Today, I want to issue a challenge to all Canadian universities. I think a lot of universities are going to be in significant trouble come September. I know everyone is working hard to avoid this outcome but fixing what needs to be fixed for September is simply too big a job for individual institutions. And so, I am going to argue that the only way forward is for institutions is to do something which does not come naturally to them, and that is to create a national online curriculum collaboration.
Let’s start by restating a few incontestable facts.
- There is a strong possibility that face-to-face instruction will not be permitted to resume in September. That means another term of students learning from their laptops.
- Whatever various university comms departments say, what we did to finish the winter term this year was not “online learning” in any meaningful sense of the term.
- If we want to keep international students and not completely lose first-year students, institutions need to significantly up their games in terms of online education.
- There isn’t an institution in the country that has the learning/instructional design staff with the capacity to do what is required for all students.
Or, to be even blunter: many institutions will have both a pedagogical and financial disaster on their hands if we go into September without radically improving our online offerings for first-year students. And the problem is that there isn’t an institution in the country that has the learning/instructional design staff with the capacity to do this for more than handful of courses over the next few months.
But, fortunately, there is a solution. The precise source of the problem – the fact that every large institution, for good reasons and bad, jams all its first-year students into a few dozen mega-classes – is also the reason why a national effort makes sense. Because they are all basically the same classes. Think about it: courses like Engineering Statics, Introduction to Canadian History, Organizational Behaviour 100 – they aren’t all identical, but basically they are covering the same type of material. And therein lies the opportunity.
For a whole bunch of reasons, we can’t make a single, brilliant online Intro to Canadian History class for the entire country. Quite apart from any proprietary sense individual professors have about the way they approach the subject, you’d need to customize the thing for multiple learning management systems (not impossible, but a pain). But what we could do is, for each of the (say) 100 courses with the highest enrolment taught across Canadian universities is to create, in common, a large basket of very good online resources which each institution could then incorporate into its own learning platforms. For instance, there could be short films of experts in the field talking about or demonstrating key knowledge/concepts, providing animations and examples.
Imagine for a second how this could work:
- Let Universities Canada run a small co-ordinating secretariat, with a governing group of a half-dozen or so Provosts from across the country.
- The country’s scholarly association would quickly survey their members and identify the 3-5 common courses in their field with the highest enrolments. The secretariat would from this choose 100 or so courses for priority development.
- The country’s universities could put their learning/instructional design teams collectively at the disposal of the secretariat. The secretariat would assign institutional teams to each of the 100 courses.
- The scholarly associations would convene meetings of all the instructors who teach the selected courses under their aegis (e.g. all the Intro to Psych profs, all the Accounting 100 instructors, etc.) In an initial meeting, these people are connected to their assigned instructional design teams and asked for wish lists of online learning resources. These don’t have to work yet: they just have to be ideas at this stage. Nor does everyone have to agree on every resource. Remember: these are baskets of resources from which every institution can pluck what they want. A subset of these profs would be asked to oversee the work of the instructional design teams as they work to develop as large a portfolio of resources as possible.
If we really wanted to, we could do all of this by the end of April. That would leave the entire summer to produce all these online resources, make all the short films and various learning tools (en deux langues, evidemment) that everyone wants. At most institutions, the instructional designers would only be responsible for two or three courses (though large institutions like U of T and UBC would be responsible for more). But at the same time, every institution would have access to the entire basket of online learning tools/resources produced by this collective effort. A uniform approach to the subject would not be required, let alone a common curriculum: each professor would be able to choose which of these resources to integrate, given their own approach to the subject. In cases where a professor has already developed quite exceptional online resources on their own (I am sure you can all cite examples you know of locally), they might conceivably decide they don’t need this at all. Whatever floats your boat.
The point is, though, that every institution would have available the building blocks for excellent online (not just remote) courses that cover most of the credits earned by first year students (including international students). It would need to be done in concert with some first-class training for how to teach online – an effort that again could be done to some degree in concert across the country – because quality education remains as much a function of an instructor’s mastery of delivery, regardless of how many gadgets you put online. But the beauty of this proposal is that it reduces the severity of the main process bottleneck that stands between Canadian universities and good online delivery, which is the scarcity of good instructional designers and material.
(I’ve been using the term university here, because I think there is probably more commonality across universities than there is with colleges, but parts of this idea would work at colleges too. And at least in business/commerce and health fields, my guess is it would make sense to include some polytechnics and colleges in the university working groups too, because some of the material would be shared).
Would it cost money? A bit, yeah. But not really in terms of salary (we are paying these instructional developers anyway). Compared to what governments are spending right now, it’s absolute chump change. Even a moderately ambitious philanthropist could probably get this done (and, bear market notwithstanding, I suspect there are a lot of philanthropists looking for something productive to do in a pandemic other than buy masks and ventilators for the health system).
