The changing dynamics of online education
These are times of unprecedented change in education. Digitally mediated online education looms large as one of the most significant harbingers of change. Potentially, for better or for worse, no classroom and no formal or informal learning process will be left unaffected.
Immediately, this statement demands qualification. On the one hand, online education is a classical technological disruption of traditional practices of teaching and learning. Yet, on the other hand, some of the technological changes represent, in pedagogical terms, little or no change at all. In fact, worse than that, we will argue some forms of online learning can serve to ossify anachronistic practices to a point at times where they almost become back-to-the future parodies of their past selves.
On the disruptive side of change, business theorists Joseph Bower and Clayton Christensen speak of technology in general when they analyze “disruptive innovation” (Bower & Christensen, 1995). This is a variation in an older theme of technological and social change where Joseph Schumpeter famously called capitalism a system of “creative destruction” (Schumpeter, 1950/1976, p. 81). Applying their analysis to education, Christensen and colleagues predict enormous change in which some old education institutions and teaching practices die while others thrive (Christensen et al., 2008).
In pedagogical terms, implementing technology need not bring about reform. We can video our lectures, but the didactic form of the lecture does not change. We can move from print to e-textbooks, but the genre of the textbook as a medium of content transmission remains the same. We can deliver courses in learning management systems, but the lock-step logic of the traditional syllabus stays the same. We can deploy online tests, but the process of assessment to discriminate the few who succeed from the many who are destined to be mediocre or to fail remains unchanged. The paradox here is that the transition to new technology—the technological infrastructures provided to teachers and learners by the decision makers in our schools and colleges—may at times force us to replicate didactic patterns of teaching and learning. In this case, technology stifles the possibility of pedagogical innovation, even when innovation is needed and perhaps within reach.
Technology does not in itself determine the shape of change. We can put it to different kinds of use; it only has affordances, or a range of possible applications. Psychologist James Gibson coined this word, capturing the idea that meaning is shaped by the materiality of the media we have at our disposal. His work is at an elemental, creaturely level: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson, 1979/2015, p. 119).
We use the word “affordance” to delineate the range of possibilities for use of an artifact or tool (Kalantzis & Cope, 2020a, p. 92). Technology offers opportunities for action as much as it does constraints, for change as well as to ossify old practices. Elsewhere, we have sketched out seven affordances of digital technologies for teaching and learning; seven things that with thoughtful design and implementation, online learning technologies could possibly offer that would enhance learning: ubiquitous learning, active knowledge making, multimodal meaning, recursive feedback, collaborative intelligence, metacognitive awareness, and differentiated learning (Cope & Kalantzis, 2017; Kalantzis & Cope, 2015). These are only possibilities because at every opportunity for change in the design and implementation of learning mediated by digital technologies, we can also create and deploy online technologies that fossilize old pedagogical practices, so making educational reform harder to achieve than ever.
Building on the idea of digital affordances, this chapter takes one step further. Reaching beyond the immediate pedagogical affordances of online learning, we explore possible futures for education in a larger institutional sense. Two possibilities arise: We can “hack” online learning technologies, subverting the anachronistic constraints built into their designs. Or we can create new designs for online learning. The second path is the one we have taken in our Common Ground Scholar (CGScholar) research and development program.2 Our guiding research question has been: If the first generation of online learning technologies replicated and fossilized old pedagogical processes, how might we create a new generation of these technologies and deploy them as a medium for reform?
We articulate our argument in this chapter in terms of five theses. Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg, a lengthy complaint against Catholicism that initiated the Protestant revolution. Karl Marx wrote eleven theses addressing the intellectuals of his time, the final one of which was, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Our theses are a more modest complaint about the education of our in-person and recent online past, and they represent our aspirations for change in the future of education:
Thesis 1. There will be no pedagogical differences between learning in person and learning remotely.
Thesis 2. There will be no distinction between instruction and assessment.
Thesis 3. There will be no class scale.
Thesis 4. Adaptive and personalized learning will not be at the expense of learning community.
Thesis 5. Educators will stop insisting on inequality of outcomes.
