Why should an online course strive to match up with the classroom experience?
The classroom experience is an accident of historical, economic, and technological forces that made it the only game in town. But we learn all the time from a myriad of ways. Why are we not exploring that in terms of online?
Is it because we are seeing online education as a temporary thing? An emergency measure, like a fire sprinkler – normally everything in here should not be wet?
I think that online education should be seen as a new addition to the university or the school, not some emergency measure we take on temporarily. We are going to need something that is up to the challenge or nature of the online medium, something that celebrates it and uses it to its capacity.
In public speaking, which I’ve been reading a lot about, I’m very confused that instructors require an in-person audience for their students that has to appear on the video. They are also banning things like editing and multiple takes. Why?
These are the habits of an instructor who thinks that online is deficient, and the class must continue along the lines of how it has always been.
A quick look at YouTube would reveal that there are tons of people effectively addressing audiences of millions with their speech through editing and speaking to the audience of listeners online. They are asynchronous and they are much more active and interested than the people in a classroom would be.
It’s hard for me to see the value of trying to preserve the university classroom experience in a speech class, particularly when the pandemic itself shows the need and importance of being able to speak effectively on camera. Why are we not taking this in instead of pretending that it’s not really there or happening?
I think a lot of public speaking instructors have lost the connection of the course to the idea of human communication. I think that they are much more interested in going through the motions of a class – teaching weird modalities like informative, how-to, persuasive (which of these would be the category for the public health messages from governments we’ve been getting for months?) or teaching things like formal outlining where someone writes “General purpose” or “specific purpose?” Most of these things are created for the ease of grading and evaluation not because they translate into useful practice. Even the limits of topic selection for most instructors forbid the most common things people are asked to speak persuasively about, and under less than ideal conditions. When your ability to speak to others really matters and a lot is on the line, we choose to ban those situations from the practice room. It makes no sense.
This preservation of what people like and are comfortable with evaluating is not what speech courses should be. Instead, they should be places to practice articulations that are troubling and difficult. They should be places where students can really try to get it right and get some help along the way.