Professor Sky Gilbert, Research Chair of the School of English and Theatre Studies, is one of the University of Guelph’s more outspoken faculty members. On March 10, The Globe and Mail published an opinion piece written by Gilbert entitled ‘University education, like love, cannot simply be moved online.’
Tellingly, this article received no mention on the U of G’s regularly updated ‘Faculty in the News’ campus bulletin. It is likely that the university administrators – not least among them President Alastair Summerlee – were less than pleased with Gilbert’s remarks about the future of university education.
In the article, Gilbert expresses concern about the proliferation of online courses and frets for the future of, as he calls it, “the teacher-student dialectic.”
Yet despite what are doubtless good intentions (“What I’m trying to do is save education,” he says), Gilbert has succeeded in authoring little more than a rant. The article is a strawman fixated on the most provocative aspect of university reform – online courses – and ignores the equally innovative ideas that are being explored to make university a more personal learning environment.
His article would have the reader believe that moving everything online is post-secondary education’s sole directive for the future. It simply isn’t. The reality is much more nuanced. The development of online courses, or courses that have online components, is but one example of ways we can ensure universities are still relevant in 50 years time.
So when Gilbert says, “it’s foolish and short-sighted to imagine that technology is the answer to every problem,” we can agree with him – certainly technology has its limits. But we can also question the extent to which this a helpful concern. No one is actually suggesting that technology is a solution to “every problem” faced by universities.
Equally, when Gilbert rhetorically asks, “Is a world without love and a world without interactive pedagogy one in which you wish to live?” we should wonder why Gilbert is anxious about a future he has rendered in such needlessly stark terms (with or without “interactive pedagogy”). Certainly such a world is undesirable; yet to suggest that this world is on the horizon – let alone desired by cost-cutting administrators – only fans the flames of critics and slows down the already glacial pace of post-secondary reform.
What is equally unfair is the way Gilbert singles out President Summerlee as a villain in the crusade against “real” education.
Gilbert sums up Summerlee’s vision for the future of post-secondary education by simply pegging him with a four-word slogan: “create more online courses.” Gilbert’s subsequent defence of traditional teaching methods – where presumably the teacher and the student frolic together in the fields of spontaneous interaction, excitement and involved discussion – is ultimately a reaction to those four words, which are deliberately removed from all context and nuance.
Gilbert then paints George Mehaffy, the Vice President of Academic Leadership and Change at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, with the same brush.
Mehaffy spoke at the University of Guelph in February to faculty and administrators (a podcast of which is available on the U of G homepage) about the challenges and opportunities that universities face in the Internet age.
Gilbert might just have easily singled out Mehaffy’s talk for its emphasis on employing cognitive science to develop stronger curriculums, encouraging collaboration among professors when developing courses, re-evaluating the semester model, and developing strategies for promoting student-centred learning.
Gilbert might also have noted the instance when Mehaffy said that the “future will be far more various and surprising than we can see now.” Online education models – like Massive Open Online Courses – may be unsatisfactory now, Mehaffy said, but they will be better in the future.
Academic innovators know the value of experiential and interactive learning. They also know that online courses are not perfect. Personal interaction is not an inevitable casualty of innovation, Professor Gilbert, least of all for theatre studies. But to wish away the need to improve the way post-secondary education is delivered is unhelpful at best.