One of the things I am sure you have seen with respect to the transition to remote teaching for the fall is some kind of reassurance that institutions are doing all they can to ensure that the fall term will be the hunkiest-doriest term of all time.
For instance, McGill says: that “students and their families can be assured we are planning for robust and high-quality teaching even if the modes of delivery will be modified for this term”. Waterloo speaks of delivering “the highest quality courses and experiences for our students, at a distance”. These are not outliers: pick any institution you want, they are all promising more or less the same thing:
The problem is, they can’t actually guarantee anything of the sort. The fact of the matter is, they have no teaching quality standards for their courses, online or otherwise. This was outsourced to individual faculty members long ago. And so, whenever institutions promise something with respect to “quality of courses”, what they are actually doing is praying that their staff actually manage to work something out.
Canadian academia is a bit of an outlier in the way it assumes that “academic freedom” is synonymous with “classroom sovereignty” – that is, that professors have a more or less unfettered right, within the guidelines set down by Senate/Academic Council and the course description approved by the relevant academic body, to teach a subject more or less however they like (this is quite different from, say, continental Europe, where academic freedom is conceptualized more in terms of institutional autonomy and the right of faculty to elect their own leaders, which is not at all an expectation in North America).
The logic here isn’t outlandish: when a professor gets tenure, that’s an indication that their expertise is accepted by others. And what goes along with that is a belief that the professor must also be an authority in how to communicate knowledge related to their expertise. This is, quite frankly, nonsense: subject-matter expertise is a necessary but insufficient criterion to be a good teacher at the post-secondary level. Many profs happen to be naturally good at it, and many others work hard to develop their skills in it, but it’s quite possible to get a doctorate and even tenure without achieving much fluency in teaching.
Now, that said, the system mostly works. It is not as good as it could be, obviously – we’ve all had bad teachers and know how agonizing that experience can be. A best practice in this respect is probably the UK, where a majority of academic staff take a “Post-Graduate Certificate in Higher Education”, which is about a term’s worth of work spread over two year, and which provides new academics with the basics of higher-level pedagogy (although, predictably, this credential is almost never found among staff at the really research-intensive institutions because, really, who can be bothered with undergraduates when there is MOAR RESEARCH to be done?). But on the whole, in the Before Times, we got by without it and life was not terrible.
But that was then and this is now. Before, professors – even those without extensive pedagogical training – had themselves gone through a couple of decades of informal training simply by sitting in classrooms themselves. Now, most professors are being asked to think about teaching in a new medium in which they have no or little experience either as a professor or as a student. Most of what passes for their expertise in pedagogy is now gone. And yet, in Canada, this is no reason to ignore what faculty have come to view as their natural right to teach as they please. If they want to do 3-hour zoom lectures all term, by God, they are going to do 3-hour zoom lectures all term, pedagogic consequences (in particular, elevated levels of student drop-outs) be damned.
Obviously, most professors are not going to do this. Most are going to work diligently over the summer, using the limited time and means at their disposal to try to make a better learning experience for their students (digression: one of the reasons American universities are so much more freaked about the possibility of fall term being online and – apparently – more prepared to risk re-opening is that they don’t pay their profs in the summer, which makes it a lot more difficult for them to ask profs to put in extra hours on teaching prep). It won’t be as good as it could be: there isn’t enough time and money for every professor to spend time on this and make it as good as a true online course, and God only knows what the quality will be of all those courses taught by sessionals, who certainly don’t get hired, paid, or supported in the summer months.
The problem is, of course, that precisely because we have no quality controls on courses, there will be some professors who will not do the work. Indeed, I suspect there is a small fraction of professors, who are probably slightly overrepresented in the humanities, who are going to do nothing to make their courses online-friendly because they despise online education (MOOCs, neoliberalism, something something) and hope this experiment fails because otherwise they might be asked to do it again. It won’t be a huge group, or anything, but that faction certainly seems to exist. Some of them may try to hide behind an academic freedom argument. But they ought not to be able to.
Now university administrations don’t really have a tool to guarantee quality here. But Senates do. Senates are a form of shared governance, and as long as the decisions on quality are shared, they are enforceable (ok, I suppose it’s possible someone could use the Collective Agreement to grieve a Senate decision the way they grieve administrative ones, but they’d look like a complete muppet). So, what I would do, were I a university provost (yes, I know, God Forbid) would be to walk into the next Senate meeting and:
i) Lay out a comprehensive plan that pays for every professor to take some kind of instruction in online pedagogy, help them with understanding the ins-and-out of online systems, and provide all kinds of money for putting courses online, allocating extra grad students to do TA and small group work. Anything the institution can do to make the transition a good one can and should be delivered (Western seems to be doing the best job of this right now, if y’all are looking for a model)
ii) Ask Senate to require every professor teaching this term to take such a course, require them to lay out a plan for a revised course delivery, optimized for the online environment, and empower department chairs to reject plans which do not obviously take account and advantage of the new medium.
iii) Ask Senate to empower Deans to revise faculty workload expectations for the summer, favouring course preparation over research, and adjusting tenure/promotion/merit assessments accordingly.
This is, I would argue, the solution that students need. That institutions need. And ultimately, that professors need as well, at least to ensure that workloads in the transition to remote delivery are not going to be vastly unbalanced (you know there’s going to be a gender element here, right?). Sure, it breaks with tradition in a number of ways. But nothing right now is business as usual. Regular notions of professorial sovereignty over courses shouldn’t be, either.
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Another obstacle to sessionals preparing great online courses is that they often don’t get hired and access to the university’s facilities and training until a little before semester starts.
