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Welcome to Wired Ivy, Summer Shorts!
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Kieran here, with some thoughts on what we call teaching and learning that takes place outside of a physical classroom.
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When you think about it, terminology is a kind of short-hand. Having an established, defined vocabulary allows academic colleagues to discuss their discipline without having to explain what they mean by every technical word they say, every time they say it.
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So isn’t it odd that,125 years since Wolsey Hall, Oxford, became the first college devoted to the practice, we’re still struggling to agree on what to call teaching and learning that doesn’t take place with everyone together in the same room?
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At various times and institutions, this bundle of education delivery strategies has been called: correspondence, extended, broadcast, connected, distributed, distance, e-learning, online, EdTech, and virtual. Each of these, and other terms, arose out of a desire for a more precise definition in response to innovations in software, hardware, connectivity, and engagement.
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Correspondence worked... until the postal service was no longer the only feasible way to deliver lessons and turn in assignments.
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Connected was apt when students met in geographically dispersed classrooms joined by communication cables but faded away when the Internet changed everything.
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Distance was a fitting descriptor until it became clear that on-campus students found this flexible delivery model every bit as attractive as off-campus students.
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Online has grown in popularity even though students don’t necessarily have to be on the network while engaging with course materials and assignments.
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Virtual can easily encompass the range of course design and delivery involved but it suffers from the stigma of “pretend” or “not really there.” That’s problematic for universities, which take pride in awarding credentials based on academic rigor and measurable outcomes.
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Most recently the term Remote has been used to differentiate between courses that were intentionally designed for a dispersed audience and courses created during an emergency pivot from campus to cloud.
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To complicate matters further, there’s the ever-more porous wall between traditional face-to-face and nodal delivery. As soon as early-adopter faculty got curious about these new instructional formats, then realized what they were doing online might work just as well offline, they started flipping classrooms and the academic waters got choppy fast.
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Add to this the broad adoption of learning management systems (aka LMS) and we’d be hard-pressed to identify a single university course at any institution that doesn’t have some level of technology enhancement.
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Are you starting to see why it’s so hard to tell others, in or out of academia, what you do, and have a reasonable expectation that what they heard and understood is what you meant?
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Still, you wouldn’t think the higher ed community would have such a hard time coming up with an inclusive, adaptive, or even metaphorical name for all the instruction that doesn’t happen in front of a chalkboard. I mean, various members of our profession have coined vernacular for concepts as complex as axiology, the Gaia hypothesis, relativity, quarks and hadrons, not to mention consciousness, which we know to exist and yet, despite centuries of debate and research, still struggle to explain. Nonetheless, there’s a word for it.
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Surely, then, if we put our collective heads and diplomas together we can come up with a single word or phrase that means “I design and deliver higher ed courses by curating content, technology, and delivery channels that help my students meet their learning objectives, any time, any where.”
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Let’s hear what you have to say! Send us your questions, comments, and suggestions! You can leave a voice message at speakpipe.com/wiredivy or send an email to kieran@wiredivy.org (Kieran is spelled k-i-e-r-a-n) or dan@wiredivy.org (Dan is spelled d-a-n). And help Wired Ivy grow by sharing, subscribing, rating, and reviewing us on your favorite podcast app.