Professor Urges Educators to Understand the Business They Are In
Posted on September 3, 2009 by Barbara Macaulay
This article by Jennifer Imsande goes along with the other postings I have done about faculty perceptions of teaching online. Dr. Imsande is the associate director of the Masters in Advocacy and Political Leadership program at the University of Minnesota Duluth. For Minnesota Public Radio, she has written this commentary entitled, “Online learning takes more than a webcam in the classroom.” The headline, however, in my view, really doesn’t do her article justice. She moves beyond the themes of what we come to expect in articles about teaching online, these being how hard or different it can be to teach online. Instead, she presents a viewpoint about how educators should position technology and its role in education.
I’ll summarize her four major ideas, using her own words, which hopefully will compel many of you to study her commentary in full:
1. Educators must consider carefully what business we’re in. We’re not in the classroom business. Neither are we in the technology business. Technology has value only if it increases our ability to teach the knowledge and problem-solving skills that we need to teach.
2. We need new, hybrid professionals. We need technologists who are trained educators, and educators who can wrap technology around their learning objectives.
3. We must transform our internal academic processes, which, like those of the print media, remain dependent on outdated decision-making standards and cycles.
4. College administrators and well-intentioned policy makers must abandon their sense that the Internet will save them money.
This is great stuff—see what you think and tell me what else you would add…
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I agree with all the points above. One point really strikes a cord with me: “We need new, hybrid professionals. We need technologists who are trained educators, and educators who can wrap technology around their learning objectives.”
One thing that has been on my mind for a while now is that as individual professionals a lot of the time we are deeply entrenched in what WE know, and leave the specific subject matter to SMEs. The problem there is that if we don’t know a little about the SME’s field, and if they don’t know much about our own, then we can’t adequately communicate and as such the end-product won’t be as good as it can possibly be.
And as with your comment on the other blog, you raise an excellent point. Communication after all is based on a common language and understanding and if this is not there, then a lot depends on faith and trust. There are many ways to deal with this, I am sure, but all require some up front investment and some careful preparation.
Thanks for sharing!