Union Math

Them Unicorns looked up from the rocks and they cried

And the waters came down and sort of floated them away

And that's why you'll never seen a Unicorn... to this very day.

The Irish Rovers: Unicorn Song

I'm showing my age here but there you go.  That song came out two years before I was born and it was played in our Norfolk sea-side house regularly when I was very little.  It was playing in my head as I read an astonishing email from our local union executive this week where they repeatedly congratulated themselves on the system they now claim to have had a hand in creating in response to the pandemic.  This is suprising as earlier they claimed that things were happening without their input or consent, but historical hind-sight lets you rewrite the narrative to make it look like you did something, I suppose.

This self congratulatiory email went on to state that teachers should be assigned a maximum of 225 minutes of student instruction daily, and 75 mins of preparation time.  Having never been provided with these things I'm at a loss to explain the rhetoric in any rational terms.  So deaf has been our union that I've quit as our local CBC representative after numerous emails and calls for clarification and support went unanswered, even when I was advocating for other members.  I'm pro-union because I know what would happen if One Percenters had dictatorial control, but our union isn't particularly egalitarian either, though it likes to make noises like it is.  The longer I look at OSSTF the more classist it seems, so I shouldn't be surprised that their support only appears to apply to certain members. 

Our president says we're lucky we don't teach in other boards, which isn't very 'help one another' of him, but I've found that a sense of comraderie isn't very resonant in our small, white, privaleged district.  From throwing other districts under the bus while pandering to provinicial liberal bias to fighting for clear and transparent communication with members, I've found our local a difficult beast to deal with.  And this from a guy who was once mentoring under the district president and attended many weekend trainings.  A guy who regularly shows up to policial protests, tries to present our profession in an honest and postiive light to the public and has volunteered at the school and district level for over a decade in a number of roles.

The problem with the district's current belief in this fantastic schedule is that it conveniently ignores specific situations where the board doesn't have the resources it needs to make it happen.  I think the board made a good decision under no direction or leadership from a broken ministry of education in setting things up as they did, but we then needed a local union ready to work to protect its members when the specifics of the plan could not be met.  What we have instead are a group of self contratulatory district types with a strangle hold on control of our local who are more interested in putting out emails that sound like they were written by our employer than they are in making sure all of their members have access to the same plan in terms of work expected.

What we need, unless qualifications don't matter, is to agree that any teacher working in a classroom should be familiar with the curriculum and qualified to teach the subject they're teaching.  Ironically, in the same email we were told not to do any writing jobs for TVO's upcoming elearning program because there is no guarrantee that a qualified teacher will teach that material - that's exactly what's happening now in our district and we are waving a victory flag about it.

I did some maths this morning to try and work out who exactly is teaching 225 minutes a day as per our local cohorted covid teaching plan:

Someone ignorant to the job might read this as teachers only working 225 mintues a day, but that's 225 minutes of instruction.  You can't just walk in and do that.  You have to prepare what you're doing and also mark the results.  Teaching is more like presenting in media as a DJ or TV presenter - the part you see is only a small part of the job as a whole.  When you see radical differences in instructional time the 'under the water iceberg' part of the job is also magnified.  I'm having trouble sleeping and I'm often up at 4am marking or prepping for my red-all-year schedule because it's the only time available to do it.

You have to fall into a very specific catagory to luck out and get the union advertised 225 minutes of instruction.  The tricky thing about equity is that it needs to be equally distributed.  Having said that, even the 225 minutes of instruction is no cakewalk as you've got to create two sets of material (one remote and one face to face) and then deliver them in two places at once all day every day.  Re-writing and splitting the curriculum into a never-before-taught format on the fly is difficult enough but there are other political factors diminishing the effectiveness of that remote elearning half of our curriculum.

As you might guess, I've been given 6 double cohort sections this year and have never once been given a qualified face to face relief teacher.  Teaching technology means you need to have a tech qualified teacher or students have to stop hands on work for safety and liability reasons.  Hands-on work in class is at such a premium this year (we only have 52.5 hours of it compared to 110 hours in a regular class), that tech teachers are simply staying in class in order to protect what little tactile time students have - of course most tech teachers have small, single-cohort class sizes, but not me.  I get capped the same as a university bound calculus class.  Before this all kicked off admin said to us that they expected we'd all wave off relief support anyway in order to 'let our kids keep on learning'.  The worst thing you want to be in a pandemic is a unicorn, just as in the song, you can expect to get ignored, left behind and drown in the indifference shown to you by your union.

I'm the only person in my building qualified to teach what I teach and this isn't an academic subject that might be taught out of a text book.  Technology, like French or other skills based subjects, needs to be taught by people who know how to do the thing they're teaching; you can't fake it.  Usually the union is all over this, but they're evidently blind to it this year - unless you want to try and escape this nastiness by writing elearning courses for TVO (yes, I've applied).

