A minor critique and support for what you are saying.

The experts of pedagogy (academics and teachers) are rarely digitally literate (they can’t use technology in any competent, engaging or engaging enough way) enough compared to their students. This line was crossed about 15 years ago with most institutions still digitally functioning like they are in 2005.

Some neat studies out there about this. Profs are smart and know what they don’t know. Academic leadership often doesn’t have the will to modernize. We saw how many colleges resisted modernizing during the pandemic lockdowns and when they came back lamented how poor online was after designing a solution in 2 weeks.

Bureaucracies serve ultimately for their own self preservation.

Pedagogy is a red flag word. People who use it incorrectly often discount themselves pretty quickly. Pedagogy is about how children learn, it has less relevance in higher education, which is more about learning how to learn. Andragogy is how adults learn and I invite anyone to see how often that word is used.

It’s pretty telling when educational conferences how pedagogy is used every 3 words when… How adults learn (andragogy) including young adults is quite different than children.

When I hear the word pedagogy referring beyond high school it’s tell take sign of people using buzzwords, and a sign they might not really know the difference.

If experts really wanted to get into digital learning taxonomies based on old ones that don’t seem to bridge the divide, maybe that would be a start.

Instead academics have insisted on sharding the digital learning experience among dozens of digital tools for students ( how many different things do students have to log into), perhaps so it will not challenge their job security. Ironically most institutions have streamlined enrolment systems that are pretty complex but can take your money smoothly.

I think part of this is because too many academics are poor listeners though to openly entertaining ideas and positions that are not their own. There are amazing academics who get all of this and more (including the solutions) but they are often buried in the toxic cultures present at most post secondaries.

In Academia, afoption of ideas is gradual and slow, and too slow for the rapid changes taking place the past 2-3 years in society.

Another observation is that most universities only teach how to teach children, and churn out teachers. Maybe it’s why the word pedagogy is so present in academic circles. Do universities have a 4 year degree to teach university students like they do for K-12?

In this post - just reading about how WhatsApp and Google docs is used to learn together, for better and worse .. was created by students, not experts. Good on the prof for finding more ways to engage with the material. It’s a big problem.

Institutions have not kept up the skills of their staff. It’s decades behind. Probably another 10 years before the folks at the top wanting to keep things familiar enough start to retire and digitally native geriatric millennials can start getting into those roles and help change.

You have a good point about election cycles but it can go both ways to hurt education and curriculum too if that’s what politicians want.

Looking at students, Covid forced 10-15 years of change to happen in 2, while we have students who have missed a big chunk of education. There’s a need for our leaders, experts and institutions to recognize and do something about this, but bureaucracies ultimately serve their own self preservation at all costs.

One choice is expend all this effort fix the old institutions, or put the same effort into building new institutions for the future.

Education is no longer measured by hours of butts in seats. Education is no longer math not changing for 500 years so curriculum can take a few years to do minor tweaks.

It’s interesting to see how much more society has opened up to taking courses from anyone to learn the beginnings of any topic. If you ask me the clock is ticking on academic brands if they can’t create and revise curriculum faster than the 1-3 years it can take to approve and change a single sentence in a course.

If it’s relevant, I’ve built platforms to deliver online K-12, post-secondary education and industry training certification for a unusually long time. It feels like a weird world sometimes with the lens still stuck creating ad delivering education like it’s designed to be stored on encyclopedia CDs.

Meanwhile, Industry is often having to fill its own gaps to build the skills and competencies they need in people because education isn’t turning out people that are needed. The advances they put in place to keep their people safe shouldn’t be discounted.

Edit: Grammar, clarifications.