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Colleges and universities across the U.S. are readying themselves for a pandemic caused by the H1N1 flu virus. Or, rather, in the words of administrators at my university, the pandemic.
Some of us are thinking there's a lot of crying wolf going on; after all, we've heard these warnings about pandemics before. Still, it's reasonable to prepare for the possibility of a pandemic; I just resent it being presented (in face-to-face meetings, if not in official documents online) as an eventuality.
The good news: there may be fewer face-to-face meetings about swine flu because, hey, meeting with people could transmit the flu. It also means, however, that large classes may need to move online--hopefully the pandemic will coincide with furlough time scheduled for days when classes usually meet and when students will have to be more resourceful than usual to connect with their classmates.
But just because the classrooms will be empty doesn't mean that there can't be learning going on, so it's time for those last professorial holdouts to learn to use more than just e-mail for communicating with students. Most colleges and universities already have some kind of learning management system in place to assist faculty in keeping track of student assignments and tests, and some of these systems have passable (but far from excellent) modules through which faculty and students can communicate and collaborate.
As a recent report (PDF) prepared for the U.S. Department of Education suggests that online learning, properly deployed, is more effective than classroom learning, it's past time for instructors to hybridize their courses. By employing different methods than have traditionally been used in the typical large-enrollment course, online education offers opportunities to extend and enrich students' learning.
There isn't sufficient room in one blog post to consider all the different ways that online learning can enrich--though I don't think it should ever fully replace--the learning that takes place in the classroom. But I'm happy to point out a couple (years-old) trends that faculty should investigate if they aren't already doing so:
Open education. The open education movement seeks to develop a virtual learning commons. By videocasting and podcasting, uploading lesson plans and assignment sheets, and sharing curricula--and making this information publicly available--faculty contribute to the public good. They also gain opportunities to improve upon their own teaching by taking advantage of other instructors' transparency and candor about what's working and what's not in their classrooms. Downside: because they tend to rely on a single microphone instead of recording everyone in the classroom, podcasting and videocasting tend to return learning to the older "sage on the stage" passive model of teaching and learning that students and faculty across the country are increasingly dismissing as ineffective.
Want to learn more? Check out the many blog posts and tweets from the Open Ed Conference. There's an interesting, and remarkably balanced and candid, conversation going on right now about gender at the most recent conference. See, for example, D'Arcy Norman's reflection, Jen's comment on the post, and Chris Lott's piece.
Course management systems. I've written before that I feel these are an educational technology dead end because they're built to help faculty "manage" learning rather than promote real collaboration, creativity, and curiosity. But they can be a stepping stone to a more deliberate use of social media--assuming faculty don't become so frustrated with the systems that they give up on technology altogether. By playing with the forums, chat rooms, wikis, or (usually very crappy, closed-down) blog platforms packaged into most of these systems, faculty might eventually find their way to more open (if not necessarily open source), and easier to use, systems like Ning or WordPress that allow for public participation in ways that a typical university's installation of Blackboard or Sakai might not.
There are a ton of social media alternatives that are terrific learning tools. Please share your favorites in the comments.
The academic blogosphere. The academic blogosphere is huge and diverse, and faculty could be drawing more from their colleagues' posts on that either update or report on current knowledge, like those at Jennifer Forman Orth's Invasive Species Weblog; that talk about the liabilities using of technology in teaching, like Barbara Sawhill's post on the limits of presenting via live videocast (check out my own cameo at 1:08 in the first video she shares); or how-to pedagogy posts like