The union has a long term hatred of elearning and have been dismissive of it outright.  Elearning is a challenge, and I've been involved it in since its germination, but if done right it could offer a differentiated approach to learning that could serve some student needs (that's what we're here for right?).  What you don't want to do (that this government is intent on) is Walmarting elearing into a cheap and pedagogically ineffective wedge that weakens the entire education system.  You don't stop that mean-spirited, self-serving narcisism (the Ontaro PC party has donors who are ready to leap in with charter school options) by refusing to participate in it.  What we need is a union researching best pedagogical practices in elearning including which students it actually works for, and then advocating for that.  The 'keep everything analogue' approach is dangerously out of touch and a sure way to make both the educaiton system and the union itself irrelevant.

Union footdragging on elearing pedagogical effectiveness has made a mess of half our 'class time' with our students.  Double cohorted teachers don't get to support their own class in elearning.  If you're one of the lucky ones you've got a collaborative, technically savvy, qualified colleague who is helping you manage that, though you're still responsible for all the planning, prep and review of work - though that gets hazzy too as we keep turning down exectations (no new content, no assessment and now no attendance) in our online cohorts.

We aren't turning off all these aspects of learning in elearning for pedagogical reasons, we're doing it to lessen the load on remote learning support teachers as per union direction.  This means we're now trying to pack a 110 hour course in 52.5 hours of face to face classroom learning in a dramatically accelerated schedule with little chance for review or differentiation.  This is difficult in any course but in tech courses that rely almost exclusively on tactile, hands-on learning and which have been instructed to allow NO HANDS ON WORK remotely for liability and safety reasons, it reduces pedagogical effectiveness to well under 50% just based on time alone, I won't get into how difficult it has been to get parts in as the pandemic has worn on.

Eleaarning could have been leveraged make this time-crunch work better from a pedagogical perspective.  The first (obvious) step would be to ensure that all tech classes or other specialist taught courses are single cohort in order to ensure both teacher familiarity but also provide qualifiied and meaningful remote support, but that would neccessitate a local union that is fighting for all members, even the ones who teach specialist courses.  It would also require a provincial union that isn't intent on belittling elearning as a tool in Ontario education's toolbox.  We've got dozens of teachers not teaching and providing toilet breaks for people in the building so the money and teaching talent was there, it has just lacked focus.

The result of this game of smoke and mirrors is a steady deterioration of remote learning expectations since this year of pandemic teaching began.  Every time we go fully remote we seem to lose leverage in the remote half of our regular in-school day.

This politically motivated intentional ignoring of remote elearning has resulted in many classes (I'm told by students) who have little or no remote elearning work at all.  There are single cohort teachers doing 120 minutes (2 hours) of face to face instruction in the morning and then simply walking away from the remote half of the course.  Students in that class are earning credits and grades based on less than half the normal class work and can't possibly be coming anywhere close to regular curriculum expectations, but when it suits the political angle the union wants to take on elearning, it's all good.

The other result of this wildly uneven scheduling of work is that some members are being waterboarded by a brutal workload that can include more than twice the instructional time (along with all the prep, marking and logitistical time required for it).  When I pointed this out after my first double cohort double class quadmester and suggested I should have lightened remote support expectations in the quadmester where my prep period resided (something we could have worked around with a more evenly distrubuted schedule instead of clinging to the old one), I was told by admin that wouldn't be fair and everyone has to do the same duties.  That's exactly the moment my union should have stepped in and shown how much extra work I'd already done, but they'd rather pat themselves on the back for a job well-done for a small percentage of their members.  The equity must be great if you're lucky enough to have it.

I don't think the current situation is a failure of the school board.  I think they made difficult choices as well as they could with no support or leadership from the ministry.  What we needed was our local union to show up and help mould that plan into something that is actually fair for everyone involved and differentiates based on availablity of qualifications.  More supported, credible and consistent elearning expectations should also have been developed and evolved over the course of this year, but our union's poltiics can't get out of its own way when it comes to elearning, even when it results in members being hurt by wildly unfair and inequitable work expectations.

I look forward to the next email that looks like an advertisement for my employer and shows no awareness or concern for member circumstances.  It's probably sitting in my inbox right now.  I'm pretty sure I pay the same dues as everyone else, too bad the support isn't equal.

You'll see green alligators and long necked geese
Some humpy-back camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you're born
You're never gonna see no Unicorn.

This unicorn with his rare teaching qualifications isn't just dealing with another double cohort double class quadmester.  This time around it's double cohort double classes with stacked multi-grade senior classes, which means even more prep (grade 11 face to face work, grade 12 face to face work, grade 11 remote work, grade 12 remote work), and all packed into a single class capped at 31 students - like a university bound academic class, except my class of 31 includes 10% essential students, 35% applied students and over 50% of the class has an IEP (tech tends to attact students with special needs because it doesn't expect them to sit in rows reading out of the same textbook).  The unicorning going on here is starting to feel less like benign neglect and more like systemic bias intent on extinction, which any technology teacher in Ontario education can tell you is nothing new.

***

Here's another way to look at the wildly uneven work expectations many teachers are facing.  Aren't you lucky if you're in the green?  I wish we had a union to address it...

Yep, you may well be working more than twice as many face to face instructional hours as other teachers in the same board.  You'd think someone in an office somewhere would want to do something about that, but evidently not.

