You Can Put College Courses Online, But You Can't Get
an Education There
The pandemic made remote learning an absolute must for higher
education. But technology is incapable of replicating the best teachers.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
I remember a very painful series of meetings a few years ago as
a member of my university's innovation council when online courseware was all
the rage. Traditional university presidents and provosts were being regularly
assaulted by teams of young techies explaining that they urgently needed to get
their faculty to put basic courses online using that particular vendors' tools
and technology.
The techies impolitely suggested that the schools' current
digital efforts would be absolutely fine - 10 years ago - but they now needed
to move forward -- before it was too late -- to enhance and expand their
offerings. The COVID-19 pandemic is just the latest reminder that the entire
educational system in this country, from grade school to graduate school, is a
continual proof case of "too little, too late" as we continue to fail
our kids and forfeit their futures.
Too late, in the university context of the last decade, means a
variety of things to the different audiences to whom this serious warning was
addressed, but, among the main expressed concerns were the risks that: (a)
better and readily accessible online course content might rapidly become available
from other, more prestigious institutions, often at little or no cost to the
students; and (b) that most of these universities had neither the time,
resources nor staff to create their own content delivery systems with the
"bells and whistles" that were going to be increasingly required to
meet emerging production standards, quality levels and best practices. Blackboard,
among other antiquated programs, was basically yesterday's black hole, which too
many schools kept pouring time and money into with little or no benefit or
return.
And even under the best of circumstances, the prospect of a
single school spending scarce resources to basically re-invent the wheel when
startups had already spent millions to build systems which were being quickly
adopted across the country, made very little sense to the colleges'
administrators and financial officers. And, to their credit, the best of the
startups offered an even more compelling argument. They would develop, record
and onboard the course material at their own expense in exchange for a
multi-year commitment from each school to share its online tuition revenues.
So, over a relatively short period of time, especially given the
glacial pace of innovation in higher ed, the transition work began, and more
universities aligned with online curriculum providers although - interestingly
enough - far more of the impetus for the changes came from the administrative
side of the house rather than from the academics. This is in large part because
the financial benefits that drove much of the entire movement accrued almost
exclusively to the schools rather than to their faculties who - as a further
insult - were regularly reminded that the incremental revenues generated by the
new digital initiatives helped to pay for some portion of their own
compensation and secured their jobs.
The indignities didn't stop there. The ultimate blows came when
the online providers sent their employees (typically the age of graduate
students or younger) to help "convert" the content of the faculty
members into the instructional formats and bite-sized buckets better suited to
the new delivery formats. Imagine, if you will, any professor from your past
being told by some young, officious techie that his or her decades of training
and teaching were about to be reimagined and transformed by the alchemy of the
digital age into glitzy and compelling content sure to hold students' attention
and, at a minimum, entertain them if not educate them. This wasn't any old
shovel ware or simple standup video lectures - it was definitely new age. And
it was Marshall McLuhan's dictum come to life: "Anyone who tries to make a
distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing
about either."
But the truth is there is simply no compression algorithm for
education or experience. As the utterly bereft efforts at online education
during the pandemic convincingly demonstrated to millions of students and
parents, effective education is still delivered from one person who connects -
personally and emotionally - to another. Teachers don't teach content or
courses; they teach students. It's an alchemic process for sure, but not one
that even the best technology can put into a box and deliver convincingly at
scale regardless of the skills of anyone involved in the process. We might
appreciate our smartest teachers, but we're most grateful for the ones we
believe cared honestly and deeply about us and about preparing us for an
uncertain and challenging future.
The fundamental flaw in online education today -- now glaringly
apparent to parents and even politicians -- is the failure to appreciate and
understand that education is something that is done to you; learning is (and
must be) something you commit to and do for yourself. Engaging the curiosity of
our kids is absolutely crucial - schools can't be dream-snuffers. Teaching isn't
about instruction; it's about creating interest, engagement and excitement
about learning. It's not about filling an empty vessel with knowledge, it's
about igniting a passionate desire to learn.
Even more to the point, it's difficult to scale true learning
without some new and far more interactive tools that provide personalized and
immediate feedback because ultimately, it's not about teaching anyone to
memorize facts, but rather leading them to think about the facts, understand
the context and issues they represent, and then to think about how to address
and solve the problems they pose. And ultimately to synthesize those arguments,
thoughts and conclusions and present them convincingly to others.
This is the only chance we have to return to a time when the prime focus of
education was to make better and more informed citizens, rather than competent
factory workers and grossly indebted college graduates.
The best technology will never replace great educators; ideally,
tech will empower, extend, augment and enhance their skills while relieving
them of the enormous burdens of paperwork which they currently bear. If we
don't immediately employ effective classroom and administrative technologies to
support and relieve some of the daily stress and strain on our best and
most conscientious teachers, they won't stick around, and we'll be left with a
combination of the oldest and least effective teachers and a mass of inexperienced
and inadequately trained newbies.
In 2021, nearly one million people quit jobs in public
education, a 40 percent increase over the previous year. Following the
pandemic, it's estimated that one in three teachers in the U.S. is thinking
of leaving their positions.
We waste so much of our teachers' time tracking, documenting and keeping score
that we lose sight of something critical that every entrepreneur and game
developer can tell you. We learn much more from trial and error - even from
failures - than we ever do from our successes. Happy endings are only
instructive in the movies and, even then, the messaging is mixed at best.
We've got to do a great deal of work going forward to figure out
how to properly (and efficiently) measure not what students are taught, but
what they're actually learning and whether we're providing them with the
practical education and the tools they will need to succeed not just in school,
but in life. If the pandemic taught us anything about online teaching, it was
that after all these years of trying, we still haven't learned a thing.