week 11 reading notes:

“Another Colonial Tool?” by Aaron Barlow

Aaron Barlow speaks about his experience as a student and a teacher in order to discuss  how MOOCs can transmit colonial ideas. It begins with an anecdote about Dutch physics professors at a university in Burkina Faso attempting to create lesson plans for students. When they talked to the teachers, the teachers did not react well to the lesson plans because of the assumption of resources. Barlow states that this anecdote is an example of colonial attitudes. MOOCs often have the same colonial ideals as well. Barlow draws from his own experience as a teacher in West Africa and and as a student who had to use a learning machine. Learning machines, like many xMOOCs, are prescriptive, offer no interaction, and will want a student to take the apparatus of learning apart instead of paying attention to the actual topic.  xMOOCs, he argues should be part of a larger learning environment that should offer students to explore freely on their own, as well as one-on-one teacher interaction. Many MOOCS are made to fit an institution's need, rather than the needs of students. Institutionalized control over MOOCs is colonial because institutions often make the assumption assumption that it knows what is best for the students- like Europeans assuming they know what is best to fix African problems.  This kind of paternalistic colonialism can create courses that are not interesting to engage in, and perhaps even ideas that oppress. MOOCs should instead center on what students want to learn.

Discussion:

I always find discussions of colonialism and education really interesting because I am interested in teaching in other countries and I have family who receive education in Central America. The anecdote that Barlow discusses in the beginning where Dutch professors made lessons using the tools they knew local, rural students would have. The teachers from Burkina Faso were offended at the assumption that they didn’t have the same tools as schools in Europe. Barlow uses this as an example of neo-colonialism that is similar to the attitudes present in MOOCs. There seems to be more to discuss in that anecdote, however. Did the assumption of limited resources carry a colonial attitude? Did these schools actually have some resources similar to schools in European schools? If the professors know that resources are limited, shouldn’t they build lessons based on those resources? I suppose the best solution would have been to ask the teachers in the Burkinabe schools to contribute to the lesson plans- or even better, get the students to contribute to their own lesson plans. Or perhaps the idea that the teachers needed additional assistance to teach may have been unintentionally insulting in and of itself.