Someone might come back at me with "yeah, we'll I'm also teaching online!"  So am I, all day, every day while I'm also teaching face to face all day every day.  If you want to throw the simultaneous elearning/remote expectations on top of this it gets even less even.

COVID19 Reflections: Status Quo, Enthusiasm & the Compassionate Path

This is a first draft, feel free to enjoy the writing process, but there is a revised and updated version on Mechanical Sympathy: http://mechanicalsympathy.ca/wp/index.php/2020/04/17/covid19-reflections-status-quo-enthusiasm-the-compassionate-path/



The other week Alec Couros asked for predictions on what will come of this pandemic remote learning situation.  I find myself straddling this divide.  On the one side you have the powers that be who have no interest in changing a status quo that has put them in charge.  On the other you have technology multinationals and the branded teachers who support them wanting to use this situation as an opportunity to push a more technology dependent evolution in schooling.  In between them all are working teachers who are just trying to make this work.

Six years ago I found myself in Arizona at the Education Innovation (sic) Summit at the invitation of Wikispaces (who have since evaporated).  I say sic because it had very little to do with education or innovation and a lot to do with market share and the rollout of an inflexible digital delivery system (or LMS if you prefer).  There were a couple of comments from that conference that are resonating with me during this pandemic emergency response.  I overheard a senior VP at a multi-national tech company you'd have heard of that likes to 'certify' and brand teachers say, "with the new common core curriculum and the charter school push, this is our moment to strike!"  You could almost hear the drool hitting the floor from the predators who filled up this 'education innovation' summit.  This should sound strangely familiar to Ontario educators after this past year.

An opposing moment came as a round table of Ph.Ds talked about data exhaust and tracking the vast improvements that have happened in education and learning thanks to our adoption of digital technology.  The problem is that there is no such data.  Countries that adopted digital technology in learning early on show little or no statistical change in learning outcomes.  This is what happens when we adopt digital technology primarily to reduce photocopying budgets instead of applying pedagogy to leverage new communication mediums.

In the six years since that conference I've watched our school systems lurch toward the stake I claimed on the digital frontier, adopting wireless and cloud based technologies and expanding general student access to edtech, but the learning outcomes are seldom different because we have done little to improve digital transliteracy.  Students who struggled before tend to actually struggle more in the digital cesspool of conflicting mediums.  Now that I'm teaching computer technology full time, I see it happening on a province-wide basis; technology isn't the great equalizer.  Instead of adapting and engaging with new mediums and developing transliteracies around them, we've reduced digital technology to a cost saving measure that doesn't actually save any money.  We don't teach digital fluency, we just magically expect it, and in the meantime we're buying mounds of technology that almost no one knows how to leverage effectively.

At the end of 2019 a novel virus that we've never seen before began spreading across the world.  Unchecked it would kill millions and overwhelm our austerity riddled medical systems.  After a year of bullying Ontario education with absurd threats of mandatory elearning courses for all, COVID19 suddenly delivered the perfect opportunity to prove that it's possible.  What's happening with remote learning right now isn't designed to deliver the best possible learning outcomes using the all of the digital tools at our disposal, it's a marketing exercise.

I'm in a position where I teach digital technology to a self selected group of students who are much more likely to be connected, have their own technology AND (most importantly!) know how to use it.  In our first week of remote learning I've got eyes on every one of my students and a 100% engagement rate across all classes, but to use this as proof that elearning might work is the worst kind of skulduggery.

When this all kicked off I was keen to move quickly, take initiative and demonstrate what our digital fluency could accomplish.  While the rest of the system lost initiative in two weeks of silence, I had a number of students who were already crushing what would become the radically reduced expectations that the Ministry eventually worked out.  

Three hours of remote learning per week per course?  We spend over six high bandwidth face to face hours a week in class and senior students usually drop another couple of hours in on top of that.  Three hours of remote learning is a tiny fraction of this.  How tiny?  The introduction to networking piece we usually do in a blended online LMS and F2F grade 10 class on Cisco's Netacademy takes one week to finish - I've given my remote learning grade 10s an entire month to do the same thing, and many won't manage it, in some cases because the locked down Chromebooks they were shipped won't install the software, in other cases because a lack of space or time, and in others because without an adult present some students just won't do anything.  There are so many reasons why this shouldn't work, but we keep adding more reasons on top.

If we prove this works at all (and many are having trouble reaching even that lowered target), we've proven that remote learning is only fractionally as effective as face to face learning, which was why so many teachers fought this government's callous mandatory elearning push in the first place, and that's not even getting into digital divides, equity and digital illiteracy.  In a perfect case with carefully selected students with the tech, connectivity and skills required, remote learning is 25% as effective as what we usually do.  In reality it won't even come close to that.

***

My 'let's floor it and show everyone what digital fluency can do' approach changed dramatically over the first few weeks as remote learning finally rolled out.  Colleague Diane's comment in the union portion of our first online staff meeting (another impossibility - our union is famously anti-tech) began a shift in my thinking; this isn't an opportunity to push elearning, it's an emergency response.  How we name it might sound pedantic, but it isn't.  Names carry implications, and even though Ontario's emergency response remote learning is pretty much entirely elearning based, it shouldn't be, as this article from the Broadbent Institute suggests...

