn't that be something?  Seeing education management getting bonuses based on competency rather than self-congratulations?

Pandemic Reflections: F2F Has Way Better Bandwidth

I'm a teacher with a lot of technical expertise.  I don't just teach effectively with digital technology, I teach the subject itself.  Fifteen years working in information technology in roles ranging from systems implementation to technical support and training are what led me into teaching the subject.  When I began teaching in 2004, elearning was beginning to evolve out of distance (ie: mail order paper based) material.  I jumped on it the summer after I started teaching at Peel DSB.  At that point elearning was a very loose HTML webpage where you had to write code to display the content properly.  I had some very interesting experiences teaching senior, university bound English on that system.  When I moved to my current board I volunteered for their pilot elearning program and taught a variety of elearning courses purely online, and then did a blended face to face introduction to elearning while teaching the mandatory career studies course.  One of the best things to come out of that project was that all of those students had a very clear idea of whether or not elearning would work for them.  A third of the class never wanted to see it again, and the correlation between students with IEPs and students who had trouble with elearning was nearly 100%.

All that to say, I've spent a great deal of my career exploring how digital technologies might augment our teaching, but I'm also well aware of the shortfalls.

The recent pandemic shutdown has driven a lot of teachers and students online, and the framing by our Ministry early on was very elearning focused, but a colleague in our first ever staff video conference said something that resonated with me:  this isn't elearning, it isn't business as usual, this is emergency response remote learning - we're not 'going online' we're doing everything we can to keep education alive at a time when it's too easily dismissed.  This might sound like an arbitrary distinction, but it isn't.  Not everyone needs to go online, and in many cases (as in the 2011 career studies experiment above), we have a sizable portion of our student population who cannot learn effectively in that space.  When you also toss in the inequity of online learning, it leaves option looking like a very poor go-to.  As educators, whenever we see the system roll out an undifferentiated, blanket response to an issue (like EQAO), we should take a hard pedagogical look at it.  Uniform responses that don't honour our student (and teacher's) individual approaches to learning and teaching are, by definition, unresponsive and ineffective. 

Since the school closures happened I've been very conscious of the economically disadvantaged students who have been cut off at home.  This may very well be a home that isn't safe, isn't providing adequate care and isn't where the student wants to spend their time.  The "stay at home" message that started this off is couched in privilege.  For many students home isn't a nice word.  I've been frustrated by the lack of initiative shown in this crisis, but the digital divide many of our students face was something we could have addressed before, but didn't.  Some leaders are now using that lack of equity as an excuse to do nothing, which strikes me as the worst kind of hypocrisy.  If we messed it up before, we're messing it up now for even more people because what we didn't do before is an excuse to do nothing now?  Wow.

I'm also staggered that there is evidently no one in the largest school system in the country who is responsible for emergency response planning.  We seem to be making it up as we go and delivering planning by press conference (evidently this are no communications going to boards before hand to begin preparing), and we've already lost three weeks planning something that should have been in place from the go.

You know what's harder than teaching remotely?  Teaching remotely using unclear and constantly changing expectations.

So here we are, in a pandemic situation that people have been warning is coming for years.  Our solution is to throw elearning at it, and (so far, 3 weeks in) do nothing to address the fact that thousands of Ontario students don't have the devices at home and/or the internet connectivity to access it - and those are the students who most needed education to support them from the beginning.

There is a reason why we truck in students on diesel fume spewing school buses each day to a face to face learning environment; public education is the great equalizer.  More than anything else it helps us find the best in our population and enable them to achieve beyond the socio-economic situation they find themselves in.  For wealthy students school can feel like a step down from a life of choice and excess, but for others it is a bastion of reliability; the only time in their day when they're talking to dependable, capable adults.  For some it's the only time when they aren't hungry, and our solution in an emergency situation that demands isolation is to ignore them?

Level 3 means you can take a time and date out of an email
and put it in an online calendar, this isn't rocket science.

Let's say we get the digital divide under control and manage to get everyone connected (we haven't and we won't, but let's imagine we did).  Now that we have everyone online and using an appropriate device, we need the majority to leverage digital skills they haven't developed and get them learning remotely.  Ontario doesn't have a digital skills continuum, other than some vague language dropped into other subjects here and there, yet we were increasingly expecting students and teachers to use digital tools in school and now they have suddenly become a necessity.  I teach computer technology and have a well developed program, but I only reach about 100 students out of the 1300 in our school.  If you count the business tech courses and media arts that also build digital fluency, all together we'd be lucky to reach a quarter of our student population, the rest have basic, habitual digital experience - like most of the population.  What we're doing with elearning is akin to handing out books to illiterate people so they can learn at home with them.

Could elearning work?  It has in my experience, and I'm seeing some of my very digitally fluent seniors doing outstanding work online now.  I've had some very positive elearning teaching experiences where we leveraged technology and created a remote learning environment that was rich and responsive.  When it has happened, it was with a digitally focused and experienced teacher and voluntary students who also had the resilience and technical expertise to make it happen.

When you teach online it feels like you're looking at your students through a wrong-way-around telescope.  I described this recently in terms of bandwidth.  When you're face to face with someone you're able to read their body language in fine detail.  The tone of their voice isn't a dimensionless thing coming out of a tiny computer speaker, but it doesn't end there.  I've had students with obvious (when face to face) hygiene issues that I'm able to notice and subtly address by getting our councillors involved.  I'm able to leverage the fantastic food school resources our school offers to get hungry students fed when we're face to face.  I'm able to overhear student conversation in class that gives me the context I need to connect with them more effectively.  I'm able to present body language and nuance of voice that develops trust and a human relationship.  I'm able to differentiate instruction with students quickly and effectively while face to face.  I'm able to close the digital divide for all my students when they enter my lab.   Doing all this in school means I'm also doing it in a place with social conventions aimed at teaching and learning that define and direct what we're doing - you don't get any of that online.  There is a reason we learn best face to face, it has way better bandwidth than any digital option.  Even if you and your students are digital ninjas, remote/online learning is always going to be a lower bandwidth, less effective option that face to face learning.

In a perfect world we'd develop our staff and student's digital fluency and engage in augmented 21st Century learning using digital tools and connectivity to enhance our ability to collaborate and communicate (and be ready for bizarre emergencies like this one), but it makes for a poor replacement; educational technology for augmentation is a worthy pedagogical goal.  Educational digital technology replacing face to face learning isn't pedagogically motivated, it's usually tied to scalability and the resultant monetization of a platform, usually with an eye to reducing costs and centralizing control.  The elearning push by Ontario's current government was entirely focused on this without any thought given to the digital divide, dearth of digital skills and pedagogically reductive nature of remote elearning.

This pandemic has shone a harsh light on the inadequacies of our system in terms of emergency response and digital skills training, as well as highlighting the ongoing digital divide.  A good that might come of it is that we begin to address all of these issues and build a more resilient and effective education system that is able to take initiative and respond to an emergency situation without taking a month to think about it.  The resultant remote learning will still be inferior to what we can do in school, but as it stands now we've taken too long to do something we're not ready to do anyway.  As we limp out of this situation, we need to take a long hard look at how unprepared we were to deal with this.