The real challenge is twofold. The first is time: at this point in the race to be ready for September, every hour is precious. And the second is will. Inter-institutional collaboration of this nature is deeply foreign to Canadian universities. It goes against some very deeply-ingrained habits both of institutional behaviour (“we are always in competition within one another”) and of professorial doctrines of classroom sovereignty (“my class is my class and what I do with it is my business”). I get all that.
But what other options exist? If we don’t do this – or something very close to this – we’re looking at losing our international student income and much higher-than-normal drop out rates among domestic first year students. So, ingrained habits be damned: in this emergency, our institutions and our students deserve bold and collective action on their behalf.
Stay safe, everyone.
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My experience suggesting something along these lines two weeks ago (with much less insight and elaboration) for English-language centres in the GTA is that we’re all far too parochial and short-sighted to do it.
You’re correct in pointing out that universities have been caught flat-footed with regard to online education. A national solution to the problem isn’t a bad idea, it’s just unworkable, especially with the timeline you suggest. It also ignores certain things already in place (e.g. for many of the “core courses” envisioned here, open educational resources already provide textbooks and other materials that are freely available and which can be modified as one sees fit).
But there are some fundamental issues that need addressing:
– you assume that online education needs a great deal of technical input, that online teaching = technically complicated teaching. It does not have to be that way, and it is possible for instructors to mount online courses on their own using the learning management systems already available to them, just as they mount classroom courses using the tools available to them there.
– if fall term sees all courses going online, creating some generic national courses won’t solve the problem of putting the thousands of courses taught across the country online.
Instead of focusing on trying to replicate the current online development process on a national scale, a process that would simply take too much time to get off the ground, it would make much more sense to put the effort into equipping instructors with the skills to mount courses online with a minimum of outside help. Online instructional design units at universities should put their efforts into providing that education and professional development.
We’re living through an emergency, and that requires new approaches. The most workable approach is realizing that instructors have the tools and resources to mount online courses themselves. They need to be shown that this is possible, and then they can retool their courses as necessary to meet the challenge of an online fall term.
Hi Alex,
I’d be happy to discuss (over email, or voice) opportunities to develop what you have in mind – I have years of experience at UBC, University of Calgary, Engineering Faculties, Business Faculties…and have been mapping global networks of online innovation hubs (i.e. ASU, MIT OpenCourse…etc). The only modification I would make the vision you sketched out would be rather than focus only on courses taken by first year students, expand scope to include “introductory” university level courses relevant to students at level of education (i.e. this would include undergrads and grad students, and post-degree upgraders/lifelong learners, who want university credit on a “transcript” that is associated with a canadian university. I’m happy to learn more about your vision, let me know if you want to connect. Philip
This is basically what BC Campus, the OOLC and eCampusOntario were created to support. We don’t need models of cooperation and collaboration; those exist and are quite robust.
The entire provincial funding model is premised on competition, not because of egos, but realistically because more than ~70% comes from tuition. Given the shift to a capitalist driven financial lens over the last 30 years, you may as well ask Apple to collaborate with Microsoft and Google to create an open source computer.
Of course, this is different, universities still are mostly regulated and provincial governments could reimagine funding models that are for the good of society. Given your expertise, I’d like you to propose what that could look like. Otherwise this has been tried and exists already, mostly in spite of lack of a sustainable funding model to ensure success
Hi. The fact of the matter is that our institutions aren’t set up for online, we still take our cues from the “sit at the feet of the master and learn” Greek model within a Victorian school year that is configured to adhere to Christian holidays and allow students to go home to reap a northern hemispheric summer harvest. I agree with the idea of common courses but suggest that for it to have real legs and not be a passing fancy a national institute for distance learning needs to be established to act as a hub for the development of a national open learning agency that will devise common courses. templates and programming/research for on-line teaching and pedagogy. Teaching/learning/research in distance modalities require completely different approaches, techniques, and perspectives to in-person venues and if we are to be serious about remote learning we need to recognise that not all horse and buggy drivers were able to transition to driving cars and operating and maintaining a vehicle as opposed to driving and caring for a horse are about as alike as lecturing and managing on-line learning.
Bill Radford PhD, St John’s Newfoundland.
My thoughts: The Problem With ‘A National Effort in Online Education’
https://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-problem-with-national-effort-in.html
Universities have resisted the transition to online learning for years and now the need to make the transition has been foisted on them by an unstoppable catalyst. To be sure this is an opportunity to evolve, however the people who resist here are likely in denial of the global trends that make this opportunity an imperative. The world is transitioning to a digital economy ever faster and the private industry is surely rubbing their hands together in anticipation of eating the lunch of a university system paralyzed by bureaucracy and comfort. If the universities don’t evolve, and quickly, then it will set the perfect conditions for a data-driven private industry to go about addressing the need that universities were tasked to satisfy. I would argue that the online world will expose the blemishes of professors that never invested the time into becoming excellent teachers, and that the systems that have been introduced (e.g., eCampusOntario) are not designed for the future economy, but rather as an iterative improvement on the legacy one. The proposed initiative would help address these issues before they begin hemorrhaging the reputation of institutions in the minds of taxpayers, parents and students. We can all agree that this virus has hastened a change in the way the world will do business that has been bubbling at the surface for some time. If a bold initiative is not fully committed to I believe the university system that we grew up in will begin to decline – a death by a thousand cuts – and a new digitally-driven approach will inevitably take its place.
