Putting my teaching materials on Google Drive rather than Blackboard

[downer]

I've sat on a committee or two that's been charged with coming up with standards for online teaching. And I don't doubt that there's plenty of abuse of standards by faculty.

I'm not sure that there's any reason to think that standards are violated online any more than they are in face to face teaching. It's hard to measure and compare. It seems that the growing supervision of online teaching is happening because it is possible to do so, while it is harder to supervise face to face teaching. (One of the factors is faculty complaining about the violation of academic freedom, which seems to happen less often for online teaching. Not sure why.)

So maybe the point is that those who violate standards spoil it for everyone else, resulting in a loss of freedom and moving towards an increasingly supervisable and regimented approach to online teaching.

I do wish that departments would deal with these issues internally, with chairs working to maintain high standards in all classes. But I don't see much of that happening.

[polly_mer]

I'm not sure that there's any reason to think that standards are violated online any more than they are in face to face teaching.

I disagree.  Good online teaching requires significant amounts of specific preparation and careful curation of discussion a couple times every day.  In contrast, good enough teaching in the classroom can draw on the professor's previous background with much less immediate preparation.

From my very first semester teaching college, I had an inverted classroom with significant amounts of online material including weekly quizzes so that the classroom was for small group work in a lab setting.  My adjunct position was for hybrid classes meeting Tuesdays in person with online material substituting for the Thursday meeting.

The first time I taught an in-person class with only face-to-face lecture and assigned paper homework, I was astounded at how much less work for me prepping that class was.  I didn't have to properly format all the materials with full sentence explanations.  Instead, I could work a few problems on paper by hand interspersed with tidbits like "tell the story of the 4 laws of thermodynamics".  Good video took far longer to accomplish than doing the same presentation live at the board or projected on the document camera.

Prep for an online class was reduced in later terms by uploading the last shell as a start, but updating the class was still more work than pulling out the binder from last time where my notes on what to add/substract/complement were already in place. 

A good in-person discussion is much easier to guide than a good online discussion.  Part of that is the time involved.  When we're all together in the same room at the same time, I can more easily follow up in real time with student questions and the bar for doing well at that is much lower than when I have to write what I would say.  I find that saying the words may be a minute or two, but a post to cover the same content is probably an hour or more with revisions.

When I'm the student, I can't always tell in person how much targeted prep for a specific class instance someone has done.  I can tell who applied backward design to the course based on the syllabus and who either prepped or has significant experience teaching this course to this demographic.  Online, though, a ton of work by the professor may still be inadequate for the students because of how much longer a good video or written explanation takes than the same dealie in person.  For a one-time offering, people are more likely to run out of time/energy than for a polished course-in-a-box or for an in-person offering where one can get by with less formal prep.

I agree strongly with:

Others worry that for many for-profit colleges and others that embrace technology as a way to bring down the cost of instruction, the regulation is among the few things preventing bad actors from relegating already underserved students to course work devoid of human interaction.

"The big danger is that we end up with, essentially, online textbooks that cost $15,000," said Robert Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a former Obama administration official.

The more the federal government assures institutions that they don't need to provide human interaction, he said, the more likely it is that they'll develop entirely automated programs that are "basically just a textbook, computerized."

Reference: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/08/08/new-debate-regular-and-substantive-interaction-between

[downer]

So your argument is that teaching online takes a lot more preparation the teaching face to face, so people are less likely to do that work.

Maybe that's right. But I remember the first year I had a full-time teaching job I was exhausted. Then I build up experience. The first time you teach a course in any format, it is a lot of work. The norm is to teach a course face to face first, and then move to teaching it online, and so faculty probably do just transfer what they do in the classroom to an online format. But as online teaching becomes more prevalent, there may be more faculty who start off teaching online.

I think with most courses, faculty make changes each time they teach it, gradually solving problems that they see. So the teaching gets better with each successive time, other things being equal, until boredom sets in.

I'd want to see some actual comparisons of online versus face to face teaching to be convinced that the online classes are more often taught badly than face to face classes. And like I said, that's hard to do.

[dr_codex]

I have long maintained that the industry that MOOCs were disrupting was the textbook industry. Early digital content from many publishers was embarrassing. Now it looks like an industry cash cow.

To bring this back to the OP, one reason that people have their students pay for commercial content is that it comes pre-formatted for the various LMS platforms. Not that it's a reason to do it, but it is a partial explanation. It also addresses Polly's comments about online course design. It's no worse, in my opinion, from a face-to-face class with canned lectures that summarize textbook chapters. If any of you think that's gone away forever, you don't walk the same halls that I do.

I maintain, with Downer, that online courses are getting more surveillance, partly because it's easier to do, and partly because, as Polly argues, the online courses (as a collective) need it more. But there's also a kind of "uncertainty effect", too. Anyone who has sat in on another class as an examiner knows that one's mere presence transforms the dynamic. This is much less likely in an online class, although I'm seriously considering adding a disclaimer to mine so that the students know that their posts can and will be read by various administrators and staff members, for reasons that have nothing to do with their course performance. My colleagues often forget that our email is public, not private; I suspect that my students routinely forget that, too. If that has a chilling effect on conversation, well, take it up with the monitors, please.

[Aster]

The more the federal government assures institutions that they don't need to provide human interaction, he said, the more likely it is that they'll develop entirely automated programs that are "basically just a textbook, computerized."

This. 100% This.

I agree wholeheartedly with Polly.

The "quality range" is much more dynamic (in the negative) with fully online instruction. Perfect examples of this are found at my current institution. We have many, many online professors that merely "slap it in a can" and leave it alone. All assessments are fully automated. All content is fully automated. The professor is unreachable. The professor's disengagement tends to only increase over time. Automated content is rarely (or never) updated. Assessments are rarely (or never) updated. Assessments are reduced in number. Assessment access (e.g. easier cheating) is enhanced. Assessment security becomes lax or nonexistent. Discussion boards are not monitored. Discussion boards are removed. Absentee professor doctors grades at end of term to ensure no complaints reach the administration. Or... everyone cheats in absentee professor's abandonware class to receive passing or high grades. Class enrollments are high. Ratemyprofessor ratings are high. The college administration is happy with the reliable tuition dollars rolling and the political pressure relieved to "retain/complete" students. No one asks questions. The absentee "money maker" professors are put into a protected class by the administration. They stop coming to campus, going to department meetings, or even holding office hours. So long as their online classes fill the professors are untouchable. The absentee online professors request overloads to teach additional online courses. The college administration eagerly agrees. The cancer grows.

Many of these problems are certainly not exclusive to online instruction. It is just that it is much easier for these problems to manifest and magnify with online instruction. Having to regularly bear witness to this has made me very disillusioned for the future of the Academy.