Is Online Learning “Virtual” or Real?

The term VLE (virtual learning environment) has been with us since at least the 1990s. Back then, academic institutions in the U.S. and the U.K. started using not only e-mail but also “distributed learning environments” such as course web sites for teaching. AUB began using a course management system called WebCT twenty years ago, later moving to Moodle. Until recently, these VLEs were considered complementary to classroom teaching and learning at best, more often merely supplementary, or extra. Most teachers (and their students) could easily do without them. Currently, however, with physical distancing measures due to COVID-19, most education is taking place online. Should VLEs therefore continue to be considered “virtual”? Shouldn’t we consider a new name for them perhaps?

If we consider synonyms (or near synonyms) for VLEs, we will come across the following:

• CBI (Computer Based Instruction)
• CMC (Computer Mediated Communication)
• CMS (Content Management System)
• Distance Learning/ Remote Learning
• E-Learning
• LCMS (Learning Content Management System)
• LMS (Learning Management System)
• LP (Learning Platform)
• MLE (Managed Learning Environment)
• OLC (Online Learning Centre)

Of course, there are multiple ways for teachers to use VLEs; for example, focusing on one platform, such as the institutional Moodle or Blackboard, or integrating several platforms for one course. An example would be using Zoom or Webex along with one of these course management systems. Going as far as allowing Facebook or Whatsapp as supplements may be considered extraneous or peripheral, and probably unofficial by the institutions hosting the courses. Still, this has become part of many students’ lives, along with their teachers'. In fact, some educators may dislike using their institutions’ central VLE, finding it restrictive, opting for “loosely coupled teaching” as noted by Martin Weller back in 2007 in “The VLE/LMS is Dead”. 

This is all real life for large numbers of students and educators these days, day in, day out. Should it continue to be referred to as “virtual” teaching and learning? Give it a thought and let me know what you think. It is a bit like wondering whether the novel coronavirus should continue to be referred to as “novel” indefinitely.

Word of the Year 2020

 

Unsurprisingly, the Merriam-Webster word of the year is pandemic, a word defining this era, as the dictionary editors put it. It earned this status not only due to an extreme number of lookups, but also based on increasing lookups year after year. There was a peak of interest in it in February 2020, after which there was no decline. By March 11, when the WHO confirmed that COVID-19 was a pandemic, searches had multiplied by over 115,000% compared with March 2019. The Greek origins of the word may be of interest: pan, meaning all, and demic, relating to demos, people. As one would expect, coronavirus was next on the list of Merriam-Webster, having multiplied more than 162,000% in the past year.

The Oxford English Dictionary could not settle on just one word of the year this time, publishing a report entitled “Words of an Unprecedented Year”. These include, besides terms such as coronavirus, COVID-19, lockdown, superspreader and social distancing, entries such as bushfire (mainly relating to Australia); impeachment and acquittal (mostly surrounding Donald Trump), and black lives matter, which spiked after the recent killing of African Americans.

Here are the words of the year of some other dictionaries:

Collins: lockdown

Dictionary.com: pandemic

Cambridge: quarantine, which – according to the editors – has gained a slightly new sense, synonymous with lockdown.

Let’s hope that, with the vaccine around the corner, the 2021 words of the year will revolve around vaccination, recovery, and brighter prospects for the world.

Brave New World of Online Teaching

                                                                                                                     

This is the first academic year at AUB that has started completely online. Teaching online allows one some freedom, but is it fun teaching in semi self-isolation because of widespread corona measures? Isolation can help you focus on your work as a teacher, promoting productivity, but that is where the fun ends. You would hope that your students, too, are not going out too much or being distracted otherwise, but you feel sorry for them, just as you do for yourself. Often you can sense from their work that they do actually have time to read and write, possibly more than they did before corona. The quality of their work is not too bad either. 

Every week, I try to include at least one synchronous session, where we are together in class for a lecture, or for discussion or student presentations, just like in a face-to-face university classroom. Lecture summaries and recordings are made available for those who cannot be with us live, whether due to technical reasons or because of a time difference - a number of students may be currently living in a different time zone. The rest of the sessions are asynchronous, involving active learning on the part of the students, either individually or in teams, with flexible deadlines. Not everything is graded; there is practice work and self-assessment where students get credit for trying rather than for how much they score. Plus, learners are never entirely on their own. They may contact me live or by email whenever they need to talk or ask questions.

There are some weird aspects to teaching online though. You feel let down when a student admits his aunt searched the web for him, for example. You feel alarmed the first time you hear someone doing dishes in the background while you converse with a student. A bit like parents walking into your classroom with pots and pans. Your whole course is out there for families and friends to see. They can hear your voice, see you, and watch your every move in the course. It can feel creepy, but you get used to it, just as everyone is getting used to living with this virus.

There are amusing incidents too. The other day, a young child took over a pupil’s microphone while she was out of the room. Having unmuted the microphone, the little girl addressed the class, almost hijacking the lesson. At first, we wondered whether it was a hacker, but it turned out to be a child playing. We smiled and continued with the lesson. This is what this virus has done to our lives – to teaching and learning. Yet, life goes on. More later.

Corona Times: War or Journey?