I applaud the innovative approach laid out by you Mr. Usher. If you do not get the buy-in required, then I would be happy to collaborate on what the private industry will do in response.
Thanks for getting the ball rolling on the need for online courses for September, especially at the first year level.
I don’t see a need for another body to coordinate expansion of online offerings. Consortia exist, many universities already have a consider number of first year courses online, and Stephen Downes has made excellent suggestions regarding OER and approaching learning/teaching differently.
However, given the short timelines for moving online in September, universities might also consider leasing online courses from other institutions. University course leasing isn’t a new process, but was used more frequently before online courses became so widely available. In those earlier times, courses were typically leased to test a local market, fill a gap in offerings (e.g. major/minor requirements) or for low enrollment upper-level courses that would take many years to recover course development costs. When a course match was identified (either by having previously been evaluated for transfer credit or by dept. head review), negotiations began. Lease fees were usually per enrolled student at close of the registration period, copyrights were cleared by the leasor institution, and modifications to the course could be negotiated. Libraries were also consulted, and an assessment conducted of available resources. In addition to course lease fees, there would, of course, be time/expertise needed to make modifications and the upload courses to the LMS. Lease fees can be considerably less than developing the online course (depending on enrolment). Furthermore, online courses are ready now, and have often had the benefit of the expertise of course development teams. If universities would work on a quid pro quo basis, lease fees can be kept low. (if not, there may however be a need for govt funds to adequately compensate the leasor and/or subsidize fees paid by the leasee.) Another strength of this option is that the leased courses will be taught and evaluated by the leasee university’s own faculty members and instructors.
There’s another option to increase access to online courses in September, and it will also be familiar to universities: Visiting students. This too can be ramped up: universities could advise their students to enroll as visiting students in pre-approved online courses offered by other universities. Institutions could waive non-tuition fees such as visiting student application fees, letters of permission, and transcript fees. Drawbacks are that students might have to work in unfamiliar LMSs, and residency requirements may need to be altered or waived. The latter would require approvals of various academic bodies, up to Senate. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, these courses would not fill the teaching loads of faculty at the home institution.
Further to my post: Far more urgently needed are supports for instructors to teach online, and students to learn online.
I agree with James Skidmore: ” if fall term sees all courses going online, creating some generic national courses won’t solve the problem of putting the thousands of courses taught across the country online.”
& that a big part of the solution is going to have to be rather considerable retraining of faculty. I will have 3 courses needing to go online, 2 of which have previously been based on extensive discussion, and one of which was a student-public hybrid (members of public could take it too). Having done this Winter term pivot, with 2 days to take 3 courses to remote access, I have become keenly aware that it’s very different teaching, very different engagement by the students, and what various things I tried did not replicate the in-room experience.
So I admit to being terrified of all my classes being online in the fall, and the very steep learning curve among all the other expectations plus personal and community duties that I will have over the next 4 months.
I think many faculty will need all the help we can get to do it decently. So professional development will be key, as well as expanded support, especially in places that have higher number of courses/faculty. As firmly stated by Bill Radford, the “sit at the feet of the masters” model is pretense that doesn’t work well for most contemporary undergrads, especially online, without the other forms of interaction and extra-curricular elements that can happen at a campus and may also be important elements of the experience and the education.
In a time of crisis, a transition to online learning has been unavoidable and may continue to be needed for a while yet. But I am disturbed by the prevailing attitude displayed in the comments so far that face-to-face instruction is somehow antiquated and is to be preferred only by old-fashioned luddites. We are humans, not machines. Human, face-to-face interaction is the way humans prefer to behave and hopefully will continue to prefer to behave (otherwise, heaven help us). This is not about a “Greek model within a Victorian school.” This is about education as a cooperative, collective endeavour in which we build relationships to people, not machines. Do universities need some reform? Sure. Is face-to-face instruction becoming obsolete? Not as long as we are all still human.
I am not suggesting that f2f instruction is obsolete, it will have its place in boutique graduate programmes but the “cooperative, collective endeavour” is a myth at best for the most part in university prorgrammes, less so in colleges. I have degrees from both UK and Canadian universities that used hybrid delivery methods, including a Phd; one or two of the f2f Phd seminars were cooperative and collective but the rest of the f2f courses were exercises is mass lecturing that did not require f2f delivery. The on-line classes were, when well constructed and managed, far superior to the tired classroom/lecture hall models in which little learning takes place.