Time to retire from online learning?

Forgive me for being personal in this post (well, it is a blog), but I also have a few important things to say professionally.

The context

I was 75 yesterday and as I’ve tried to do each birthday for the last 25 years, I spent the day skiing at Whistler. (A wonderful day: sunshine and still tons of snow, and a lot of terrain to cover). How to spend yesterday was an easy decision. The hard one is how to spend the rest of my life (yeah, welcome to the club).

In particular, I have decided to stop (nearly) all professional activities from now onwards. I want to go through the reasons for this, because the reasons are as much professional as personal. Also this change has implications for my blog in particular.

What I’m not going to do

In general, I’m not going to accept any invitations to do paid consultancy work nor to accept invitations to be a keynote speaker or a participant at conferences from now on. I will not be taking on any more thesis supervision or examinations, nor reviewing articles or books for publication, unless they are directly relevant to my own writing (see below). I say in general, because it’s stupid to be inflexible, but there will not be many exceptions.

Why stop now?

First, if 75 is good enough for judges in Canada to retire, it’s sure good enough for me, and after 45 years continuously working in online and distance education, I’ve certainly earned the right to stop. However, many people just don’t believe me (including my wife), because online learning and open and distance education are my passion and my life, and that’s not going to go away. As the day spent skiing illustrates, I’m really fortunate to be healthy and fit, so health is not the reason. But there are good reasons for me to stop now, and I want to share these with you.

The main reason for stopping now is that I want to stop when I am still at my best. I’ve been really on form over the last 12 months, as far as one can be objective about these things. But I have seen far too many great people who continued long after they should have stopped – and unfortunately it’s the later years that people often remember. Much of my expertise comes from having done things: teaching online, managing a department. But it’s over 10 years since I taught a full course, and a similar amount of time since I was responsible for a department. Given the pace of change, it is dangerous for a consultant to become adrift from the reality of teaching and management. It’s time to hang up my boots before I get really hurt (or more importantly, really hurt others).

Related to this is the difficulty in keeping up in this area of knowledge. It’s a full-time job just to keep abreast of new developments in online and distance learning, and this constant change is not going to go away. It’s tempting to say that it’s only the technology that changes; the important things – teaching and learning – don’t change much, but I don’t believe that to be true, either. Teaching in higher education is about to go through as major a revolution as one can imagine. This is not going to be easy; indeed it could get brutal.

Even the processes of learning, which used to be relatively stable, given how much is biological, are also undergoing change. Technology is not neutral; it does change the way we think and behave. Furthermore, I foresee major developments in the science of learning that will have major implications for teaching and learning – but it will also have major false directions and mistakes (be very careful with artificial intelligence in particular). So this is a field that needs full-time, professional application, and very hard work, and I just don’t have the energy any more to work at that level. To put it simply, this is not a profession where you can be half in and half out. Dabbling in online learning is very dangerous (politicians please note).

And then there’s MOOCs. I can’t express adequately just how pissed off I am about MOOCs – not the concept, but all the hubris and nonsense that’s been talked and written about them. At a personal level, it was as if 45 years of work was for nothing. All the research and study I and many others had done on what makes for successful learning online were totally ignored, with truly disastrous consequences in terms of effective learning for the vast majority of participants who took MOOCs from the Ivy League universities. Having ignored online learning for nearly 20 years, Stanford, MIT and Harvard had to re-invent online learning in their own image to maintain their perceived superiority in all things higher educational. And the media fell for it, hook, line and sinker. This is a battle I no longer want to fight – but it needs fighting. But my reaction did make me wonder, am I just an old man resisting the future? And that has definitely left a mark.

Lastly, I am concerned that the computer scientists seem to be taking over online education. Ivy League MOOCs are being driven mainly by computer scientists, not educators. Politicians are looking to computer science to automate learning in order to save money. Computer scientists have much to offer, but they need more humility and a greater willingness to work with other professionals, such as psychologists and teachers, who understand better how learning operates. This is a battle that has always existed in educational technology, but it’s one I fear the educators are losing. The result could be disastrous, but that’s a theme for a whole set of blog posts.

So yes, time to go, and to leave the good fight to the next generation.

What I will continue to do

I will continue to write. In particular, I have already started writing an open textbook on ‘Teaching in a Digital Age’, and when that is done, I will write a semi-autobiographical novel (only the names will be changed to protect the innocent). I will also complete any existing professional commitments.

I will also continue this blog focused on online learning, but it will be more journalistic and less based on my immediate and recent experiences in online learning. So I hope it will continue to be of interest and value.

And yes, plenty of golf, and more time with family.

Last words

This post has ended up being a bit too personal. But it’s been an incredible, wonderful 45 years. Open and distance education are honourable fields of endeavour, aimed at widening access. Online learning is an exciting field, constantly under development, and has huge potential for both increasing the quality of teaching and the productivity of higher education. Above all, though, the journey has brought me many marvellous and true friends and colleagues. It has been an honour and a privilege to work with such great people. Thank you all.