Abstract:
Closed campuses, working remotely, and physical distancing have changed the way we work, teach, learn, shop, attend conferences, and interact with family and friends. But the Covid-19 pandemic has not changed what we know about creating high-end online education. Two decades of research has shown that online education often fails to fulfill its promise, and the emergency shift to remote instruction has, for many, justified their distrust and dislike of online learning. Low interactivity remains a widely recognized short-coming of current online offerings. Low interactivity results, in part, from many faculty not feeling comfortable being themselves online. The long-advocated for era of authentic assessments is needed now more than ever. Finally, greater support is needed for both underrepresented students and for faculty to move beyond basic online instruction to create a strong continuum of care between the teaching and learning environment and the student support infrastructure. For those who have been long-term champions of online education, it has never been more important to confront the three biggest challenges that continue to haunt online education – interactivity, authenticity, and support. Only by confronting these challenges squarely can instructors, educational developers, and their institutions take huge steps towards better online instruction in the midst of a pandemic and make widespread, high-quality online education permanently part of the “new normal.”
Utopia or dystopia
"Prof Paul Prinsloo, Research Professor: Department of Business Management at the University of South Africa (UNISA), led delegates through a rapid-fire presentation that was as optimistic about the future as it was disturbing. It can be summed up in his opening comments: "I am interested in the duality that has sprung up about robots being smart, how they can speed up repetitive tasks and do away with mundane ones and then the dystopian version of a robotic future".
As an academic, Prof Prinsloo questioned the notion of progress which, he argued, was unthinkingly understood as something 'good'. But he went further to ask questions like "good for who and why". Similarly, the question of growth was also under interrogation because we cannot continue growing, it's unsustainable. "We need to degrow," he quipped. Progress, he argued, especially through technology, could be a curse as much as it could be a blessing; it could be used to alleviate pain at the same time as it was being used to wage war.
He quoted Neil Selwyn, a professor from Monash as stating that educational technology "needs to be understood as a knot of social, political, economic and cultural agendas that is riddled with complications, contradictions and conflicts." For Prof Prinsloo, that was problematic when added to a space like a university. "Technology realigns existing power relations and structures creating a more complex, knotty, inter-generational asymmetry. You add artificial intelligence (AI) to a country that is as unequal as South Africa, what happens?""