I had one last quick opportunity to work in a team as a student in the MALAT program at Royal Roads University. My esteemed teammates were Kristin Beeby and Sandra Norum. Together, we explored the impact digital learning has had on teachers in recent history. To present our findings, we developed the above Genial.ly presentation. To learn more about each subject, click on the plus icon next to a given title… and don’t forget to check our references… there’s some gold in there!
I’d love to hear your thoughts on what we’ve included. Have an awesome day!
Great work by your team! This is very comprehensive, and touches on a wide range of issues, each could probably be explored in depth on its own.
“Transient teachers” seems to be a growing trend in higher education, and in my experience, this is not always a positive. Digital teaching practices allow us to teach from anywhere to anywhere on the globe, which opens up tremendous opportunities for both teachers and learners. The flip side of that is there can be less continuity for learners and instructors alike, as transient faculty have to renew contracts every year or every semester, and there are no guarantees.
Did intellectual property emerge as an issue in your research? It’s an issue I’ve seen exacerbated by digital learning, and the “ownership” of digital learning materials can become a contentious issue between institutions and the faculty responsible for designing, developing, and delivering them.
Thanks for taking the time to read our post, Darren. I agree that each of these topics could be explored in much more depth… just scratching the surface here.
Yeah, the concept of transient teachers definitely has both positive and negative connotations, and I think you’ve identified the both of the big ones from each side of the argument. There’s a lot of benefit to a strong educator being able to communicate with as many students as possible at a variety of institutions around the globe… but, as you say, it comes with the caveats of a lack of job security for the educator, and a possible lack of consistency in the learning for students.
No, intellectual property did not come up during this particular conversation, but is certainly something that interests me. Personally, I think the topic is only contentious when there’s a lack of communication between the institution and the educator. Usually these matters have very clearly be defined, but those definitions aren’t always communicated to the educator. At my institution (Fanshawe), the ownership of the content we create for the college is divided into two categories… moral rights and economic rights. Moral rights are associated with attribution, association, and integrity… and economic rights are associated with reproduction, distribution, and performance. At Fanshawe, the educator maintains the moral rights to their work, while the college maintains the economic rights. This may not always be the case at every institution, so I would always recommend an educator to be sure to communicate with their employer to have an understanding of where the line of ownership is drawn.