Silence sends a signal. When we expect activity, chatter, or discourse and hear nothing in its place, it can be jarring, disorienting. When teaching a class designed to build off student interests and to help students build agency and learning independence, the exchange of energy as ideas are discussed and clarified provides the course’s vitality. Without that dynamic, the course dies.
Today’s blog post is a post-mortem in a literal sense. For a course that had over 400 auditors and 17 enrolled participants, I managed to prompt interaction from 6 people during our time together. I value those interactions — on Slack, Twitter, and Zoom — but I struggled to create a cohesive narrative about the course that gave the impression that we were working together toward shared goals.
Challenging Questions
Thus the question I posed on Monday — What is a course? — came back to haunt me. This week had all of the trappings I came to expect. We have a syllabus. We have daily agendas. I had the best intentions for collaboration and community-building. And yet, those intentions went unsupported by effective action. Did I create a course this week, or did I build a set of documents and platforms?
On Wednesday night, Danielle shared that she struggled with the question of where learning happens. That question isn’t new, but it sure took on extra urgency in the pandemic. The advent of correspondence courses challenged the notion that learning had to happen in a school. Later, developments in broadcast technologies meant that learners could literally “tune in” to lectures via radio and television. Then in the 2010s the explosive popularity of MOOCs made classes simultaneously more individualized and more collective. Where, then, does learning happen if students across the globe can use any device to access course materials at any time?
What Was, Versus What Could Be
According to the original plan, this class was going to create an online course in a week. By Tuesday, we scaled back that ambitious project to a single document — a white paper or research note. By Thursday night, with few comments and no new content in that document, it was clear even that goal didn’t fit our needs. Expectations and abilities failed to align throughout our time together.
All week, I’ve thought that the goal of this course was to help folks think through and challenge their assumptions about how teaching works. Those tasks don’t require documentation, but just yesterday I highlighted the importance of feedback in the learning process. And I never figured out a good, consistent way to provide feedback with how this week played out.
Creating Vitality
So here’s what I’ve learned this week: My approach to creating courses requires a critical mass of active participants. Limiting attendance an online class I’ve designed creates a potential disaster. In future iterations of this course, I intend to lean in heavily on the concept of hybridity. I’ll host an in-person intensive seminar, where participants sharing space and time work together to discuss ideas and create materials. At the same time, I’ll run a parallel MOOC, in which anyone interested in our discussions can join in online, add to the discussion, and help us process. That way, we can reach critical mass in both modalities, and ideas can flow from one to another as it works best for those involved. Classes should be filled with vitality, not silence.
Because silence — essential, stifling, or dangerous — takes all the life out of a course.
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