PandemicPedagogy: Online Course Migration

PandemicPedagogy #1 engages with current challenges of migrating courses online for re-opening of higher education in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. A common issue for educators migrating content online is a concern that the technology will overtake the pedagogy. This post addresses ways educators can seek a balance between technology and pedagogy. Pedagogy applied to technology conditions new ways for educators to engage with learning design. Educators now become facilitators of learning performances and curators of learning enactments. 
Some practical pedagogical action steps: 
1. Revisit learning outcomes of your module/s to ask the basic question: what do my students need to "know" in order to demonstrate their performance of understanding? I will draw upon the decoding the disciplines framework to decode the learning enactments in the webinar below at #4. Most instructors notice places in their courses where students find it difficult to learn. The decoding the disciplines framework holds that these stuck places, or “bottlenecks” to learning, mark the important ways of knowing in a field. By “decoding” what an expert does so that they do not get stuck at the bottleneck, we can spell out the expert’s mental process, the “critical thinking” of a discipline. The framework of decoding the disciplines is a theory of pedagogy with principles for identifying bottlenecks and decoding tacit disciplinary knowledge. With expert tacit knowledge “decoded,” we can make it available to students. See links below this post for other frameworks useful for learning enhancement.

 2. Do the assignments align with the learning outcomes? Students can get stuck on the "threshold" of conceptual knowledge. There are similarities between "bottlenecks" to learning from the decoding the disciplines framework and Threshold Concepts. Are the assessments suitable to demonstrate performances of student understanding? 

 3. Think pedagogy not only technology: use online tools to make learning in the discipline/profession explicit. From a pedagogical perspective, I especially value how an online seminar makes explicit disciplinary ways of thinking about approaches to the knowledge, method, purpose and form of disciplines.

 4. A webinar is an engaging online event where a speaker, or small group of speakers, deliver a presentation to a large audience who participate by submitting questions, responding to polls and using other available interactive tools. A practical example of a webinar is #HISTORYACTS bringing activists and historians together. Here, the pedagogy is embedded in the technology as the medium of the webinar amplifies the pedagogical concern of the symposium that is articulated by the question: how can abolitionist activism be theoretically framed and practically expressed for prison reform? Watch presentation from 14:42 to 17:15 
    . . . and questions from 1:01:40 to 1:06:06 


5. A demonstration of pedagogy as enacted through technology: I have chosen to decode the learning enactments in these sections of the webinar because its pedagogical focus is on the politics of mutual aid during the COVID-19 crisis. What is at stake is the “politics of knowledge” and the use of “history as a political tool - one which could both foreground the exploited and marginalized whose lives had been 'hidden from history’, and affirm the resilience of ordinary people as agents with powers to resist their domination” (Gentry, 2013, p. 205). Here, the facilitating role of the historian is to uncover the politics of knowledge  with focus on "mutual aid" within a tradition of mutualist writings best known as emerging from Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902) by Pëtr Kropotkin and to explain change over time. The activist is concerned with how mutual aid can be used as a political tool: mutual aid is about people coming together, in a spirit of solidarity, to support one another. However, mutual aid is not just practical because it is also deeply political. An anarchist intention to work outside formal and powerful structures, which can entrench educational and economic inequality, can be appropriated by abolitionist activists as a discourse of care and compassion. In this context, abolitionist activism employs a philosophy of solidarity as a means to persuade sympathetic sections of the public that the health concerns of inmates matter because prison and society are interconnected. Civic concern for inmates has implications for the responses of inmates to civil society. Here, I especially value how this webinar plays out the problem of prisoner invisibility as mediated through the academic approaches of History and the experiences of activism as applied to the layers of meaning as signified by different interpretations of "mutual aid" by historians and activists. Despite the fact that activists may employ a hopeful discourse of social solidarity this expression frequently masks a pessimistic perception of established economic and power structures. This pessimistic stance can blind activists to the pragmatism required of politics. The role of the historian, in this context, is to adopt a critical stance that acknowledges the tensions between pessimism and pragmatism and how these have implications for how activists can communicate with a wider public to forge meaningful coalitions to further their abolitionist cause. The co-hosts guide the seminar to the problem at hand and the types of questions that emerge from the case studies embodying theory in action while resisting simple solutions and easy answers to complex political and moral problems. The result may not be finding definitive answers, but asking provocative questions. During this pandemic we see how the types of questions that motivate data collection and analysis inform different perspectives on public health and reopening the economy. Learning to value provocative questions has deeply political implications.  

 6. Online learning needs to be scaffolded for learners and highlights the need for staff to support through guiding questions and posting relevant readings that students will be expected to read beforehand as in the flipped classroom framework. Hosting webinars highlight the need to support through guiding questions and posting relevant readings that students will be expected to read beforehand, see an example from CRASSH in Cambridge University. 

7. The structure of online seminars with guided questions address the learning outcomes. The aspiration here is to generate a constructive alignment between the learning outcomes at programme and module level and the activities and learning enactments that are generated within online discussions.

8. Identify advocates of learning enhancement in your professional community of practice and seek to collaborate with them because you can share insights on disciplinary concerns and how this relates to learning and teaching in the specific context of the knowledge domain. This approach acknowledges that "knowledge" and the performance of understanding is socially constructed and mediated.

9. Enhancing learning using a case-study approach: this case study discusses ways to introduce students to ways of thinking, acting, and being in disciplinary History.

10. For further information visit Keep Teaching; Keep Learning; Keep Assessing Keep Well. 


Useful Links:


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