Alex,
Interesting post. I like the idea of universities providing more guidance, and I suspect most are looking to do that (Carleton is).
The idea of adjusting tenure/merit is an interesting and potentially good one. However we’ve seen how these types of provisions can backfire with, e.g., the US studies showing that female economists end up being *disadvantaged* by maternity/parental leave provisions. Why? Their male colleagues take advantage of the extra year’s leave to publish extra articles, the tenure/promotion standards move up, and those who actually spend their mat/parental leave in childcare end up less likely to get tenure. So whatever’s done, has to be done carefully and thoughtfully.
I think you paint an overly stark picture of academic freedom in teaching. Quality assurance processes do put some limits on what/how profs teach – e.g. they might require profs to include experiential learning, writing assignments, learning outcomes etc., in their courses. This is a blog, but I think that’s an important enough caveat to mention in passing.
As you know, the person at the front of the undergraduate class, more often than not, is a contract instructor. It’s not clear how the “you’re getting paid over the summer, you should do some course prep” argument applies to them. Perhaps we should think about paying CIs more if we’re asking them to do on-line courses?
Not sure why you think the humanities profs are any more slack than the rest of us.
Then there’s this: “Ask Senate to require every professor teaching this term to take such a course, require them to lay out a plan for a revised course delivery, optimized for the online environment, and empower department chairs to reject plans which do not obviously take account and advantage of the new medium”.
Look, whatever we do is not going to be optimized for the online environment, because truly optimizing for an online environment takes more than a few weeks of prep. It’s not clear that department chairs themselves would know what, e.g., an econometrics theory course that’s optimized for an online environment would look like. And if the department does reject the plans – so what? Take disciplinary action against the prof? When no one actually has agreed what “taking advantage of the new medium” would look like?
Thought provoking post however, and lots of interesting ideas here!
Fascinating post. As a senator, these things have been top of mind, though I think they’d have to come from the bottom-up. A blanket resolution from senate without significant buy-in wouldn’t get much play with faculty, I don’t think, for the reasons that Frances outlined above.
I just wanted to mostly add one proviso to the suggestion to “ask Senate to empower Deans to revise faculty workload expectations for the summer, favouring course preparation over research, and adjusting tenure/promotion/merit assessments accordingly.” Merit is in the control of the dean, /but/ so much of the tenure and promotion process at research institutions relies on external letters. Even when expectations are communicated to external referees, the requirements of the professions will rear their head. A historian without a book is going to face a tough time getting supportive letters, COVID or no COVID; same with economists and their tiered journals, etc. etc. Few want to tenure somebody when their external letters all say “sure, you can tenure this person at your university, but we wouldn’t tenure them here.” (to be fair, I suspect COVID would help an appeal case, but nobody wants that)
As you know, disciplines (and disciplinary standards) push us towards research, and nobody wants to be burned a few years down the line.
I am not optimistic that faculty can reach the kinds of decisions you propose nor am I convinced they are the correct ones. This moment is the golden opportunity to re-think higher education pedagogy especially for undergraduates. They have been, in the words of a terminally cynical former chair of mine, “cannon fodder” for far too long. They deserve to be at the center of college life where the classroom or… is as engaging to them and even more useful than their lives in non-academic pursuits.
If we devoted our collective imaginations, intelligence and innovation to creating fully immersive, content rich environments that compete successfully with massive multi-player games we would be on the right track. There are many extraordinary game engines that have been created to be all absorbing. They lack two things that would allow them to enhance real learning; rich, vetted ,deep multi disciplinary content and adaptive learning algorithms to assess student progress similar to what Knewton and Khan Academy embed in their courses. Our end game! would be to eliminate most of the brain damaging repetitive, boring foundation building necessary to achieve mastery and replace it with compelling content environments that closely mimic the natural learning of children. The focus then can be on the most important value of in person school-conversations between students and teacher and students with each other to explore mutually interesting subject matter from an informed base.
This would be a fine time for faculty to work together across disciplines to create the university of the future. It is a hard enough problem with more than enough complexity to engage both students and teachers collaboratively for quite some time and for a better purpose than what passes for academic activity much of the time. Administrators might even find real work to do in support of this by marshalling resources, freeing academics from burdensome committees that accomplish little or nothing and supporting all these efforts by sweeping away bureaucratic obstacles.(A fella can dream, can’t he?)
Nobody does know what will work best, but I’m sure that there are lots of MOOC-ers and pedagogy geeks that would be happy to insist that we follow their recommendations. Alex seems to want to license these busy-bodies.
This is also, BTW, why academic freedom produces pedagogical quality. It frees us from people telling us how our fields are best presented, allowing us to be conscientious, to call bullshit on the teaching gurus, or at least to ignore them.
One additional problem to the suggestion that every professor should be required to take a training course, asked draw up detailed plans for a revised delivery, etc. over the summer months: the acute and ongoing lack of school/childcare that many faculty members now face. How can academics with young children (especially single parents or those with partners also in full-time employment) be required to take on intensive training regimes, etc. prior to the fall semester while they are also taking care of (and frequently disturbed by) said children all day?
You can revise faculty workload expectations until you’re blue in the face, but there are only so many hours in a day, and parents facing a long summer without childcare can’t reshuffle their schedules to make pressing caring responsibilities go away.
Hello,
Another point is that in smaller universities, faculty in the sciences spend the summer months training and helping graduate and undergraduate research students and ensure the lab equipment is running properly. These students also deserve/need our additional help, so simply saying that ‘research can wait’ is untrue for many disciplines. Putting more time into course preparations = less time to help my graduate/undergraduate student researchers finish their work.
This is a perspective that needs to be included as well.