Online learning can be good.Kahn Academy was a good innovation for motivated children.
A few years ago, I lay in a chair at my dentist's office with a dental technician sitting beside me while she watched a teeth-cleaning procedure on her mobile phone. She had her hands in my mouth while she was watching YouTube! She was motivated and wanted to learn and get things right; she wasn't being graded!
But my department is designing online processes to accommodate students that aren't motivated and will fail to learn. I predict that no one will receive failing grades in December. In North Texas, we used to call this "social promotion."
I feel like I'm living in Teddy Perkins land. See "Atlanta" for that allusion. I don't know what this world is doing. Reality used to be a friend of mine.
--Moriarty from Midland
Amen. This is disturbing. And Danny Glover is great.
ReplyDeleteCorrection: Donald Glover?
DeleteYes!
DeleteThanks.
BU hasn’t done a bad job, to be fair. A place down the road from us has adopted a plan like the one Moriarty describes, and it includes (I am only lightly paraphrasing here) that instructors should accept any file type for student work and be ultra-lenient with deadlines and extensions.
ReplyDeleteTwo types of people I have not heard commenting at BU lately: the students who say they don’t need a computer because they have a smartphone, and the “let’s run the uni more like a business” brigade.
I do wonder why people who are not good at running a university think they’ll be any good at running a business.