Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, linguist and professional slacker. This week, we're getting back to getting learned.
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As I write this, in the Autumn of 2020, the world is still coming to grips with both the Covid-19 pandemic and all the changes it is effecting on how we've been doing things as societies and cultures. No big deal, right?
I've found myself caught in the middle of one of the most-affected sectors, education. In the beginning of the pandemic, all my teaching work moved online; two years prior to the pandemic, I had begun working on my Master's degree through an entirely online program. Online education, as both teacher and student, is not without its problems. And yet, I don't think it's going anywhere.
Good advice. Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash
Right. Raise your hand if you've tried a course, any course, from one of the following:
If you're not familiar with at least one of them, congratulations, you must not use the internet as much as I do. And, while their advertising is both irritating and pervasive, I think it is also a sign of how much online education, in some forms, is not going away. And, honestly, this is not a new topic for me, it's just gotten some new framing in the past six months.
I took my first online course about <counts on fingers> six thousand years ago. Okay, 12 years ago, but, exaggeration aside, it was a different world both online and off. At that time, I had decided I wanted to learn some coding skills. I signed up for the O'Reilly school and just...hated it. The software was buggy, responses from instructors was lacking, and everything took twice as long as advertised.
Guess what student reviews regarding online-instruction-during-the-pandemic had to say about both the institutions I attended and worked for the ones I attended? Buggy, lacking, twice as long. Yup. To a certain extent, I think these complaints are both universal and evergreen in that students will always complain about software (or equivalent access and technology) issues, teachers' responses to their individual needs, and how long (or how much work) is required to complete tasks. The key for each institution is in addressing each of these complaints as it applies to their system and flow. Some institutions do this better than others.
But, what is more interesting to me is watching the market at work. Students complaining that the software is buggy? Check out this brand new site with all new software built to avoid the flaws of previous systems! Teachers' abilities and responses not matching your needs and wants? Check out this brand new system that gets the best of the best of the best to teach you, as an individual! Deadlines too strict? Too much material to cover? Check out this brand new company that produces the best lessons you've ever seen and gives you all the time you need to complete them!
Bury me here. Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash
To be clear, education, especially in the last 30 to 40 years has been increasingly affected by market forces with schools putting more money into luring students in than they put into actually teaching them, but this explosion of online learning services and companies shows that traditional avenues of education just aren't working as well as we'd like to think we are. And I don't think that's going to change. Honestly, it makes me afraid for my job, but it makes me quite happy, as a consumer and as someone who enjoys taking classes.
In other words, education is too expensive, classrooms don't work anyway, and the market is pushing more and more individually tailored courses at us. Which, taken together, shows that the market is beginning to show what teachers have known for decades: the most effective learning happens between a knowledgeable teacher and a very small group of actively engaged students. Once this is all said and done and we, as a global society, are able to start gauging the effects of the virus on education and can isolate factors that worked and those that didn't, I hope we'll begin to see some large-scale changes in public education. But I'm afraid we'll only see those lessons in the market, in the form of yet another online self-education platform, when the truth is we need both.
Now, I've got to go find a class that will let me refresh my journalism and video-editing skills without costing me an arm and a leg...
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Stay safe, stay sane. Learn something.
Joel