McJobs has come to mean low-paying jobs with limited skill requirements where turnover is high, workers’ activities are programmed, and the work is supervised closely by managers.
McTeaching or online instruction is where tightly sequenced software with accompanying worksheets and quizzes especially in credit recovery courses become the meat-and-potatoes curriculum. Other online courses with live teachers lecturing in a studio have step-by-step rules of face-to-face engagement with distant learners are higher-level McJobs. Both forms of online instruction have lower prestige among teachers (many of whom may fear being replaced by high-tech McJobbies in the form of software programs and cyber-teachers).
Surely, there is much variation in online instruction both in K-12 and higher education venues. The history of using the Internet for all forms of education has multiple roots and branches guaranteeing differences. Web courses differ in delivery; some emanate from virtual schools with a curricular menu of software and teacher-directed courses; others are courses with online teachers having discussions in real time with face-to-face contact periodically. Online students range from home schoolers to those enrolled in the International Baccalaureate diploma program and Advanced Placement courses to those taking course for MBA and engineering programs. Then there are all those students who have failed courses and sign up for credit recovery.
The quality of online instruction also varies. There are stars among instructors who relish the work, plan thoughtfully, use the limited face-to-face interaction and discussion threads during the course creatively, and offer many stories of student success. Software designers have also created programs that both entice and push students through carefully sequenced lessons sufficient to teach complicated concepts clearly and crisply. Such stellar performers and well-designed software turn some McJobs into superb opportunities. But most online instructors and software programs plod along well-worn roads that only highly-motivated, independent students can traverse to finish the journey.
Even if those who tout online learning (derisively called “click-click” courses by critics) as the “disruptive innovation” that will replace regular schools or, those advocates of “blended learning” (sometimes called “hybrid” schools) spread their gospel, two facts are incontrovertible.
First, online teaching costs less per student than regular classroom teaching (see here,pp.7,80; and national_report, p. 7). At a time of rampant budget cuts, online instruction with lower instructional costs and seemingly positive student results (finalreport-5) give champions of web-based instruction from Bill Gates to the Idaho state superintendent license to tout the efficiency and effectiveness of applying high-tech solutions to delivering instruction.
Second, online learning offers limited face-to-face interactions between teachers and students compared to regular classroom instruction. Most online instructional enthusiasts assume that effective teacher lectures, software, programmed lessons, video clips, exercises, and tests will achieve the goal of transferring knowledge from teacher to learner.
But different assumptions prevail for classroom teaching: the trust that grows from sustained face-to-face relationship between teacher and student is fundamental for learning; teachers develop teaching persona and emotional relationships with students (e.g., Rafe Esquith, Jaime Escalanate, Erin Gruwell) that students come to recognize and expect as lessons unfold; teaching is a performance (Am Educ Res J-1994-Pineau-3-25) and the “constant living interaction between teacher and audience makes every performance a new event.”
No, I am not romanticizing regular classroom teaching. I do know the variation among teachers’ personas and their teaching that occurs within the same school and across a district. I also know the inherent dilemmas that teachers face when bonds of affection develop with their students and they risk losing those affections when they press students to think harder and dig deeper into the subject matter. Or when they try to individualize instruction for 30-plus students. Further, I know well the uneven and too often low quality of teaching that occurs in largely poor and minority schools. So, I will not make every urban teacher a Rafe Esquith or Erin Gruwell.
The point I want to make is that the purposes of teaching include but go far beyond transmitting knowledge, the aim driving online instruction. Classroom teachers want to develop in students the desire to learn more about the world, themselves, and others; they want to demonstrate through word and deed how to live a decent life.
For those who seek the benefits of individualizing instruction through online lessons and having a teacher available to help and teach group lessons–what some call “blended learning” or “hybrid” schools–the combination defuses some of the criticism leveled by both parents and teachers at offering a full menu of online instruction. Nonetheless, the cost of such “hybrid” schools once up and running remains less than fully staffed regular schools, a fact evident to anyone who can read a budget.
Cheaper to do and employing different assumptions about teaching and learning, McTeaching in online instruction increasingly edges closer to McJobs.