Let's turn now from one of the first inventions that helped turn the human being into a technological animal – the clock, precursor to the Industrial Revolution (which we'll be looking at next week) - to a much more recent innovation of the twenty teens: something that was briefly being called the MOOC when I designed this course. The MOOC is an invention that can be evaluated throughout this course, because the course is not unlike a MOOC. MOOC stands for Massively Open Online Course. (This class is really more of a SPOC, you might say (Selectively Paid Online Course ,-).)
The assumption behind an online learning course is that many elements that have seemed essential to learning in the Western world for the last few centuries – the classroom, the lecturer, the presence of fellow students, live back-and-forth discussion - have now been superseded by methods that are more economical, more user-friendly, and possibly more effective, and that these mechanisms of learning can be packaged, put online, and tapped-into by students somewhat "at their convenience." This is one such learning experience.
I was teaching eLearning courses long before the pandemic, and I used to tell my students who were new to an online learning experience, about Lisa Nielsen's (2011) list of10 reasons given by a select panel of students for preferring this sort of learning to the traditional classroom.
(10 Reasons Students Say They Prefer Learning Online)
For most of you, these will already be painfully or joyously obvious, having been forced online by the pandemic. How does the list strike you today? Are these all true? Would you have stressed other pluses or down sides to online learning?
A few of those in the list above are not really relevant to an online course taken for credit at an institution like Humber (as opposed to a course you take entirely of your own choosing, for pleasure). You do have some choice in what electives you take, but you have to take electives. So #2 and #6 don't seem entirely relevant here.
What about the negatives? What are the down sides to online learning? Personally, I think there are some, but I'm no longer convinced they outweigh the advantages. But I will allow you to express your own opinions on the pluses and minuses of eLearning in the discussion forums that will power this course. Some of the positive points listed above seem to have fairly obvious "double-edged sword" corollaries on the negative side, at least to me. To be honest, however, I'm coming to think that the negatives are mostly for me, the teacher. I miss having a captive audience (I'm a bit of a showman!) and connecting with people in person and face-to-face. I also miss the live, unpredictable, spontaneous, organic, no-time-to-overthink experience of the classroom at its best.
For a majority of people, however, I have found that a class like this can work well, especially now that we have become even more used to making virtual connection because we had to. But it's worth thinking about how a tool like eLearning shapes us. I'm sure you have thought about this if you were taking classes online during lockdown.
In the past, I have found many students were forced by eLearning - at least as I do it - to engage in ways they wouldn't in class. Even in ordinary circumstances, school can be an alienating experience for a lot of people, and the students I was teaching when I designed this course had become even more cynical and alienated than they were when I was in college 40 years ago. By alienation I mean the feeling of being detached from what one is doing, a lack of emotional involvement and a feeling of disengagement, a sense that what one is doing is meaningless; lack of investment of oneself in what one is doing. Many people have had that experience in the classroom.
Alienation is one of the worries of those who study technology. Technologies in the modern world have often served to cause more alienation (emotional detachment from what one is doing) and disconnection in our lives. Do online learning courses add to or take away from our sense of alienation? I actually think they can take away from it, despite the lack of an embodied connection. Why? Because to do well in this class you need to actually engage with the material in a way people often don't do in the classroom.
In terms of taking knowledge and ideas on board (learning), I think the online course is more effective for most people (i don't necessarily say more enjoyable or easier). One thing I didn't fully appreciate until I actually taught this course online for the first time was just how much this kind of learning is based in reading and writing. Of course this should be obvious and I was theoretically aware of it, but now that I've actually done that reading and writing myself a great many times, it has really come home to me.
Both of us have quite a lot of reading and writing ahead of us! On the one hand, this seems like a very good thing. In the live classes I teach at Humber, I'm painfully aware that few students do the readings consistently - they rely on the lectures and classroom discussion for most of their understanding, and all too often they are unfocused during those classroom experiences; so many don't end up understanding anything very accurately or thoroughly. Here online, I can be almost certain that you will at least have read some of the prepared lessons and struggled to make sense of them on your own. This is the old-fashioned model of the educated individual - learning privately through silent reading - which I'll be discussing later on when we get to the lesson on "Artificial Intelligence."
So as a secretly old-school Humanities prof, I should be delighted that - ironically - this kind of eLearning experience secretly pushes you back toward an older kind of learning. And I do find this a pleasurable irony. But also, like many of you, I would find it more expedient and more enjoyable just to go over this stuff in class, while cracking a few good jokes and showing you some of my often amazing PowerPoint presentations (not kidding). The amount of writing I've had to do, and the amount of reading involved in the discussion forums have been both lonely and time-consuming work that in some ways are more burdensome than performing in front of my captive audience in class. During lockdown I really missed the energy and excitement of being live and the energy I get from other people there in front of me. I would assume a lot of you missed the opportunity to meet your colleagues, make connections, and ogle people across the room. I'm enjoying doing at least half of my classes live again now. But I can also appreciate this special experience for the depth it tends to bring to all our learning.
On online course is a tool like any other, and Marshall McLuhan would say that this tool shapes a certain kind of human being. In what ways will it be different from the humans shaped by live classroom learning? What are some ways in which online learning will likely change human nature from what it has been in the past to what it will be in the near future? Suppose you had done all of your learning from an early age in the same way as you learn in this course. How might you be a different person today? Think about it as you work through the course. You'll have a chance to discuss this when we get to the lesson on "Artificial Intelligence" later in the term.
This is the most basic assumption behind this course: that human nature does not remain forever the same (something unchanging and essential and definable), but that it changes as human technology evolves. There is no human nature outside of the human nature we make, and the technology we make makes us different than we were. What sort of humanity will today's technology lead us to?
Because - at least for the purposes of this class - the assumption is that we don't just create online courses, but online courses also create us. First we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us. I look forward to shaping and being shaped by you, even if it is through this strange alienating medium, and across this cold dead screen. It is always an adventure, even if it's a virtual one!
Welcome aboard.