Among the figures of speech used for responses to corona are the usual war ones often borrowed in medicine from the military, as in Trump’s “war against the invisible enemy” and Raab’s “fighter” (in reference to Boris Johnson when the latter was in hospital). Michael Skapinker recently commented in The Financial Times that the journey metaphors in use in the UK are better as they remove blame from the victim who may be seen as not having fought well enough to “defeat” the virus. Skapinker notes that war metaphors for illness have been criticised for decades: in 1978, the American writer Susan Sontag had warned that the battle approach could “assign to the ill the ultimate responsibility both for falling ill and for getting well”. Skapinker refers to the observation by Nottingham Professor Brigitte Nerlich that UK ministers are starting to use journey metaphors, implying cooperation, as in going “the extra mile”, “keep going”, and moving “beyond the peak”. Still, he notes that King’s College language specialist Tony Thorne believes that battle metaphors must not be disposed of altogether due to the need for national mobilization.

On this subject, Patrick Cox of The World radio program interviewed Seema Yasmin, who teaches medicine and journalism at Stanford University. According to Yasmin, war metaphors have been used in epidemics since at least the 1600s when Thomas Sydenham, a British physician, declared, “I attack the enemy within. A murderous array of disease has to be fought against, and the battle is not a battle for the sluggard.” Subsequently, Louis Pasteur spoke of “invading armies that lay siege to our bodies.” Then in the 1920s, cancer cells were referred to as anarchists or Bolsheviks, after which Richard Nixon waged his own “war on cancer” by signing the National Cancer Act of 1971.

Ian Buruma of The New York Times warns that there’s a long history of illness being used to inflame hatred and that we mustn’t let this happen with corona by calling it a “Chinese virus” or a “foreign virus”: “Nationalism should have no place in medical discourse. And medical language should never be applied to politics. Coronavirus isn’t Chinese or foreign; it is global. Blaming alien forces, whether in the name of God, or science or simple prejudice, is bound to make things a great deal worse.”

A Virus Gone Truly Viral!

When news spreads like wildfire on social media, we say it has gone viral. How many of us had ever reflected on the origin of the adjective “viral”: well now there’s no doubt about it since Covid-19 has illustrated the phenomenon perfectly to the world. One can already envision "Word of the Year 2020" in most dictionaries: corona, ventilator, epidemic, pandemic, PPE, self-isolation, social distancing, etcetera, etcetera! Words galore: Heaven for many English teachers and Hell for the majority on this planet!

One can envision google searches such as epidemic versus pandemic and social distancing versus physical distancing.  Actually, the latter distinction is worth some reflection. When the World Health Organization adopted physical rather than social as the adjective, many - including psychologists and sociologists -  lauded the decision, affirming the fact that while physical distance was "absolutely essential" during the global pandemic, "it does not mean that socially we have to disconnect from our loved ones, from our family."

WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said on March 20, "Technology, right now, has advanced so greatly that we can keep connected in many ways without actually physically being in the same room or physically being in the same space with people," adding, "We're changing to say physical distance and that's on purpose because we want people to still remain connected." 

London School of Economics social psychologist Martin Bauer had rightly questioned the “unfortunate” phrasing from the start, pointing out in an interview with Al Jazeera that the WHO terminology change had been overdue when it happened in late March; the phrasing error should not have been allowed to happen: "In these strange times of the virus, we want clear physical distance (minimum two metres), but at the same time, we want people to remain close to each other 'socially'."

The next time you listen to television news, try to observe which of the above expressions is used. At the time of writing this blog post, many channels are still using the older terminology. Perhaps they take it for granted that people understand – or perhaps they don’t consider that changing a word here and there will really make a difference. I wonder what my readers think. For example, do students feel socially dispersed or disconnected when they are physically remote from their teacher and classmates, or do they still feel united by common learning objectives and common online work areas and discussion forums? I look forward to hearing your views.

Word of the Year 2019

The dictionary words of the year 2018 included many that were environment related, whether as top scoring words or runners up. This past year, the scenario has not changed; rather, there appears to be even more concern with the environment.

The Oxford Word of the Year is climate emergency. According to the dictionary’s editors, the term was used a hundred times more frequently in 2019 than in the previous year. The Cambridge Word of the Year, chosen because it was the most popular Word of the Day once, is upcycling, meaning “the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material”. According to the Cambridge Dictionary blog, while reversing climate change, or even stopping its progression, appears difficult, upcycling is a concrete step towards that which could be taken individually. Lookups of the word have risen 181% since 2011, when it was introduced into the dictionary. Other terms on the Cambridge shortlist for 2019 also reflect environmental concerns: carbon sink, compostable, and preservation. A new addition is plastic footprint, meaning the amount of plastic wasted rather than recycled, hence damaging the environment. Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year is existential, also due to frequent lookups. Among other things, the term has been used in relation to climate change as an “existential crisis” and an “existential emergency”. The Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year is “climate strike”, first registered in 2015; lexicographers noted a one-hundred-fold increase in its lookups in 2019.

On a different note, the Merriam-Webster Word of the Year is they in its relatively new non-binary sense. The new sense entered the Webster Dictionary in September 2019 due to increased lookups, and the American Psychological Association blog endorsed the use of the pronoun in October in a post entitled “Welcome Singular They”. The use is now officially accepted in academic writing after gender experts updated the APA’s bias free language guidelines. “They” may be used as a generic pronoun to replace “he or she” or to refer to individuals who prefer not to be referred to as either.