The “Flexible” Folly
Last week I posted about how ineffective the Convenience Argument is in defending e-learning: emphasizing that students-can-learn-anytime-from-any where while ignoring other crucial aspects of learning, like content quality, sells short the possibilities of online learning. Nevertheless, here it is again. This time, in Education Week, it marauds under the guise of Flexibility:
Just as the model of blended learning is pulling the worlds of virtual and brick-and-mortar schools together, new theories within virtual learning are bridging the divide between synchronous and asynchronous instructional methods.
Online educators say they once debated whether to deliver courses synchronously, by allowing access to instruction during a given time, or asynchronously, by allowing access anytime and anywhere. Now, they are designing approaches that meld both methods.
“The online model is really designed to be flexible for the individual student,” said Pam Birtolo, the chief learning officer of the Orlando-based Florida Virtual School, or FLVS, which is seen as a trendsetter in virtual education. “I don’t know that you can separate the two anymore.”
It took three paragraphs to get there, but there it is: really designed to be flexible for the individual student. Flexible and individual. That might be true (but, it also hinges on how you define “flexible”). What concerns me more is how rhetorical words like “flexible” and “convenience” are used. It’s a sales pitch.
Show me flexibility and convenience in a curricular context, with rigorous content that pushes students to make meaning. Then, you’ve got me.
Online models really designed to be flexible for individual students? Not interested.
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You make a a valid point in both recent posts on this topic: there isn’t a complete dichotomy between convenience/flexibility and quality, but it is rare to find anything that maximally achieves both (see: fast food/microwave dinner, collapsible bikes, SparkNotes, Netbooks, wash and wear suits, etc). It’s misleading for proponents of online education to tout the former without addressing shortcomings in the latter.
That’s something that will hopefully be addressed in our session on Hybrid Learning at NCTE: there has to be some sort of balance between making some aspects of learning more efficient/convenient/flexible while keeping much of the social/physical interaction of the bricks and mortar model.
Living in the 21st century requires that students think, create, and collaborate in real time and space as well as in virtual space. Any system that completely ignores one over the other is doing them a disservice.
I agree, Brady, that with progress comes trade-offs and that what is lost and gained in such trade offs merits scrutiny. I think that, for me, it’s problematic how seldom various organizations that are meant to represent educators fail to push back on companies that make these kinds of “flexibility” claims. Why, for instance, doesn’t the NCTE or IRA have a watch dog committee that reviews and highly publicizes the quality of literacy content? One reason, I imagine, is that they don’t see a need for it. Another, however, might be because private companies that provide curricular content are the equivalent of powerful interest groups in Washington: they have the cash to form the relationships that are in their best (business) interest.