"To roll out what has been a specialized program serving a minority of students to the majority of students in an emergency — sets up expectations against which we are poised to fail."

"The provincial “Learn at Home” approach draws not only on a fantasy of eagerly connected students with ample resources, but also on a fantasy of home free from conflict and space constraints, supported by caregivers who can and will provide structure, motivation, and mediate learning between the teacher and their child."

There is a lot of fantasy in how this is all unfolding.  Over the years I've often found myself surrounded by perfectly operational computers that were destined for landfill.  At one point I got our student success person on board and built free, Linux based computers to hand out to families in need - it was a disaster.  When you hand out unfamiliar technology that people don't know how to use, they don't know how to use it - how's that for a stunning revelation?  We've just done logistical backflips on a system wide scale in Ontario during this remote learning crisis to do exactly that.  How bad is digital fluency in Canadian society?  Worse than you think.  The belief that 'digital natives' who are familiar with habitual use of technology somehow have mastery of it is just another fantasy we can't be bothered to dispel.

The remote learning push will be what it will be, and what it ends up being will be nothing remotely close to what it could have been thanks to our wilfully oblivious approach to digital divides and transliteracy.  We've done what we always do: drastically simplify a complex situation for appearances, but it's to be expected when a critical service like education is run by politics.  Handing out books to illiterate people isn't going to prompt a lot of reading - but that's exactly what we're expecting with our sudden onset elearning plan.

Other pedagogically focused educators I look to when reflecting and adjusting my teaching have also emphasized the importance of re-framing this situation away from a digital technology marketing opportunity.  Zoe and Brenda have both emphasized the importance of a compassionate, considered approach rather than driving for curriculum consumption. Alanna's blog post on social media distancing with students changed my mind about trying to recreate a classroom environment by driving for video chat access.  Knowing that my students are digitally skilled and connected, I was frustrated when I didn't have quick pickup from my seniors, only to discover that the quiet ones had suddenly been pressed into 40+ hours a week of reduced minimum wage work and were sorry for not doing the 3 hours per class that private school Stephen who didn't need a job in high school has decided is appropriate.

***

Would I like to see us adopt a coherent digital skills curriculum with specifically identified and developed skills?  Yes, I would.  I'd like us to become authors of educational technology rather than just consumers or branded representatives of multi-nationals.  I seek a nuanced, transliterative use of digital technology and an adaptive, self-aware pedagogy that leverages these new mediums of communication to maximize learning outcomes for everyone.  I've been advocating for a digital apprenticeship for our students and staff for over a decade and I don't see that changing, but using an emergency situation to push that agenda is inappropriate, and what we've done in terms of expecting miracles from it has cast a harsh light on our myopic approach to digital transliteracy to date.

The irony of this crisis is that it has improved digital transliteracy in one of the hardest to crack bastions of the education system.  I've seen staff who I would never have imagined on video chats, and doing that while they're also having to integrate unfamiliar digital tools in a live learning environment (such as it  is).  If Alec is still looking for a bright side in what comes out this maybe it's that more educators begin to understand the possibilities of digital transliteracy in learning.  Perhaps then enough educators will know enough about it to create a sea change in how we approach our digital transliteracy, because it sure ain't coming from the top down.


Related Material:
ECOO 2011 Presentation: Dancing in the Datasphere - we cling to outdated concepts of information and communication even as a digital revolution envelops us
ECOO 2016 Presentation:  The DIY Computer Lab - differentiating technology use to raise digital fluency
2017:  The Digital Divide is Deep & Wide - access to digitally enhanced learning is about much more than just technology and connectivity
2018:  How To Resolve Poor Technical Fluency - courses that teach digital transliteracy are few and far between in Ontario classrooms, yet every class expects fluent use of digital tools

Digital Fluency: it kicked off Dusty World and is a recurring theme in it (because it has never been addressed)

Elearning: How to make the inevitable more than a cash grab

My Background in Elearning:

I've been elearning since the early 1990s in university.  Back then it was called distance-ed or correspondence learning.  I'd get a big parcel in the mail and work my way through paper based course work before sending it back.  When I got my ESL teaching qualifications in Japan in 1999, it was through a distance-ed school in Scotland.  Those courses were difficult and made more so by the one way nature of the communication.  As email became prevalent I was able to establish faster two-way communication with instructors.  This finally evolved into an online, cloud based elearning system in the early zeroes.

In the 90s I was working in IT, which included a lot of user training on new, cloud based software management solutions, so the elearning concept wasn't new to me.  From the very earliest cloud based management systems, I've had an oar in the water when it comes to elearning.

I became an Ontario teacher in 2004 and was a summer school elearning teacher by 2005.  Those early Learning Management Systems (LMSs) were very texty.  If you wanted graphics or even links, you had to HTML code them in yourself.  All of us (my students and I) were alone in cyber-space way back then, and some wonderful things happened that demonstrated the potential of this technology.  After two years of teaching elearning through Peel's summer school program on the ANGEL LMS, I moved to Upper Grand DSB, who hadn't touched elearning yet.

