Digital Pedagogy: Recontextualization of Online Teaching
Online courses sound like a very recent phenomenon due to the pandemic, and it really is – even the most anti-online professors had to transition to the online context. I bet it would be very difficult for a professor who teaches the same material for the last 20 years with minimal virtualization. However, as Todd Tauber states, online education has been around for quite some time thanks to platforms such as Coursera, Edx, and Udemy. However, these platforms are not proven to be effective yet. Tauber states these platforms are not fulfilling its goal of building a “massively better-skilled workforce”. In other words, MOOCs are massive in quantity, but not quality.
I think this is a critic that we should make as the community of educators. However, this should not mean that online teaching cannot be effective. The big mistake here is the recontextualization. If we take the same teaching practices that are working in a traditional environment and transfer it to an LMS as videos and scanned pdf files, this is not enough. This is like moving a plant from the soil to water. The fact that a plant lives in the soil does not mean that it can live in water. Oftentimes plants die if they stay inside water for too long. Similarly, if in-person teaching practices are directly transferred to the online environment in the form of videos of in-person lectures, it is not going to work, which is the case of MOOCs. The reason for this is that the students will not engage in the same way when they are online. Therefore, educators need to make significant changes in their course design. This is what separates digital pedagogy from online teaching. Digital pedagogy covers the optimal use of all the affordances of digital platforms to make the learning effective for all students. Below I discuss three important aspects.
This is online, but you are not alone. I think it is very important that the teacher is always accessible. Social interaction is still an important part of the learning regardless of the context. The students need to know that someone is always there to help and guide them. This is an advantage that comes with the online environment. Also, horizontal learning should still be encouraged with discussion forums, group projects, and collaborations.
Lectures don’t work anymore. 1-hour long lecture recordings are not applicable in an online context. Bite-size content with concision is the key to engage the students in the content.
Don’t be a lecturer, be a leader. Once, a wise and very successful online teacher I know said that “I don’t teach students, I lead them.”. It sounded very strange to me, I asked: “How can I lead If I don’t teach?”, and he replied: “They don’t need me to learn, they need to go through the content.”. After a while, when I saw a quote, I recalled his words:
October 29, 2020 @ 2:21 pm
Thanks for sharing this interesting post! I likes the part where you describe moving traditional content to online to moving a plant from soil to water and expecting it to live. I think this is what differentiate online teaching from digital pedagogy. As you said, students need to be engaged to learn, they need to sense a learning environment that will provide them with the necessary mean to go through the course content with excitement. There are already some aspects that need improvement in traditional teaching to make it more appealing, so moving this content to online platform is definitely not the solution or way to move ahead. I like the suggestions you give to enhance the practice of digital pedagogy, and on a personal level, I can relate with all three of them from past experiences.
October 31, 2020 @ 2:41 am
Thank you for your words! I agree –There are already problems with the traditional system. I think moving the content makes the problems a lot worse, and just like you said, students needs excitement to learn effectively. As a part of our digital pedagogy, we should use the affordances digital platforms provide us to make things more exciting for the students.
October 30, 2020 @ 7:47 pm
I enjoyed reading this blog post, as you did an excellent job reconceptualizing the online environment with a focus on the ways teachers can be leaders in this massive shift to online teaching. While I believe that it is always the role of a teacher to lead the students to think more critically, engage in the subject matter and see the value of a course, I think the ways in which a teacher leads now are focused more on students having their voices heard and especially being understanding of the uncertainties surrounding COVID-19. Furthermore, because the shift to virtual learning happened so fast, teachers have to be even more adaptable and have a learn-on-the-go mentality to ensure that they are helping ALL students understand the course content in such a new setting!
October 31, 2020 @ 3:22 am
Thank you for your comment, Andrew! You made an excellent point! I totally agree! The COVID-19 case is an exception. In these difficult times, being understanding is a lot more important than delivering interesting and engaging content. The new setting must be tough for some teachers which is understandable. However, it might be unrealistic to expect effective use in that quick transition. Just to look at the things from the bright side, it immensely facilitated the use of new technologies as well. I think this quick shift will help more effective use of online tools in general.
October 30, 2020 @ 10:44 pm
I really like how you touched upon the latest trends in online education such as MOOCs and compared them with traditional learning, putting MOOCs under the microscope to really understand their position in our education system. Converting traditional classes online with just videos and no engagement is not the right way, and I fully agree with you on that. Engagement is the key factor in online learning and the material needs to be concise enough to appeal to the short attention span of the students in the modern era. I agree that teachers are more like leaders or advisors, facilitating students with the process of learning.
Great Post!
Keep up the good work.
October 31, 2020 @ 3:53 am
Thank you for your comment! I like the way you phrased it, “putting the MOOCs under the microscope”! I think MOOC is a nice testbed to online education, and we can learn a lot from MOOCs to make our online teaching more effective. Similar to what you said, the online learning environment must fulfill the requirements of the modern era to be effective. I think this is even more important for MOOCs because MOOCs are things people do in their free time – it is usually not done to get a degree. Therefore, there is no cost of dropping out of a MOOC. That being said, if a MOOC is good enough for people to not drop out of it, it should be taken as an example by the teachers for online teaching.
October 31, 2020 @ 3:51 pm
As an active user of MOOCs like Coursera, and Udemy, I can relate to what you said. These platforms are different in their quality, though. I find Coursera to care more about the quality and to break the content into bite-size understandable parts. They also provide discussion forums and follow up support for questions. There is always room for improvement, anyway. But these platforms are game-changers for students who do not have access to high-quality resources and knowledgeable teachers.
November 1, 2020 @ 3:08 am
Thanks so much for your thoughtful post. I really agree with you. As an instructional designer I know both traditional and online learning have strengths and weaknesses and the two contexts have different characteristics. Also, some researchers discussed the terminology and a specific term for the type of instruction that was being delivered during the pandemic. It should not be labelling online learning, it is emergency remote teaching, because the quality of online learning should matter and this learning environment should be resulted from careful instructional design and planning which take several months to develop. Since there are many research studies, theories, models, standards, and evaluation criteria focus on quality online learning and teaching. There also are many online learning platforms like MOOCs are many in quantity but not quality.
November 1, 2020 @ 10:39 pm
Thank you very much for your interesting essay, Derya! I really liked your analogy of taking the non-digital styles to an online context to expecting a plant to live in water! I agree that while doing so, we should not expect any different result than the non-effectiveness of the digital pedagogy. I also found your three suggestions of preserving the social interaction aspect, having bite-sized contents, and being a leader rather than a lecturer useful to improve the digital pedagogy useful. The first one actually is a positive aspect of the traditional teaching style and can be reinforced by means of digital social media. It has been mostly neglected in online teaching, though. The second and third suggestions are requirements posed by the digital era and have not existed before. However, are two necessary components needed to have a successful digital pedagogy platform.