Well, semester 2 at various institutions here is under way, and I feel like some reflections upon distance education are in order. This might be part one of several…

I might begin by talking about this semester. Last semester, regular sufferers of his blog will recall, I taught a small greek class in person. “In-person” was exciting, because this is actually how I’d like to teach most of all. But students had the option of being in-person or watching records (or even joining via video conference), so the mixed-modality was a bit… wearying.

This semester I’m teaching a follow-on course, but all my students are distance. Now, let me caveat here and say (i) I fully support distance educaion options, I’ve studied quite a few things by such, and obviously I do a whole bunch of other teaching at distance, (ii) I have no particular issue with these students or this college.

But, it does raise some issues. Now I’m essentially running a fully online, asynchronous course. Which means that I’m recording video lectures, and providing support via an online learning system. This is, hmm, frustrating. Not least because I can’t see anyway to bring my primary language-pedagogical convictions to bear.

We can’t do ‘communicative’ greek if you’re at home watching videos and I am system-constrained to produce powerpoint slides with video+audio. And it calls to mind a whole host of other issues for me. Issues related to the economies of scale, the value of this kind of teaching, the increasing prevalance of both distance-ed and modularisation among, particularly, seminaries, which means a loss of cohesive, integrative, pastorally-minded courses of study that involve spiritual formation of leaders, to piece-meal delivery of content-focused units that assemble into a ‘degree’.

I suspect there *are* ways of doing communicative focused materials with video, indeed I have a friend producing TPRS-esque stories with no-one present and doing it well. But there’s so much lacking in this kind of teaching.

And so then we’re just back to explicit language, aren’t we? Which, of course, I can do, but it’s missing a very soulful piece of me as a language educator.