Insidious pedagogy
Hi Nathan, David and Marj, I concur with your comments re 1, 2 and 3. In relation to 2, I see a disturbing problem within Faculties' and Schools' inability to develop a coherent development plan for the online teaching within their discipline areas. A common practice is to employ an educational developer/curriculum specialist (ED) but have no idea about deploying the skills of the ED outside getting them to work with individual academic. When you then start to discuss the pedagogical approach, and in particular, approach this from the discourse and practices of the discipline you run into the problem of the staff member not wanting to implement what the rest of the disciple colleagues already do. The idea of working with a team of academics to come up with a coherent approach to pedagogical issues for the disciple isn't on the agenda. This then has negative implication for the 'opt in' approach. Cheers, Alan.
Allan,
I'm glad to hear that someone else is concerned about what passes for educational/curriculum design and development within faculties.
This is my main area of interest. Though I'm currently framing it more broadly as "how do you improve learning and teaching within universities" and to a large extent this connects with what I mean by solution #2 above.
I see major flaws in most of the current approaches, including assigning an educational developer to discipline school. There seems to be a more fundamental set of problems with this approach which most people within universities don't want to engage with. Instead you get them arguing about whether or not the educational developer should be employed by the faculty or by some central L&T unit. For me, a completely unimportant question.
As it happens, just yesterday I've tried to formulate one alternative on my blog.
David.
