Month: September 2014

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One model only for online learning?

mooc1The explosion in MOOCs in recent years has led to renewed attention given to online learning and to approaches to structuring online courses. The emphasis on “connected learning” emanating from our new “ALT Lab” at VCU is shared by many universities in North America and elsewhere. The open learning community has been advocating for some time an approach that emphasizes peer networking, digital literacy, and open publishing. It seems self-evident that we would want our students to have this type of “digital engagement”. The connected courses project, in which VCU faculty have been invited to participate, is exploring the hows and whys of how that can work. This first unit is focusing on “why we need a why”, emphasizing the concept of purpose-driven course design. Coming at course design from the perspective of language learning, it seems evident that there is a built-in expectation for anyone signing up for a language course – namely the desire to learn to function in a new language. I would argue that in today’s internationally intertwined world, and given the volatility of the job market, we need to keep in mind an additional purpose – to have students gain the meta skills and knowledge involved in the process of language learning. The students may not need German in their future but they may need to know what’s involved and how to go about learning a different language they need for work or for personal enrichment.

Providing that knowledge in online language courses seems to me to be a universal necessity. Central to the experience of an online language course is of course the opportunity for actual use of the language among course participants, along with communicating with learners and/or native speakers online. That can happen in a wide variety of ways today, through both text and video exchanges. Language faculty have been active for quite some time in engaging in telecommunication projects, whether they be group exchanges or individually based through tandem learning. Building relationships that go beyond a course structure is crucial in finding partners for long-term language maintenance, especially important for less commonly taught languages, for which local conversation partners are unavailable. Being able to document ones language ability and achievements has also been an integral component of language learning in recent years, principally through the use of online portfolios, the best known of which is the European Language Portfolio.

Also needed in a online language learning environment are opportunities to provide some of the basic elements of learning a new language (grammar explanations, sample dialogues, vocabulary development, pronunciation guides, etc.), whether they be supplied through a textbook or through the Web site. I have been advocating for a while the use of open educational resources (OER) whenever possible, such as those available from the University of Texas (Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning) or Carnegie-Mellon University (Open Learning Initiative). In that sense, I would argue that for language learning, and likely for other disciplines as well, the connected learning, C-MOOC course design model needs to be supplemented by the content delivery that is central to the so-called x-MOOC model, represented by mainstream MOOC aggregators such as Coursera or Udacity. This is articulated in a recent column I wrote for Language Learning & Technology, Global Reach and Local Practice: The Promise of MOOCs. I would argue that when it comes to online learning we should not be using a one size fits all mindset, but rather be eclectic in our approach, taking from different models what makes sense for the discipline, for the level of instruction, and for the needs and desires of our students.

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A Mom’s White Privilege

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Potential shooters?

Following the events in Ferguson, Missouri in which an unarmed black teenager was shot dead by a policeman, there have been many discussions on race relations in the US. One of the more interesting perspectives I’ve seen is the blog post a young white mother posted about her sons:

I have three sons, two years between each. They are various shades of blond, various shades of pinkish-white, and will probably end up dressing in polo shirts and button downs most of the time. Their eyes are blue and green. Basically, I’m raising the physical embodiment of The Man, times three. The White is strong in these ones.

She goes on to comment on the day-to-day experiences her sons are likely to have, living in the United States, starting with the following:

• Clerks do not follow my sons around the store, presuming they might steal something.
• Their normal kid stuff – tantrums, running, shouting – these are chalked up to being children, not to being non-white.
• People do not assume that, with three children, I am scheming to cheat the welfare system.
• When I wrap them on my back, no one thinks I’m going native, or that I must be from somewhere else.
• When my sons are teenagers, I will not worry about them leaving the house. I will worry – that they’ll crash the car, or impregnate a girl, or engage in the same stupidness endemic to teenagers everywhere.
• I will not worry that the police will shoot them.

She continues, giving examples from recent incidents in which an African-Americans woman was shot to death when she went to a house for help after a car mishap or when a young black man wielding a toy pistol was killed by police in a Walmart store – experiences her sons are unlikely to have.

She concludes:

My boys will carry a burden of privilege with them always. They will be golden boys, inoculated by a lack of melanin and all its social trapping against the problems faced by Black America. For a mother, white privilege means your heart doesn’t hit your throat when your kids walk out the door. It means you don’t worry that the cops will shoot your sons. It carries another burden instead. White privilege means that if you don’t school your sons about it, if you don’t insist on its reality and call out oppression, your sons may become something terrifying. Your sons may become the shooters.

Her comments echo those of Peggy McIntosh, a women’s-studies scholar at Wellesley College, in a widely read essay entitled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack” in which she provides an extensive list of examples. Her essay was in the news earlier this year in the context of Princeton University freshman Tal Fortgang’s rejection of the idea that as a white male attending an Ivy League university he should “check his privilege”. It seems likely that such divergent views will continue, given the diversity of experiences of white and black US citizens. Interestingly, a good number of the protesters against the killing in Ferguson were white.