2016: The Year I Failed Retirement

The new age of retirement

I decided in April 2014 ‘to stop (nearly) all professional activities from now onwards’. I argued that ‘it is dangerous for a consultant to become adrift from the reality of teaching and management’ and ‘this is not a profession where you can be half in and half out.’

In particular, I wanted to write a ‘farewell’ book that would try to capture my expertise for those who might benefit from 40 years of teaching online and at a distance. I completed that book, Teaching in a Digital Age, almost exactly a year later, in April, 2015.

I realised that this might entail some follow-up, such as appearances at conferences or webinars to publicize the book, but that ought to be over by the end of 2015. 2016 would be the year to finally let go, play lots of golf, travel with my wife and fix all the things around the house that I’ve been putting off for years. So how is that going?

Not so good. Certainly I have played lots of golf, my wife and I took our first cruise, and we went on a trip up the west coast of British Columbia to the Great Bear Rain Forest, and saw two grizzly bears in the wild, but the work part didn’t pan out as I had expected.

Here is the list of my activities in 2016.

Ryerson University

I was honoured to be invited to be a distinguished visiting professor for 2016 by the Raymond G. Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University. Ryerson is probably in general terms the most innovative university in Canada, and I had a somewhat tenuous but very welcome prior connection with Chang through its Digital Education Strategies unit. Leonora Zefi, Naza Djafarova and other colleagues in DES had provided valuable feedback on early drafts of my book.

DES has been supporting a number of innovative online teaching projects at Ryerson, such as the Law Practice Program and Lake Devo animations, and is developing expertise in research into educational games.

Lake Devo animation supports online role-play activity in an educational context.

Part of my duties was to present at the annual Chang Talks and also to sit in on a meeting to help develop an institutional e-learning strategy for Ryerson.

Conferences, presentations and workshops

Although I have done far less than in earlier years, I still had a number of academic engagements:

• six keynotes/presentations: two in Toronto (Ryerson University and Nelson Publishing), and once each in Budapest (EDEN), Madeira (IADIS), Philadelphia (Drexel University), and Kingston, Ontario (Queen’s University);
• two workshops, one for Chinese university presidents on managing learning technologies at UBC; and one at Ryerson University, Toronto to help develop their eLearning strategy;
• nine webinars (to universities in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Australia, and Alberta, to European Union educational policy-makers in Brussels, and three Contact North webinars offered internationally), all on topics from my book;
• attendance at two demofests in Vancouver/Burnaby where innovators from post-secondary institutions in British Columbia demonstrated what they are doing;
• several press interviews.

Teaching in a Digital Age

The book has continued to generate a lot of activity. The English version has been downloaded over 46,000 times and the book has been translated into French, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Portuguese. There are also translations under way in Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew. Voluntarily translating a 500 page book into another language requires a huge amount of work, but if it had not been published under an open license, it is unlikely to have been translated into so many different languages, all by volunteers. There are also a couple of major adaptations, one in South Africa (English), and one in Argentina (Spanish), to suit regional requirements. Contact North and BCcampus have sites that host both the English and French versions, and BCcampus also hosts the Vietnamese version.

I am of course delighted at the success of the book, and I am very happy to provide the necessary help to get the translations into Pressbooks, deal with translation issues, and to help the organizations providing translations with understanding the Creative Commons licensing agreement.

However, it is been a struggle to get some of the organizations supporting the translations to understand fully the concept of openness. Some have just made print copies available and have yet to provide a url from where anyone can download a copy in the appropriate language, or a digital copy that could be made available through the BCcampus web site. Thus ensuring the translations are also fully open and accessible online is still very much a work in progress on my part.

10 Fundamentals of Online Learning

During 2016 I did a series of 10 blog posts called ‘Online Learning for Beginners’, realising that although Teaching in a Digital Age had been downloaded over 46,000 times, there are still many faculty who are not yet committed enough to online learning to even look at the book.

Contact North then edited and published my 10 guides as a short, 37 page booklet, ‘The Ten Fundamentals Of Teaching Online‘ that is really a first step towards getting faculty and instructors to read Teaching in a Digital Age, and more importantly to challenge some of the myths and misunderstandings that many faculty have about teaching online. The Ten Fundamentals was published in October this year and has so far been downloaded just over 300 times and has already been translated into Spanish by a professor in Argentina.

Blogging

During the year I did 74 blog posts, which is little more than one a week, compared with the 213 blog posts in 2013, the year before I decided to retire. So I have definitely reduced my blogging activity.

However, although I am blogging 70% less than I used to, my blog site was more active in 2016 than in any previous years, with a total of 417,000 hits. In fact, the number of hits to the site was 33% higher in 2016 than in 2014. This is somewhat surprising, since the golden rule of blogging is that the more you blog, the more hits you will get.

If though we look at Table 1 below, I can perhaps explain this anomaly. The year the post was published is in brackets; TIDA means the post was an early draft of a section of Teaching in a Digital Age)

Table 1: No. of hits per post in 2016 (top 20 posts)

There was only one post published in 2016 (Building an Effective Learning Environment) that appears in the top 20 posts (in terms of the number of hits) for 2016, and even that was a summary/discussion of Appendix A in Teaching in a Digital Age. Nine other posts in the top 20 were early drafts of sections of Teaching in a Digital Age.

My interpretation of this is that the blog site is being used increasingly as a resource, rather than as a news site, especially by students who are studying on courses about online learning and teaching. This means that each year different students are coming back to the same posts. I cannot explain though why they are using drafts from my blog site rather than (or as well as) using the text of the book. There is though apparently a strong relationship and interaction between my blog site and the book.

Also three of the top five posts, and five of the top ten posts, are ‘general’ posts for online students about studying online. There are of course many more students than instructors, which explains why these are topics that come near to the top each year.

‘Can you teach real engineering online’ has generated the most number of comments (127 in all) and continues to be a lively forum seven years after it was originally published (and an indication of student frustration at the limited opportunities to study engineering online). ‘The worlds’ largest supplier of free online learning?’, about ALISON, has generated 104 comments and is also still active. ‘What’s right and what’s wrong about Coursera-style MOOCs’ has generated 54 comments, but there was only one comment on this post this year, and only one post on MOOCs reached the top 20 in 2016, which suggests interest in MOOCs may be waning, at least among my readers.

The national survey of online learning in Canada

Finally, one activity that I hadn’t planned for in 2016 that is taking up a great deal of my time is the proposed national survey of online learning in Canadian post-secondary institutions, in collaboration with the Babson Survey Research Group. This activity will continue into 2017.

Must do better

Although I am reducing my level of activity, I’m still playing, although at a somewhat slower pace. In terms of actually retiring though I am definitely failing, at least a ‘D’ if not an ‘F’. I will try to do better next year.