Addressing Teachers’ Concerns about Online Learning

One of the great parts about working in education technology is the conversations it leads to in social settings outside of work. The subject of education is naturally interesting to most people because almost everyone has spent a significant portion of their life going through the education system. Given the common interest in education, it is exciting to tell people about the ways in which blended learning is enabling personalized instruction and fixing many of the aspects of school that people find frustrating. Interestingly, while most non-educators find these ideas immediately appealing, the reactions I get from current and former teachers can range anywhere from enthusiasm to skepticism to outright opposition. In my conversations with teachers, I’ve noticed some common concerns that are worth addressing.

One concern is that technology is just an expensive distraction from the real work and real challenges of teaching. Given education technology’s track record, this is a legitimate and important concern. Schools and districts have often purchased technology with the naïve hope that if they just get these amazing devices in the hands of teachers and students then magical things will happen. What happens instead is that the technology becomes an expensive set of gadgets that teachers have to manage and troubleshoot. At the end of the day, the technology just complicates teacher’s lives and doesn’t really solve their problems. The technology we use in schools will never be more than a fancy bell or whistle if our approach is just to layer it on to traditional classroom instruction. For technology to have a truly transformative impact on education, we need to use it to rethink our instructional models (link to hybrid paper). Schools realize the true power of educational technology when they use it to transform their instructional model to offer personalized, competency-based instruction. This kind of transformation starts by creating a plan to address specific educational goals and then finding ways to leverage technology to meet those goals, rather than starting with devices and software and then trying to figure out what to do with them.

A second common concern is that technology is being used to replace teachers. As I’ve written in the past, this argument stems from a false dichotomy that frames technology as a low-cost substitute for excellent teaching. In reality, there will always be a human element to teaching and learning that cannot be taken over by machines. That being said, many of the roles and responsibilities of teachers are going to change, and many aspects of traditional teaching will be subsumed by technology. For example, the teachers in many of the leading blended learning schools spend very little time planning and delivering lessons for whole-class instruction. Instead, their work focuses more on mentoring individual students, working with small groups, and managing student projects.

The last concern I’ve often heard is that online learning will undermine teachers’ professional judgment. The teachers who voice this concern often picture an environment where their work consists only of grading assignments as students spend all their time working through a rigid online curriculum. As with the prior examples, there is some legitimacy to this concern. When online learning is used as the primary driver of instruction, teachers inevitably give up control over many aspects of curriculum planning and lesson delivery; and in low-quality implementations of blended learning, the teacher’s professional judgment ends there. But in high-quality blended learning environments, teachers’ professional judgment expands when it comes to helping students set goals, providing them with coaching and mentorship, and giving expert feedback on writing assignments, presentations, and projects. Furthermore, the classroom culture that teachers create is what gives real-world relevance and value to what students are learning online. A teachers’ professional judgment is critical to establishing such a culture.

As more and more schools adopt blended learning in the years to come, the nature of teaching is going to change. Many teachers who have spent their careers working in traditional classrooms may find that teach in a blended learning environment is a difficult adjustment. But on the bright side, many teachers find that blended learning gives them the opportunities to do more of the things that attracted them to teaching in the first place.

-Thomas Arnett

This first appeared on the blog of the Christensen Institute.

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