By 2007 UGDSB was starting to get into it and I volunteered to be in the first group sent to another board to learn how D2L's new LMS worked.  The next year I was once again teaching elearning in summer school and then also teaching elearning during the school year as part of my course load.  By that point I was also taking Additional Qualification courses (AQs) in the summer on elearning.  Rather ironically, out of all the AQs I took in English and visual art, the only one that wasn't elearning was computer technology.

In addition to teaching remote elearning in English, I also pushed for a blended learning course in my local school that uses elearning technology in a traditional classroom so that students can get familiar with this increasingly popular option for earning credits.  That blended elearning course in career studies was very successful in terms of introducing students to elearning.  Any student who took it knew what elearning was by the end of it and whether or not it would suit their learning habits.

Way back in 2011 I was trying to wrap my head around how to get students in a 1:1 technology situation to make effective use of technology that most people consider mainly entertainment focused.  Seven years ago I was trying to help our union understand elearning and how they could support effective implementation of it.  Many educators turned their nose up at elearning and the unions would rather it not exist at all, but this kind of disruption is exactly what digital information does, and ignoring it isn't a good idea - just ask Blockbuster.

By six years ago I was thinking about applying to become an elearning coordinator at my board.  Strangely, after going in for the interview and not getting it, I was suddenly out of the pool of elearning teachers and haven't taught it since.  I've found other ways to exercise my digital expertise, but elearning has always been a fascinating union between ICT, digital media and pedagogy that I've never really gone away from.

With the rise of GAFE in our board all of my classes have essentially become blended learning classes.  I didn't make any photocopies for my courses last year because our documentation and information all flows digitally online.  I expect my computer-tech students to be able to effectively use our learning management systems.  Many of them take that digital expertise and use it to effectively engage in elearning.  Many other students from across the school show up at my door unable to effectively engage in elearning courses due to a lack of digital fluency - I still help with that, though it isn't the gig I'm being paid for.

All that to say, I have a long history with elearning and think it can be a  powerful addition to our education system.

Meanwhile, in 2019...

https://peopleforeducation.ca/our-work/ontario-e-learning-plan-unique-in-north-america/

The current provincial government, without a lot of forethought or apparent research, have stated that all students have to take four elearning courses.  The high number of expected elearning credits and lack of infrastructure around this would suggest that this is an excuse to create giant classes, ignore pedagogy and pump out students with little or no effective learning.  If elearning is going to be used to Walmart education into cheaper, less effective process, then it's a disaster for students, educators and the tax payers who are funding a process that isn't effective.

If elearning is going to become an effective tool in our education system (and it really should), it can't be an excuse to cheapen learning.  There are too many corporate interests involved that want to make it exactly that.  Those interests may well be what is behind this latest lunge at Ontario's education system.

This approach plays to a common tactic: grossly simplifying a complex public service in order to diminish it.  Many adults flippantly state that they have to do elearning through work so kids should get with it. Teaching children isn't like teaching adults. When a wage earning adult takes a course, it's an entirely different situation than a child doing it. Adults (most adults, the adult ones anyway) bring a degree of self-discipline and purpose to a course of study that children are still developing, because that part of their brain isn't done growing yet; it's neuro-science.  Saying that children should learn like adults do is like saying children should drive cars because adults do (ie: a profoundly ignorant and stupid thing to say).

Elearning in our schools should start off as blended learning  focusing on getting comfortable with the technology and expectations of remote instruction in a familiar, face to face environment.  Most students are dumped into it without any clear idea of what it is and then given minimal support. Once the tech is in hand and a student has a clear understanding of how elearning might work for them, pedagogy and high standards are vital or the whole thing becomes a cheaper, less effective option, which helps no one and just wastes money.  Having elearning as a required blended course using elearning technology in a face to face classroom is a great idea, but dumping 4 remote courses on every student in Ontario is a profoundly ignorant thing to do; differentiation based on student need should always be a driving force in effective elearning (or any kind of learning, right?).

Integrating elearning effectively is starting to feel like a no-win scenario.  Between callous government announcements about forced elearning courses for all and the reticence of unions and teachers to embrace this inevitable technology evolution, there are few who are willing to champion it.  If Luddite teachers (and their unions) would turn down the skepticism and negativity and get behind effective implementation of this inevitable technology, there is a chance to beat the politics.

Elearning is going to happen anyway, and if we don't engage and participate in making it as pedagogically effective as possible it'll end up being the corporate/neo-con money grab it's being primed to be. When that happens, students and educators alike will be hurt. So will tax payers, because they won't be getting their moneys worth - the corporations pushing it and the politicians that serve them will always cash in though.

