Can Online Education Make Us Better Teachers?
If I asked you to think of the teacher in your life who influenced you most, would you think of an online teacher? My guess is no. If you’re like me, your models of teaching are mostly, if not exclusively, the face-to-face variety.
At the same time, if I asked you to think of something you’ve learned recently and tell me where you learned it, you might very well answer: online.
This situation — where we have few mental models of online teaching but plenty of experience with online learning — puts online education in an interesting position.
The lack of models can be intimidating when we first teach online: we don’t know which paths to follow. But it can also be liberating: more opportunity to get off the beaten path, more space for creativity. Also, because we lack models of online teaching, our entry point for thinking about online courses is more naturally learning. This opens the door to bring learning research more profoundly and inventively into online courses.
There are now over 50 years of research on learning from a wide range of fields. Yet it’s surprising — to be honest, it’s downright depressing — how little of this research makes it into the face-to-face classroom. Heavy use of lecture continues despite decades of research showing the superiority of active over passive learning. We continue to confuse content coverage with learning. And misconceptions abound about learning styles and their significance for teaching.
Could online education be better positioned than its onsite counterpart to bring learning research to bear on teaching? I think so.
Traditional classroom education is steeped in teacher-centered models of learning and hidebound in ways that make it difficult to change. Online education, on the other hand, is less invested in any particular model of teaching, and thus — potentially — lighter on its feet.
Moreover, online education has technical affordances and limitations that can steer us away from teacher-centered practices and toward practices focused on empowering, challenging, and motivating students.
Of course, none of this is inevitable. If we don’t approach online education thoughtfully and creatively, it also has the potential to be far worse than traditional education. That having been said, if we think hard about how to leverage the strengths of the online environment, if we position learning rather than teaching at the center of our mission, shake off our preconceptions about what teaching and learning should look like, and actively put learning research to work, I believe online learning has the potential to revolutionize the way we teach.
Join me in my next several blogs as I explore five reasons online learning can make better teachers of us all.
Dr. Marie Norman is an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine. She has taught anthropology for over 20 years and worked in faculty development for 13 years, focusing on online education. She is the co-author of the book How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching.
