Scarcities 1: Desanctifying the Classroom (1 of 2)

There was a time–remember?–when the face-to-face classroom wasn’t a sacrosanct wing, prescription protected by Do-Not-Touch velvet ropes, sale in the Higher Ed Nostalgia Museum. A time–though to admit it now may seem tantamount to waving the white flag of pedagogical surrender to the advancing corporate-MOOC Visigoth hoards–when we educators used complain about the classroom.

Cari Lyn writes recently on Seminarium Blog about open-source “learning management systems” (LMSes) as one affordable approach to learning platforms, in which students can have opportunities for “[g]roup activities, research opportunities, and freedom of expression.” This has me reflecting on platforms: the face-to-face classroom, the closed LMSes, and the open/distributed platforms. Conversations about learning platforms tend to emphasize the “goods” of the face-to-face platform and the challenges of the online platforms. But before we had online learning platforms to be suspicious about, we used to complain about the limits of the classroom all the time.

So, in this post, I focus on the limits of the face-to-face classroom in terms of “scarcities.” In a second post, I will consider the respective “scarcities” of the closed and open online platforms. This will, I argue, provide a less skewed, more productive basis for comparing platforms or for considering “blended” solutions. So, let’s get started: What’s missing–necessarily, intrinsically missing–from the brick-and-mortar classroom…?

Face-To-Face Classrooms:

The face-to-face classroom is often held up (explicitly or implicitly) as the Gold Standard of learning platforms, at least since the advent of online platforms to which it can be compared. But, anyone who has taught face-to-face knows that the classroom is not without its scarcities. What is scarce in the face-to-face learning space?

• Time is scarce. Even a three-hour weekly block represents a scarcity of time. (If the block feels long in practice, it’s because one is still figuring out how to manage that time for learning.) The clock is an unforgiving overseer to the face-to-face classroom: no matter what kinds of learning goods are busting loose when the second hand sweeps twelve, it’s time to go.
• Space is scarce, or at least sharply limited. Even with four students in a room built for twenty, space can become scarce, if your planned activities involve freedom of motion or the carving out of distinct break-out spaces.
• Permeability/openness is scarce. Even such doors and windows as are available open only on immediate, fixed surroundings. As Nathan Loewen (for example) has written, we now have the means to create electronic portals to remedy in part the closeness of the classroom. In principle, these portals can reach not only “the Others” sitting in other face-to-face classrooms, but distant resources, and even student projects built on the Web between sessions. But these portals are a “hack” on the relatively closed classroom space, and depend upon an openness that exists and is cultivated outside of the classroom.
• Malleability is scarce. It’s pretty much rows, a circle, a U, or tables…and often, such malleability is purchased at the expense of another classroom scarcity: time! (At my school at least, we have to return classrooms to the state in which we had found it before we conclude our sessions.)

There’s an idea that keeps recurring to me, when educators wax sentimental about the face-to-face classroom and its “magical” (implicitly “limitless”) possibilities. It is this: I sometimes think that, when teachers talk about the unique “magic” of the face-to-face classroom, or that “indefinable something” that they “get” face-to-face and fear that they won’t find online, they really refer to their intuitive practices at overcoming the limiting scarcities of the face-to-face platform, and the “rush” they get from deploying those skills ad-hoc in real-time. To whatever extent this is true, it raises (besides the question, Is the “rush” experienced by the instructor a valid indicator for student learning) the question, Won’t this “rush” be experienced also in other platforms, simply by overcoming their respective scarcities?

Online Platforms:

In Part Two, coming two weeks from now, I want to look at the “scarcities” peculiar to the online platforms: first, to the relatively closed learning management systems (Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas), and second, to the radically open “distributed” course platforms like those modeled in ETMooc or the Open Online Experience. I will suggest that our discourse still tends to depict blended/hybrid learning in terms of “face-to-face = the gold standard; online = a necessary evil,” and that a better approach to planning “blended/hybrid” learning is to see where each platform might help ease the scarcities that we experience in the others.

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