Monday, March 23, 2020

The skills that are in high demand are those most difficult to teach online

Global pandemic planning has led to emphasis on online learning to ensure that students can continue to learn and finish the current term. But maker skills, which are now more than ever in demand, are the most difficult to teach online. This conundrum underlies the transition to a new, social-distancing normal.

The current crisis has amplified a downside of globalization: the interconnectivity of market production has for the past several decades led to the hollowing out of manufacturing capability. Since the early years of the last decade there have been calls for and moves toward a reshoring of manufacturing--largely a result of a lack of jobs and the social risks of insufficient employment for large swathes of the population. This in turn has led to a commensurate focus on the skills and competencies associated with being able to build and make things. And herein lies the main irony of where we are in education: the skills that are in high demand are those most difficult to teach online.

As the global community starts to grasp the magnitude of the challenges we are collectively facing those of us in universities and colleges are starting to plan for unknown event horizons, including when to restart in-person instruction. While it is not feasible to think that whole societies can remain in socially distant quasi-isolation indefinitely, we are witnessing a wholesale move towards more online, distributed, or flexible teaching and learning. This means thinking through how we can translate educational outcomes adapted for distributed teaching and learning. It also means figuring how we might prioritize programming to account for and accommodate those whose programs have been disrupted. We'll need to work out the best means to stage online back into in-person engagements, and to adapt in situ learning to the inevitable new guidelines or rules around social distancing.

Throughout this it occurs to me that those same goals of globalization--of distributing the means of production to lower cost regions--has led to precisely some of the problems we face in online education. Everything from engineering to design to health care will have to adapt in the short term, which may lead to positive changes over the long term. Now is the time to focus on how effective pedagogy can drive the use of any technology, and to heed the decades of research into teaching and learning, particularly as mediated through technologies like the Internet.









1 comment:

  1. There are plenty of lessons that can be better taught asynchronously on-line (e.g. learning the vocabulary of introductory business), where students can learn at their own paces on their own schedules. Doing so effectively and flipping our classrooms could give us more time for higher level interactions with our students when they are in class.

    "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." Let's re-engineer to take full advantage of technology to make education more efficient and more effective.

    ReplyDelete