To Zoom or not to Zoom?
By Ron Roman
COVID-19 has forever changed the educational landscape for teachers and students worldwide, both at the pre-college and college levels. Since the dawn of the millennium, when education delivered online (at least at the college level) was in its infancy, online education for credit, most recently delivered to classrooms via Zoom, has become omnipresent.
And now entrenched. Ah, to Zoom or not to Zoom? There's the rub! It now appears to be irreversible. A done deal ― and a deal spearheading education, quality education at every level, flushed down the pedagogical toilet.
As a full-time university professor, I had my first introduction to online teaching for course credits at the eve of the millennium. It was the first of what would be many of my school's conferences on the topic.
Our long-term and highly respected Asia director was in attendance, ostensibly being pressured from above to open the gates for this new cash-cow technology to fatten the university's coffers.
A veteran traditional academic with robust standards, he appeared hesitant to fully embrace this new development. Ultimately it would prove to be the undoing of many traditionally minded academics, myself included.
It was later that night, seated at our traditional end-of-conference banquet table, I turned around and asked point-blank of our newly appointed online educational program director, “Hey, Bud, where's our accountability?”
To which he replied, poker-faced, and without missing a beat, “There isn't any!” He knew, as did we all, there wouldn't be, nor couldn't be, any. Didn't have to be prescient to ascertain that: not knowing for sure who'd be writing whose paper, taking whose test … We all surmised this would ineluctably slide into a scam and a sham dog and pony show down the road.
But if it pays, it stays. Be it in academia or in the business world that's the American way, right? Now the merger has pretty much been complete everywhere.
Zoom technology has accelerated all this. Colleges have segued into educational corporations (many of them now simply honest-to-goodness digital diploma mills), senior administrators into fat-cat corporate suits and skirts, students into customers, professors into classroom guides, facilitators, mentors ― and fast evolving into nothing more than monitors, at least on the undergraduate level via the tsunami-like onslaught of Zoomed automation.
And whoa-be-the-prof who doesn't at least pass Zoomed college “students” with clear suspicions of plagiarism or cheating. Yikes! “Work with them!” (the customers) teachers will likely be told in sacred code language whispered from corporatized echelons high above. Be a corporate team player and loyal foot soldier or be “bad for business” and be out of a job.
Dole out massive expenditures to engage and entertain massive numbers of customers (aka “students”) for the predominant financial benefit of all but a few select academic managers at the top of the bloated corporate ladder since most classes are now taught by low-paid part-timers (adjuncts) to begin with.
These adjuncts enjoy a hardscrabble life without stable, long-term contracts, or even a vestige of job security, let alone meaningful tenure, while the college corporate brass pull down corporate executive pay. So, it's digitize it, automatize it, commoditize it, and ultimately corporatize it.
There was a time in yonder years (early 20th century) in the U.S. when high school graduates would get what was considered by many to be an ersatz inexpensive education via snail-mail correspondence schools in technical-vocational studies: auto repair, air-conditioning repair, electrical repair, etc.
Today's Zoomed classes are an atavistic throwback to that: classes hobbled and cobbled together on the cheap. Like these correspondence schools there is no way of knowing who's actually doing the schoolwork. Indeed, there are websites which offer to take your money ― and anonymously take your class for you. Nobody the wiser. This is where we are today.
So, then, in the future how would you like to be operated upon in the emergency room by doctors with this schooling? Didn't think you would. Thus, it all boils down to what Professor David Noble presaged in 1998 in his classic “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.”
Fast approaching is the day when students won't have any meaningful recollection of education based in face-to-face reality, only in the virtual. For many students the “perpetuation of promise,” as he so artfully put it, manifested and achieved by and with a real education, will be a misty memory of the distant past.
We've come full circle from the Industrial Age to the Computer Age, from the Analog World to the Digital World. Zoomed online education for credit has fast outpaced and overtaken book-based in-person learning for credit.
The digitized overhaul of the U.S. education system, and most of the rest of First World nations' schools, is all but complete. That said, I for one, was never hell-bent on teaching wholly online classes for credit; so-called hybrid ones (half face-to-face, half online) were the most I could, and would, put up with. That was bad enough. But it was a nice ride along the way leading up to where we are today. Now teaching Zoomed classes without much pay looks to be here to stay.
Of course, we are now at the crossroads where there's little choice for the time being but to employ Zoomed classes thanks to COVID-19. Junk education is better than no education, eh? Aye, yet again, there's the rub.
Got it?
Ron Roman (ron_g_roman@hotmail.com) has taught English and the humanities for the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC-Asia) all over the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command originally from 1996 until the COVID-19 crisis earlier last year. He is a long-term contributor to The Korea Times. His thriller novel, “Of Ashes and Dust,” is scheduled for release in the fall of 2022 by Addison & Highsmith (imprint).