The way forward is clear:

• prepare students for elearning by training them in the technology and the instructional expectations in a familiar f2f environment - no one should suddenly find themselves in a remote learning situation without knowing what to do
• provide full support for elearning students including guidance and library/research support just like f2f students enjoy
• set high standards and hold to them, including offering exit strategies for students the process isn't working for
• develop LMSes that curate a learning community in digital spaces - a sense of community is vital to any classroom situation, physical or otherwise
• provide elearning instructors with excellent technical skills and fluency in digital environments
• provide passionate elearning instructors and support people who are willing to go the extra mile to ensure a successful online learning experience

At the moment we have post-secondary programs that won't accept elearning grades on par with regular credits.  What does that tell you about the current quality of elearning?  It's about to get inflated into an even less effective learning outcome unless Ontario educators come to the aid of this emergent type of learning.  We've fumbled it along so far, but without all learning partners engaging in this to ensure sound pedagogy, this forced approach is going to cause a lot of damage and cost a lot of money doing it.

NOTES:

https://k12sotn.ca/blog/ontario-e-learning-graduation-requirement-scalability/
To better understand the level of growth that this requirement would create, it is useful to examine what we know about the level of e-learning that currently exists in Ontario.



http://peopleforeducation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Ontario-e-learning-plan-unique-in-North-America-1.pdf
Traditionally, in Ontario, students have enrolled in e-learning courses for a number of reasons: to fast-track and get to graduation early, to catch up in credits, to accommodate their learning needs, or because particular courses are not offered in their communities. E-learning has benefits for many students, and for some it is challenging. 

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/does-elearning-damage-teacherstudent.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/ontario/comments/b2qq79/snapshot_from_elearning_that_has_since_been_taken/
Expectations change as politics dictate new directions.

https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/confessions-of-elearning-pariah.html

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/04/09/news/ontario-may-create-student-inequality-mandatory-online-learning-report

The digital divide is deep and wide:  https://temkblog.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-digital-divide-is-deep-and-wide.html  Elearning has an expensive barrier to entry in terms of in-hand technology as well as broad-band access.  It isn't a cheap alternative, but it can be a powerful tool in our educational toolbox.

Hybridized Education

The Toyota Prius hybrid car is a series of expensive compromises.  Born at a time when we are transitioning from fossil fuels to electrical power, the Prius is a car that combines gas tanks, gas powered drive trains and engines with batteries, and electrical motors that do the same jobs more efficiently.  The result is a poor performing car that weights a thousand pounds more than the equivalent gas powered vehicle because it's trying to live in two worlds at once.  If you've ever driven one, you've got to know that the future is grim indeed.  Fortunately, hybrid cars are a momentary blip on the automotive evolutionary scale.  As the transition from gasoline to electrical vehicles happens, and electrical infrastructure and technologies improve, the compromise of a hybrid along with all the pointless redundancy will no longer be necessary.


Our education system is in a similar situation, and it's an expensive moment to have to live through.  The future consists of paperless, friction-less information.  The past consisted of papered, controlled, expensive, limited access to information.  In 2012 education is straddling that paper/digital divide, trying to answer to centuries of paper based tradition while also struggling to remain relevant in a rapidly digitizing world.  It's an expensive gap to cross, and one that is full of incongruities and compromises - ask Toyota engineers, it's an impossible position to create anything elegant in.

We struggle to produce students relevant to the increasingly digital world they are graduating into while experiencing more paper-based drag than just about any other industry.  Whereas business and research have leapt into digitization, driven by the need to find efficiencies in order to be competitive, education struggles to understand and embrace the inherent advantages of digitization.  The only urge to do so is in trying to remain relevant to our students - perhaps the least politically powerful (yet most important) members of the educational community.

I see teachers spending thousands of dollars a year on photocopying handouts (of information easily findable online which then get left behind), and no one bats an eyelash.  Thousands more are spent on text books that are already out of date when they are published, also often showing information that can as easily be found online.  At the same time we struggle to find funds to get the basic equipment needed to embrace digital advantages; the between directions is apparent.

No trees were destroyed in the writing of this blog, but a significant number of electrons were terribly inconvenienced.

The good news is that this is a temporary shortcoming - we won't be building Priuses or trying to fund two parallel (analogue & digital) education systems for long.  Once the tipping point is reached and migration happens, the inherent efficiencies of digital information will transform education.  In 20 years will look back on this time of factory schools like we look back on the age of one room school houses.  In the meantime, the strain of trying to please the past and the future at the same time is causing confusion and misdirection.

We ignore what is happening digitally in society in general and risk becoming increasingly irrelevant as an education system.  We also risk producing students who are increasingly unable to perform (aren't taught how to manage the digital)  in a world very different from the one they were presented in school.  In the meantime we're trying to satisfy traditional academic habits in order to appear proper and correct (books on shelves, teacher at the front, tests on readily available information, streamed classes that feed the right students to the right post secondary institutions using the same old established marking paradigms).

Once again, the ECOO Conference, its feet firmly planted in the future, looked forward while getting slew footed by traditional interests.  Perhaps the best we can hope for is compromised hybridization.  Oddly, those traditional interests often include the people who run IT in education who seem more interested in ease of management than they are in our primary purpose (learning... right?).

The term guerilla-teacher came up again and again; a teacher who goes off into the digital wilderness alone in order to try and teach their students some sense of the digital world they will graduate into.  The last presentation I saw by Lisa Neale and Jared Bennett made a compelling argument for bringing the rogue digital teacher in from the cold, but as a digital commando I am reluctant to trust a system that still places perilously little importance on my hard earned digital skills.

