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
Our goal was not to create a death watch but rather to give our readers a tool to show the scope of that activity and any patterns within it. To make those trends easier to detect, we updated our tracker with a map showing closings and significant consolidations by state.
Six or seven years ago, the idea of “canceling” someone was largely used among younger people online, particularly on Black Twitter, as Vox’s Aja Romano has explained.
In May 2020 the company removed the “unmute all” setting for hosts due to privacy concerns but now has brought it back as a nuanced “unmute with consent,” which allows a host to unmute an individual participant’s microphone at any time in any of the host’s meetings once given permission. But this framing of consent is problematic to say the least. Can you refuse if the host is your boss? What if they not only have authority over you but abusive intent?
In the U.S., the percentage of undergraduate students taking at least one course online grew from 15% in 2004 to 43% in 2016, a 2018 study from the National Center for Education Statistics found.
CSU Global last week launched Direct Path Education, a new program centered on industry-specific education that allows students to transfer their credits toward a degree or earn certificates and professional certifications. The six-week courses add to a growing trend in the U.S. as many workers who lost their jobs following the pandemic search for new opportunities.
Upskilling for Shared Prosperity predicts that upskilling and reskilling could propel the transition to an economy where human labour is increasingly complemented and augmented – rather than replaced – by new technology, thus improving the overall quality of jobs.
Inertia in educational systems
The new Davos report points out that education systems – in particular secondary and tertiary education – must act and embrace this to play a central role in a comprehensive upskilling agenda.
Several higher education areas urgently need addressing:
“New arrangements – shorter, modular, part-time, with mixtures of in-person teaching and asynchronous self-directed learning – have to be developed. And to do that in a high-quality manner requires an enormous investment.”
Prominent pandemic deniers include a number of keen yoga practitioners, such as alternative health proponent Sayer Ji, who runs the website greenmedinfo.com, and his wife Kelly Brogan, who describes herself as a ‘holistic psychiatrist.’ More recently, the links between yoga and conspiracy theories came to public attention after the ‘QAnon shaman’ who stormed the Capitol on January 6, was revealed to be a yoga practitioner who is reportedly on an organic diet.
It’s hard to tell just how much conspiracy theories have infiltrated the wellness and yoga space. Researchers have tried to document the recent revival of ‘conspirituality’ – the intersection of yoga, spirituality and holistic health with conspiracy theories. The Conspirituality podcast, co-founded by cult survivor and yoga teacher Matthew Remski, lists figures in the wellness industry who have shared conspiracy theories and aims at exposing ‘faux-progressive wellness utopianism.’