Excerpt from a Brainstorming Session of the April 2005 Sloan-C Workshop on
Blended Learning and Higher Education:
Challenge group on learner-, knowledge-, assessment-, and community-centered pedagogy. 

Sometimes it is useful to re-examine basic assumptions from a “beginner’s mind” perspective. One of Sloan-C’s central tenets has always been that instructors are essential to the educational process. This viewpoint is not universally shared, however. In the commercial sector, learner-content interaction is often seen as the only essential learning transaction, with instructors viewed as a cost rather than a necessity. Even some academicians believe that, as a recent Chronicle of Higher Education title put it, "Courseware That Could Replace Instructors Is ‘Inevitable’" [1].

What's wrong, if anything, with this viewpoint? What are instructors essential for, really? This query was discussed recently on the Sloan-C listserv. Some respondents answered this question by pointing out what was not essential for instructors to do. Several suggested that designing and developing courses with (teams of) instructional designers, content experts, and other specialists is preferable to relying on untrained instructors to fill these roles. Some suggested replacing large lectures with on-demand multimedia presentations, using trained content experts to facilitate group discussions, using software to automate assessment processes, outsourcing tutoring activities, and using artificial intelligent agents to diagnose learner needs. Collectively, this unbundling and outsourcing of instructor roles whittles away much of what is essential. What’s left for instructors to do?

Plenty, it turns out, according to listserv participants. Instructor roles vary widely according to the educational

environment and learner audience, thus the ways instructors are essential depends on the “situation,” i.e., the characteristics of the learners and the environment. Student and instructor goals, motivations, and perceptions also determine what is seen as “essential.” Using familiar labels (expert, coach, motivator, guide) encourages ‘same-old’ thinking, so here are a few new labels to view with fresh eyes what discussants saw as essential for instructors in higher education:

“Meaning makers”—Instructors use their expertise to supply context, explaining how and why information is important, helping learners integrate disparate content and make sense of it so that information can become “knowledge and maybe even wisdom,” notes William Housel of Northwestern State University.

“Growth agents”—Instructors are what George Otte of CUNY calls the “sand in the oyster;” they goad, prod, and challenge learners, pushing them, as Bruce Winston of Regent University notes, “beyond their level of comfort and into areas of improvement.”

Continued on page 6

[1] Evelyn, J. Courseware That Could Replace Professors Is Inevitable, New York College Official Says (subscription required). The Chronicle of Higher Education. Monday, March 7, 2005.