When looking at technological innovations that have impacted my own educational experience, the primary suspect is Learning Management Systems, like Brightspace and Google classroom. Brightspace in particular has become the core underlying infrastructure of learning delivery in my time in university, being the place assignments are delivered, readings are assigned, updates are made known, and occasionally the way by which a full course is delivered. The key to the success of Brightspace is, in my view, that the technology exists as a digitized form of what already existed. It follows the well-trodden path of successful and widely adopted technologies, that of “thing that already exists but internet”. Amazon? A book store but internet. Paypal and etransfer? Give someone money but internet. Facebook? Show your friends your vacation photos but internet. The list goes on. Brightspace, Canvas, and other similar products took analog tasks we all knew and understood, made them internet, and placed them all in one bucket. Because that bucket was easy enough to scoop from, they became widely used, but its important to note that to state that their success comes from fitting well with our current conceptions of education is also to say that the technology only passed through the gates of institutional education because it didn’t challenge our preconceptions of what and how education must be.

LMSs can then be contrasted against MOOCs. MOOCs, concieved through connectivist philosophies of learner autonomy, interconnectedness, and the generation of knowledge through such networks of autonomous learners, did, in a fundamental way, challenge the structure of western learning: the Banker Model, where teachers, who know everything, deposit their knowledge into students, who know nothing, as further elaborated on in part II of the above video on the philosophy of Paulo Freire, writer of Pedagogy of the Opressed. We can see now that MOOCs did not reach the heights for which they aimed, in terms of adoption and of philosophical basis. In the industrial sense of education as a path to careers, one who completed a MOOC needs to work harder to prove themselves than someone with a degree from a concrete institution, if they are allowed entry to the field at all, and philosophically, my only personal experience with a MOOC was the beginning of a free course on canadian indigenous colonization, structured entirely as a series of videos and quizzes; a prototypical banker modelled course fulfilling neither the connectivist aims of the concept nor, ironically, many of the Indigenous Ways of Knowing which my primary and secondary schools occasionally attempted to emphasize.

It is perhaps naive to call for institutions whose courses are increasingly expensive and whose primary capital is legitimacy to roll over for controversial educational theories and practices that risk undermining that legitimacy, but I consider the cynicism of claiming that change can only ever work by affirming current educational practices to be similarly juvenile. As I see it, change is inevitable, but forcing it is impossible, and any changes we attempt to make will either slide off the big systems back or make impacts that we can’t always foresee. In any case, we work continuously to better ourselves, our teaching, and our learning, because to do anything else is to betray ourselves, whether we expect to change the world or not.