Why online HE should be about learning, not teaching

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210126142422302

The gate is now wide open

Teachers used to be the gatekeepers to information, to knowledge. The successive inventions of writing and reading, print, the library, and then the World Wide Web, mean that we teachers are no longer the gatekeepers.

Schools, universities and teachers to some extent remain the gatekeepers to knowledge, the definers of what comprises valid knowledge. We do this, of course, through holding the ultimate educational power – the power to assess.

But it is not clear how long we teachers will, or should, hold this power. Increasingly, students, and employers, nations, cultures, many groups in our societies, rightly want a say in defining what is valid knowledge, a valid curriculum.

Knowledge isn’t enough

Each year, vast amounts of new knowledge are produced. Also, each year, vast amounts of current knowledge become wrong, or redundant, or both. Knowledge dies. In some subjects, a significant proportion of what was taught in the first year will have died by the time the students who learned it graduate. So, what is education for?

Machines are doing more and more of the work

The bad news is, we are getting squeezed out of work. The good news is, we are getting squeezed up, into ever more interesting work. We will be able to stay ahead for a long time; because there are always still more difficult and important and exciting things for us to do, increasingly with the support of our increasingly capable machines.

Employers want graduates to be job-ready. They also want graduates to be fluent in the five Cs: Creativity, Communication, Collaboration and Criticality as well as Competence. Not all university education currently develops the first four Cs. Very little university education currently gives high priority to their development. Rarely are they formally assessed.

Changing outcomes, changing pedagogies

The architecture of a university expresses its views about pedagogy. This remains true with the great leap online. The old pedagogic architecture – of teaching as (mainly) telling, of learning as (mainly) listening and reading, of access in and through the library to specified stored knowledge, and of assessment as (mainly) recalling, repeating back what has been learned, perhaps with some application or interpretation – has for the most part been recreated in digital form, with varying degrees of success

+++++++++++
more on online education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+education