Very little of my practice now occurs in traditional teaching paradigms.  My classes are all blended (online and live), virtually all of my students' work happens online in a collaborative, fluid, digital medium.  I don't spend a lot of time in board online environments.  It's as much about my own discovery as it is my students.  Traditional teaching situations seem more about centralization, standardization, itemization and control.

If we move past a hybridized analogue/digital divide in education and digitized learning becomes standardized and systematized, I may very well lose interest.  There's something to be said about being a cyber settler, alone on the digital frontier.  Perhaps I should be pushing the hybridized divide - it keeps this hacker/teacher beyond the reach of standardization.

Aiming For The Future

I came out of business in 2003 to become a teacher in 2004.  I walked out of being IT support in an increasingly mobile office that had converted from desktops to laptops in '02-'03 and was starting to integrate the new Blackberry/smartphone trend.

I walked into a series of schools with centrally administrated desktops modeled on a working environment I hadn't seen since the nineties.  Workplaces evolve very quickly - mainly because of competitive pressure and a dictatorial approach to work (this is faster, adapt to it, I don't care about your opinion or habitual usage; if you don't like it, quit).  It's a harsh environment, and not always a productive one, but it is more willing to experiment and evolve.

I've always struggled with what I know to be current trends outside of school and what I'm seeing in school. If preparing students for the world they're walking into is one of our primary goals, educational techno-phobia and fear mongering Board IT myopia isn't getting us any closer to it.

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Come into my office! Could this be how we interact with colleagues in the future? 

I'm still developing my talk for ECOO.  This always happens.  I have an idea I want to go with, then feel the need to make it feel as speculatively plausible as possible.  I end up radically retooling it before I go.  I like to get up there and see what I'm going to say, it's often a nice surprise.

When I begin my presentation I want my mind-space familiar with current technology and trends.  This article helps cast a net over what might be coming.

Future workplace trends wouldn't be a bad place for high schools to start developing meaningful curriculum around technological familiarity.  If giving students an idea of what environment they're going to be working in when they graduate is one of our goals, we ought to be seeing where industry speculation is going.  Soon enough our students will be out of our classrooms where we do everything we can to discourage technological adaptation and into employment that will discard them if they don't quickly adapt to new technologies.

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Tech Cloud Brainstorming

I started with the Mini-lab idea for my ECOO talk. I'm still working along those lines, but the idea of a personal tech cloud seems like it will become even more integral to how we work with technology in the future.  From desktop adoption to laptops to smartphones, miniaturization is apparent, as is personalization.  Digital technology seems intent on integrating itself with us in the most intimate ways possible - which seems obvious as it is trying to interface with our most personal, mental selves.

I've said before, we live in a time of unprecedented technological growth, even the industrial revolution pales in comparison as a means of changing how humans live on this planet.  How we integrate technology into our lives will be key to us dealing with the population and resource challenges we face in the future.

Our technology continues to find ways to connect and amplify us.  Hand tools made our hands more capable, mechanization allowed dominion over our physical environments by reducing the need for repetitive work, and now our technology is creeping into our minds, offering us better memory recall, improving our senses, helping make our discoveries accessible and meaningful in ways we might not have otherwise seen.

One goal of my ECOO talk is to imagine a future classroom and what steps we might take to get there.  The idea of ubiquitous computing, technology that subtly permeates and enhances our thinking, and what an education in this world looks like is frightening, fascinating and challenging... just what I'd hoped the future would be.

Diary of an Cyber-Settler

There's something to be said for being the first settler.  You have to be self directed, self sufficient, an explorer.  You experience the risks, suffer the failures alone and get a feel for the new world you find yourself by spending quiet moments in silence together away from the static of opinion and politics.

Later, as waves of immigrants reach a critical mass you see them bringing all the bad habits of the world they left behind with them.  They never had the opportunity to learn what the new world is telling them because they've never been alone in it.  They aren't interested in what the new world offers, they want to recreate what they left behind.  Whole political and social structures make this migration.

In the summer of 2005, only a year after I became a teacher, I signed up for summer school teaching only to have them ask (based on my technical background) if I'd be willing to give elearning a try.  I leapt at the opportunity.  Summer school was run in Peel by a separate business entity, and they were aggressively pursuing alternate means of course delivery.  It was an exciting opportunity that came to me years before the Ontario Ministry of Education even started on elearning.

The online Learning Management System Peel summer school had selected was Angel.  It was HTML friendly but often required hands on coding to get graphics and other information online.  What it had going for it was flexibility and freedom.  It was a blank slate that I could populate with my own material.  I could easily add links to outside resources and quickly got a handle on how to post up to date statistics to give students constant feedback.

I had students from across Ontario, 3 other provinces in Canada, Tokyo, Japan and Bangkok, Thailand.  Peel summer school offered the course globally (overseas students could use the grade in proving their ESL proficiency prior to going to an English speaking university).  I was buzzing with the possibilities of what a global classroom would look like because I was observing one of the first.  The student conversations were wonderful to follow, so full of curiosity.

