This year, I opted to step up and teach in an entirely virtual environment.

While my initial thoughts regarding the matter revolved around selfish reasons (the least amount of contact and exposure to others as a means of protecting my family), other ideas percolated:

• I love a challenge
• the merging of digital platforms with education is long overdue and so I might as well jump on the rail line
• it’s an opportunity to learn and prove you can teach an old dog new tricks
• the worst that happens is I pick up some new ideas

However, as I work through this new frontier, some bigger thoughts have been coming my way.

Working in a completely online platform isn’t simply a matter of translating what you do in person to doing it online, it’s rethinking how you approach education in the first place.

I used to think that once we can program AI tools that use adaptive methods of responding to individual student needs, there would be no point in having a human in the room. Technology that can respond to you individually and keep you in the optimal zone of development is a far superior learning mechanism than mass instruction.

However, now I see a weakness of that idea:

It can’t adapt to the holistic person.

People are more than just the “left side” of the brain and while social media has done a tremendous job of manipulating people through their behavioral change algorithms (fancy way of saying, “keeping users addicted”), the reason people flocked to the platforms was for connection.

It occurs to me that what I’m doing right now is trying to merge the best of both worlds. And a scarier thought occurring to me is that what I’m actually doing is creating my own obsolescence as an educator.

If done right, I melt into the background as a support system rather than an active ‘sage.’

And while this idea originally disheartened me, I actually find it motivating. If we can create an education system that actually works in the benefit of each student, providing for their needs… why wouldn’t we rush to do this?

It’ll require an incredible amount of creativity and careful planning, but that’s how all great leaps forward happened. Time for another one.