Create opportunities online for students to connect with each other as part of the school day.
Keep lines of communication open and constructive between teachers and parents/guardians.
Focus on core skills at home.
There’s a distinction between online and using technology versus distance learning.
It’s going to become a lot more interactive, a lot more personal, and then teachers are going to be able to zero in a lot more on what the kids need.
A lot of teachers feel a lot of pressure to have these perfectly planned lesson plans that go exactly as intended when you get into the classroom. In this environment, it’s okay to not have the planning perfect. It’s okay if things get a little bit extemporaneous, a little improvisational in the classroom.
If I’m a teacher looking at the pie of time and energy that I have in a given week, I would try to minimize the energy that I have to put into things where I’m not interacting with students …
Teachers putting a lot of time and energy getting a setup like I have with a microphone and a pen tablet and all of that. That takes a lot of work, a lot of energy, and it’s energy that once again gets taken away from time that they could be interacting with students.
Mariya P. Ivancheva, Rebecca Swartz, Neil P. Morris, Sukaina Walji, Bronwen J. Swinnerton, Taryn Coop & Laura Czerniewicz(2020)Conflicting logics of online higher education,British Journal of Sociology of Education,DOI: 10.1080/01425692.2020.1784707
The advent of massive open online courses and online degrees offered via digital platforms has occurred in a climate of austerity. Public universities worldwide face challenges to expand their educational reach, while competing in international rankings, raising fees and generating third-stream income. Online forms of unbundled provision offering smaller flexible low-cost curricular units have promised to disrupt this system. Yet do these forms challenge existing hierarchies in higher education and the market logic that puts pressure on universities and public institutions at large in the neoliberal era? Based on fieldwork in South Africa, this article explores the perceptions of senior managers of public universities and of online programme management companies. Analysing their considerations around unbundled provision, we discuss two conflicting logics of higher education that actors in structurally different positions and in historically divergent institutions use to justify their involvement in public–private partnerships: the logic of capital and the logic of social relevance.
Unbundling – the disaggregation of educational provision and its delivery, often via digital technologies
Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s (2006) framework of different orders of justification, connecting them to the sociological literature on institutional logics
We suggest that more explicit and nuanced national and institutional policies need to be produced around unbundled provision, which are cognisant of emerging trends in and dangers to the evolution of unbundling at public universities.
Unbundling the traditional university ‘bundle’ affects not only property, services and facilities, but also administration, evaluation, issuing credentials and even teaching (Wallhaus 2000, 22). This process involves separating educational provision (e.g. degree programmes) into component parts (e.g. courses) for delivery by multiple stakeholders, often using digital approaches (Swinnerton et al. 2018). Universities can unbundle on their own, offering individual credit-bearing modules outside bounded disciplinary curricula, or in partnership with OPM providers, offering MOOCs or credit-bearing courses or programmes. Proponents of unbundling suggest that the disaggregation of television and music production and its re-aggregation as on-demand digital content like Netflix or Spotify could represent a template for universities (Craig 2015; McIntosh 2018).
The introduction of market logic into the sector happens even if higher education is a stratified positional pseudo-market with scarce excludible resources only available to groups with access to a few prestigious institutions; its outcomes and value are difficult to measure in purely economic terms
Under accelerated marketisation, Tomlinson (2018, 714 and 724) argues, higher education is reduced to the latter frame and measured in terms of income generation, employability, consumption and performativity. Building on this framework, and relating it to unbundling, we identify the emergence of two organisational logics of higher education: the logic of social relevance and the logic of capital.
Institutional logics are ‘supra-organizational patterns of activity by which individuals and organizations produce and reproduce their material subsistence … [and] symbolic systems, ways of ordering reality… rendering experience of time and space meaningful’ (Friedland and Alford 1991, 243). Unlike new institutionalism, which remained focused on processes of institutional isomorphism or the replacement of a static single logic by another, the institutional logics perspective offers a more dynamic multi-level view: a plurality of logics coexist in complex interrelations within organisational fields like higher education
Janine HarrisonYou could also substitute an ice breaker with an introduction that could be both personal and relate to your subject and require a minimum of two participation posts. If students don’t know one another, they can find commonalities that way.
Jorge RibeiroI ask them to tell us their superpower(s) & kryptonite noting that they can be anything. Superpowers have been: baking bread, doing push-ups daily, Crystal Quest, etc. Kryptonite: math, writing an essay, spinach
Ed HeaberlinAsk them to discuss
1). The movie they were most disappointed by
2) the movie that they most often recommend
3) their favorite food
4) a food they hate
5) their most embarrassing moment
6) their dream vacation
7) if they could throw a dinner with any five famous people (living, dead, or both)who would it be n why
Diana AnsonUsing the Discussion Board I have each student introduce themselves to the class. I make the first post introducing myself. I usually include a picture of my dogs. This gives everyone a example of what is expected. Many really good ideas for questions are included already posted here. I also assign points for following the instructions. Points are a great motivation .
Traci Schneider CullFavorite cartoon.. what superhero power would you have and why? If you could only eat 5 foods forever what would they be… would you rather go without technology for a yr or all sweets and desserts for a year…would you give up your tech for a year or your pet
Britt Rodgers BugbyHave them choose an emoji to represent themselves and explain why…and it can’t be 💩
Sharon KibbeYou can have them select a song that they would “enter a room/party to” and have them play it at the start of their introduction
Most students do not want an online education, and many are calling for reductions in tuition fees to compensate for what they perceive might be a lower-quality education and experience. Some might choose to wait for a return to on-campus delivery.
Most professors do not want to teach in an online environment because they value engaging with students in discussions, debates, and laboratory demonstrations. There are many good pedagogical reasons why most post-secondary education continues to take place in a face-to-face, on-campus delivery mode despite the longstanding availability of technology to support online teaching.
Professor and student preferences aside, there is a more pressing problem looming.
There is precious little time for professors to change all of their courses to an online mode of delivery.
Nova Scotia Universities and Colleges need a significant and urgent infusion of funding from the provincial government to cover the increased costs of converting post-secondary education into an entirely different mode of operation over the next three months. Universities cannot be expected to cover those costs alone, and neither should students.