This was the year after Zuckerberg left Havard to found his little startup.  This was years before the first tweet.  Phones were still phones.  In the dark fibre of the Internet before social media, we had a global classroom.  This was before the majority of students were psychologically (pathologically?) locked into the same three webpages whenever they went online.

You couldn't walk into the digital Wild West like that and expect to serve everyone.  The admission requirements demanded that you were proficient on a computer, knew how to get about on the internets, and were a capable student.  There wasn't a lot of room in the digital wilderness for spoon feeding the directionless learner.  The teacher knew how to code webpages, knowing how to simply open a browser was insufficient.  The students were digital ninjas, doing everything from their own IT support to working a system that still had the wrapping on it.

There was no real idea on how to do final exams.  We elected to run them in a 2 hour window on the last day of the course.  You had to login to the course, have your IP validated by me, and then write the final exam online, live, while I observed remotely.

One of the student's internet went down just as the exam started.  She called around until she found a friend out of the affected area, then she jumped on her bike and pedaled over there, got back online and finished the exam... on time, and well.  She also got barbaric yawps from myself and the rest of her classmates who recognized the energy and thinking that went into a fix with no excuses.  The students in Tokyo and Bangkok?  Up at 2am in the morning to write the exam.  They sent up webcam pictures of themselves with the city lights on outside... it was a sunny morning in Ontario.  That exam ran simultaneously in 7 timezones.

The Ontario Ministry of Education
works its way into elearning

I ran that course again the next summer (how could I not?).  When I moved to the rural board in which I lived, I suddenly found a dearth of elearning opportunities.  It took a year before they started to develop elearning, and I leapt into the fray once again.  In that time the Ministry had worked its way online like a lumbering kraken awaking from the deep, getting its tentacles into everything!

Elearning was now going to be organized, efficient, and a cure-all for every credit poor student.  They gave me a class full of drop outs from non-academic English.  In the first week fully half of them failed to login.  There was no local support for these digitally and traditionally illiterate students.  It was a stark contrast from my first experience with elearning where students would perform super human feats of daring-do in order to get it working - the course was aimed at those students; a higher bar to strain the limits of the gifted learner.

Half a dozen survived to the end of the basic level English course, which I had to keep cutting content out of because the poor English students were drowning in the text-heavy online deliver system the Ministry had adopted.  It was a disaster, and utterly frustrating - and every student was from my board, the furthest only 60 kms away.  It was about as magical as road kill.

The next year they changed the head of elearning and in the Byzantine logic of my board, other teachers, many with no experience at all, were handed elearning courses.  I could get none.

Blended learning stats from 2010

I came back to elearning obliquely the year after by being handed a blended learning course.  The idea was to run elearning in-class with students to familiarize them with the system, so when they got to elearning they weren't lost at sea.  The Ministry and Board were still set on using elearning as a cure all to limited access courses and credit poor students.

The stats from my blended class supported my suspicions about what a successful elearner looks like - the vast majority of students don't have the technical aptitude or the literary chops to manage elearning, especially when it's in an embryonic, text-heavy stage.  I ended up having to print out sections of the course so the weakest literacy students could manage the material.  Many more had a devil of a time trying to do anything useful with a computer and the internet, which they had only previously experienced as a toy and time waster (a new socialization that wasn't an issue eight years ago).  

The intrinsically motivated learner who explores independently and develops their own understandings, who spreads their knowledge where it wants to go, unrestricted by curriculum or what comes out of a teacher's mouth... that elearner is a small proportion of the general population.  I'd noted that the same division lies in just about everyone, including teachers.  Intrinsically motivated learners are a rare breed.

That year I heard of Digital Natives and almost threw up in my mouth.  There is no such thing.  There are capable, early adopter students who are self directed in their learning and can manage digital tools, and then there are the other 80%, most of whom are capable of learning what is needed to survive if not thrive in online learning.  The weakest 10%, dogged by weak literacy skills (no doubt a result of their poor learning habits) were incapable of interacting with computers in any meaningful way.

The fact that we are beginning to expect this proficiency in all students is worrying, especially if we're reaching for it at the cost of basic skills, like literacy.

So here I am, about to go back into an elearning class for the first time in several years next semester.  I fear the digital stupification of people - though that's not an accurate representation.  It's more a matter of these hordes of digital immigrants flooding the new world with their analogue habits; people being led here by social expectation rather than any particular predilection or interest on their part.

As someone who had a farmstead on the frontiers of the digital world since the early days, I'm looking at these wide-eyed, immigrants with a steely eye, my hands calloused with the work of building the digital frontier in which they want reside, but have no interest in understanding what it is or how it works.

I'm glad I had a chance to do elearning clear of the politics and the expectations of a bunch of bureaucrats who knew nothing about what they were demanding out of a new technology.  In those vast, empty digital plains, we took elearning places where it can't go any more because of Ministries, Consortiums , funding formulas and the modern expectations and demands of carefully managed and coddled digital usage.

Dire Straits:  Telegraph Road