Putting your class online isn’t your job.
Teachers aren’t tech support.
I’m a professor teaching at Minerva Schools. I teach remotely and generate high-quality online classes. I have a Ph.D. in neuroscience, years of in-person teaching experience, co-founded an edTech startup, and worked on IBM Research’s AI tutor. I like technology-supported teaching. I think teaching online can be better than teaching in person. Better for learning, better for work-life balance, better for outcomes, better for the environment — just better. I want you to try teaching online. I’ve written about online pedagogy.
But if you’re a professor moving a class online this fall due to Cornoavirus, I’ll be the first to tell you that this is not a job you should have to do alone.
Don’t help…
Schools and Universities are institutions that exist to provide infrastructure: physical, temporal, and social infrastructure. There is a location where everyone gathers, a schedule for when to do it, and a set of social norms that govern interaction. If you teach at such an institution, you get access to this infrastructure. Invisibly, it shapes and guides the teaching practice.
Teachers pay through the nose for this infrastructure. Both in terms of foregone income — compare what a teacher makes to someone with equivalent education in the private sector — and in terms of lifestyle. A friend of mine is the assistant principle at a school in NYC. She gets up at 5am and rides the train three hours. She travels this long distance because the school building is in Queens and she lives in Westchester. She does it at 5am because school starts at 8am. She thinks nothing of navigating this infrastructure, because the norms of K-12 education are so strong.
I teach online at Minerva, I commute from bed to my desk in about 15 seconds. But this doesn’t mean I lack infrastructure! I have an amazing custom built online teaching forum. I have 24 hour live tech support. I have a fancy laptop, nice webcam, and huge monitor my institution bought me. The students have access to these tech resources as well. We have a whole team of people dedicated to making sure our dorms have fast, reliable wifi. Furthermore, I have academic staff to support my students with counseling, dorms, experiential learning activities, and visas to travel the world. I couldn’t teach online without this army of supporters.
There are some trade-offs: I sometimes teach late at night because my students are in Taipei. I don’t get tenure, though I’m paid like a tech worker and not like an adjunct. But I think the good out weighs the bad — especially during the pandemic!
COVID-19 made physical gatherings dangerous. This affects my infrastructure basically not at all. But it dropped a bomb on traditional physical infrastructure. School buildings are worthless right now. This affects everything: Without a common location to gather it’s not easy to identify a time coordinate around. It’s not clear whether to follow the norms of the home or the norms of the classroom.
The stress most teachers are feeling right now comes from this collapse of infrastructure. Teacher’s lives are fundamentally disrupted. They want a simple, familiar way to get “back to normal.” Many of my colleagues have ask me how they can adopt some of my practices. They’re hoping for a piece of software that will give them back the infrastructure of classroom, school, calendar…really an entire sector of society.
I can’t provide that. No one can provide that. My online infrastructure is just as complex and requires nearly as many people as the physical infrastructure. It’s not just the software. It’s the community of people who support me. This is what my colleagues need. This is what I got access to when I joined Minerva — it’s the result of a lot of effort by brilliant technologists and organizers.
A more important question for my traditional colleagues: Are you teachers or construction workers? Did you build the buildings you teach in? Do you clean them or fix the plumbing? Isn’t it a little weird that you’re being asked to set up online infrastructure?
…get angry…
It’s been hard for me to give my colleagues good advice because it makes me furious that any teacher should think that rebuilding the school is their job.
Education administrators in a tiresome, familiar move have responded to COVID-19 by dumping digital infrastructure transformation in the laps of front-line instructors. If you are a teacher, I don’t think you should be practicing Zoom. You should be spitting fire and calling your union rep.
Imagine you worked in a factory. One day your boss closes the factory. Then he calls you up and tells you that he still expects you to make your quota. When you ask “How?” they tells you that it’s also your job to figure that out. Maybe you could set up some 3D printers in your living room, source supplies, manage the point-of-sale, and just send along the profits?
Your institution’s administration exists solely to construct, manage, and maintain the physical and cultural infrastructure. They assume the risk associated with owning a school, and in exchange you agree to navigate their bureaucracy. If the heat goes off in the building, it’s the administration’s job to fix it. Coronavirus is worse than that: the entire school is worthless for teaching. It’s as if an earthquake knocked the school down.
Now administrators want teachers to build a new, parallel online school that they own?
Tell your administration to go die. What the hell are they for if they can’t provide infrastructure? Clearly it’s not emergency planning. If you have tenure, tell the administration to pound sand. If you don’t have tenure, you can probably still tell them to pound sand. This isn’t a case where they can fire the teachers and hire scabs. They need to hire IT professionals and technologists who are eye-crossingly more expensive than adjuncts.
Practice saying:
“I’ll teach online when you’ve provided the digital infrastructure, support, and training to do so. Until then I’ll go to the empty classroom and teach to the empty room just like my contract says you hired me for. Solving this problem is your job.”
Please don’t help.
Please don’t solve this problem.
Please don’t be the obsequious, imposter-syndrome-afflicted, people-pleaser that the school system has conditioned you to be.
The person asking you to “solve” online teaching is trying to manipulate you into doing their job either because they too lazy, incompetent, and entitled to do it themselves or, more damningly, because they don’t know how computers work and can’t be bothered to hire IT staff.
… take back control.
Most teachers I say this to agree. But then they close their eyes and picture the haggard faces of weeping students. In part, this is because many students depend on their schools for basic necessities like food, and this is yet another critical function our institutions are fobbing off on teachers. If you feel personally responsible for feeding your students, that’s internalized oppression.
It is also tremendous arrogance to believe that one person can do everything necessary to educate another. I am vulnerable to such egotism. I validate myself by imagining students’ lives will collapse without my quiet heroism. My parenting instinct is so strong that I worry for the students of my colleagues as well. I feel that I must do something to support all of them. It’s why I have written so much about how to teach online.
Fortunately there is good news. Seizing the means of instruction has never been so easy. The chaos created by COVID gives instructors unprecedented power and control over teaching. Your institution can no longer own or police the space you teach in. It’s yours: you own it, you built it out of electrons. You could even register copyright on teaching materials or patent your methods— and your contract probably doesn’t cover such works. Once you’ve got your students contact info you can schedule class with them whenever you like, and it’s your institution that will lose accreditation or get sued by parents if there aren’t enough classroom hours. I cannot stress enough how much traditional universities are over a barrel right now.
Remember all the good ideas you had to help students that were quashed by your format? Do you hate your grading system? Were you frustrated at that worthless textbook that cost students hundreds of dollars? Remember that time you saw your students build a working calculator in Minecraft and wondered why you didn’t do that in the classroom?
No one can stop you! Your administration is in the dark about technology. They pay for voice mail. The Provost’s personal email includes @aol.com. You read Medium! You are now the one with power! Misuse your site licenses! Be the change you want to see.
Because teaching is a practice that must be constantly refined, good teachers are already used to experimenting with new pedagogy. Transitioning to online teaching is no more challenging than transitioning to a flipped classroom model. It is no more challenging that moving away from high-stakes final exams.
There’s no commute. No tests and no grading unless you feel like it. You can hold a baby while you teach. You can travel, write, fish, or just take the day off sometimes and look out the window.
You can even use the time you save to help organize.
Patrick Watson teaches Neuroscience and AI at Minerva. He’s helped robots cheat on middle school science tests, compared amnesia to the cultural revolution, and writes on love and epilepsy. He’s currently developing a role-playing game about business wizards.