Before we argue our theses, we propose a definition: Online learning consists of learning interactions mediated by connected digital devices. “Online” in this definition is not a synonym of remote or distance learning. This is only one possible modality because online can also be used to support in-person learning. The semantics is important for us because we want to argue that the infrastructure and pedagogical potentials for online learning are essentially the same, whether delivery is remote or in-person.
More than this, we want to reverse the case for online learning as well as the usual direction of technology and pedagogy design. The gold standard for modern education was traditional in-person or face-to-face learning, where the technologists reverse engineered face-to-face to replicate its features online. However, when we push the affordances of online learning, this can and indeed should become the new gold standard, transforming in-person as well as remote learning.
More than this, we believe that a crisis in education was, in any event, headed our way. Indeed, it has been heading our way for a long time, and progressive educators have been attempting to address it for just as long. Each of our five theses addresses an aspect of this larger crisis.
Machine solutions have been around for a long time, too, to be variously interpreted as progressive or regressive: As early as B.F. Skinner’s teaching machine of 1954, and the world’s first computer-mediated learning system, PLATO of 1959, developed at the University of Illinois (Cope & Kalantzis, 2020, p. 297; Dear, 2017).
The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 added a new intensity to the disruption represented by online education and urgency to respond. Almost all educators were forced to teach remotely, the medium for which online learning was necessary. For some, the experience required them to learn new things and gain insights into different processes for teaching and learning. For others who were forced to use horrible tools that hard-coded regressive pedagogies, this proved a negative experience (Kalantzis & Cope, 2020b).
In each of the theses that follow, we will contrast the pedagogical architecture of what we characterize as the old school, with the not-so-new school of online learning that reverse engineers and replicate the old school, and then a new generation of online learning tools that may be a harbinger of a genuine change in education.
THESIS 1
There will be no pedagogical differences between learning in person and learning remotely
In the old school, it was necessary for students to be in the same room at the same time. The classical classroom is a communications architecture, in fact a knowledge technology of sorts, with thirty or so children in the classroom or a hundred or so college students in the lecture hall—just enough for the teacher to speak and be heard. The logistics of communication, transmitting knowledge from teacher to learner, required confinement on two dimensions: space and time. The walls of the classroom confined learners in space, while the cells of the timetable confined them in time. Here we will parse three foundational artifacts of communication that were brought into these four walls in these timeslots: the lecture, the textbook, and teacher-led student discussion.
As a form of communication peculiar to education, the teacher-lecture is perhaps the oldest. “For it belongeth to the master to speak and to teach,” said St. Benedict of Nursia, and “it becometh the disciple to be silent and to listen. If, therefore, anything must be asked of the Superior, let it be asked with all humility and respectful submission” (St. Benedict c.530/1949, Chapter 6). St. Benedict is a profoundly important person, the inventor of Western monasticism, a system of social and bodily separation from the world for the purposes of learning and ideological devotion. The medieval monasteries become the first Western colleges and universities. In the lecture, the master speaks while the disciples sit silently listening. Perhaps at the end, there might be space for a question or two from the bravest souls (Kalantzis & Cope, 2020a, pp. 54–56).
The second great innovation of modern education is the textbook. Petrus Ramus, appointed a professor at the University of Paris in 1551, was one of the most prolific authors in the century after the invention of the printing press. He was author of over 750 editions, though today he is almost entirely forgotten. Making no original intellectual contribution of his own, he was the inventor of that eminently modern textual form, the textbook. His books were reconstructions of classical authors—Euclid’s geometry and Aristotle’s logic among other subjects. Ramus divided complex disciplines into small and digestible chunks, illustrating them with diagrams, ordering and numbering them from simpler to more complex ideas, and logically arranging the subjects according to the organizational principles of a table of contents or concept taxonomy. In this way, knowledge, which was in its classical sources dialogical, was reordered into a static visual-spatial array. As a way of organizing the delivery of learning, it was now possible to direct all the students to be on the same page (Kalantzis & Cope, 2020a, pp. 166–168; Ong, 1958/1983). In these senses, Ramus was hugely innovative, creating the modern arrangement of school subjects with which students were to become familiar over the centuries.
The lecture and the textbook perform the same communicative and pedagogical function, something that Courtney Cazden c...
