It’s been over a year since my last blog post and my perspective has changed a lot. I went from being some version of an instructional designer to being the director of development and delivery for Open Learning at TRU. My area of focus has changed from how to get students in a f2f class to engage to trying to work on improving the educational experience of 15000 students who are mostly working in asynchronous courses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The shift is not only one of pedagogical direction but also of standpoint. I’ve moved from a faculty position where my approach to dealing with the crisis in Higher Ed was to support uncertainty in the learning process (I still believe this is the right thing to do) to an administrative position where I’m responsible for coming up with practical solutions to the same problems that work at scale. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s been a humbling transition in many ways – but an exciting one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I do not think that the crisis we have in Higher Ed is AI. I mean, part of the crisis might very well be the response that people have had to AI, but no, I don’t think AI is the problem. I think the crisis is 25 years in the making and AI is the lens through which can finally see the problem for what it is. We have spent 250 years (give or take) trying to find ways to scale up our education system to try and teach more people, often with fewer resources. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The tricky bit is that these essentials in our education system, the entire means by which we set the ‘content’ of a course and ‘assess’ a students ability to cram that content in their heads is now only minimally functional. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m not saying that students can’t learn using these approaches. I’m saying they don’t have to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I used to have a slide in every presentation I gave that said something to the effect of “the fact that you need to be able to assess student learning doesn’t make it possible.” From the advent of the reliable search engine, to the development of content sharing sites (be it Reddit or Chegg) and now with easy access to content generation using GenAI students have been able to beat tests, ruin the purpose of assignments and find content pretty much anywhere they want. Illich told us a long time ago that once a thing is no longer scarce you can no longer control it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Students can no longer be forced to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And here in lies the crisis. We no longer fully control the content or the assessment. The ways in which we have used print and assignments and testing to force students to learn has stopped being reliable. It’s not that it can’t work, it’s that it no longer works most of the time. And with a loss of control we see different responses. Some people want a technological solution that will guarantee our control over students when they do assignments or testing. Lots of people just want to retire. People complain of a loss of trust between teachers and students. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I worry that we haven’t explained to students why they should do the things we’re asking them to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The one thing that I hold on to through this whole crisis is that an engaged student will learn. Not always, not perfectly, but if they see value in the work they’re doing they will (mostly) try. I’ll be writing lots more about this in 2026, but the thought that I’m leaving 2025 with is a constant desire to improve Open Learning’s points of contact with our students. Those points could be the quality of our assessment feedback. It could be a chat room. It could be contacting our staff for information. It could be an email from an Online Learning Faculty Member.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Is this going to solve the crisis? Probably not. But to me it does the thing we all need to be doing. Focus on the student. Help them understand why they need to learn something. Humanize our interactions with them. Mentor them. Put all of our efforts towards convincing them that learning is a worthwhile endeavour and not on trying to preserve our old system by trying to take back the control that we started losing 3 decades ago. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And, maybe most importantly, it’s work I can believe in. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s been over a year since my last blog post and my perspective has changed a lot. I went from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"webmentions_disabled_pings":false,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davecormier.com\/edblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davecormier.com\/edblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davecormier.com\/edblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davecormier.com\/edblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davecormier.com\/edblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davecormier.com\/edblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davecormier.com\/edblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davecormier.com\/edblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davecormier.com\/edblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}