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a yellow canary

Part 1: When Did We Stop Building Online Courses?

Written by CEN-PICKETAL on . Posted in blog, reflection, teaching online.

The Canary Is Singing: Why Higher Education Needs to Reclaim the Online Course

The LMS should be more than a hallway leading students to someone else’s classroom.

If you had asked me in 2020 whether there were self-paced, credit-bearing online courses across SUNY, I would have answered without hesitation.

No.

In fact, I would have bet money on it.

Not because self-paced learning is inherently problematic. There are excellent examples of self-paced learning in continuing education, workforce development, and competency-based education. Those models are intentionally designed around different pedagogies, different learner expectations, and different definitions of instructor engagement.

What I believed did not exist, at least not at any meaningful scale, were asynchronous online courses where the instructional experience had effectively been outsourced. Courses where the learning management system (LMS) contained little more than a syllabus, a few announcements, and a link to a publisher website where nearly everything else occurred.

I was wrong.

Or perhaps more accurately, the landscape changed beneath our feet.

For decades at SUNY, we built thoughtful, a research-based online faculty development model and professionalizedonline instructional designer roles to support intentionally designed online learning environments with distinct pedagogies and affordances that evolved as technologies evolved. This work was grounded in a growing body of research on effective online learning environments, including the importance of social, teaching, and cognitive presences (Garrison et al., 2000) and the instructional design decisions that shape online learning experiences (Means et al., 2014). We drew on our experience working with thousands of online faculty and hundreds of thousands of online learners across all sectors of higher education to better understand how people can teach and learn well online. We contributed to the growing body of scholarship that has since developed into a robust field of research and practice.

We didn’t simply try to replicate face-to-face instruction online. We reconceptualized how to achieve pedagogical objectives given the possibilities and limitations of a largely text-based online environment. Over time, we observed, researched, tested, developed, and refined the instructional design practices, facilitation strategies, and faculty development approaches needed to support and continuously improve effective online course design, teaching, and learning practices.

So when I began hearing that some online faculty and their courses were drifting toward something far thinner, I didn’t believe it.

But then I saw it.

The COVID-19 pandemic brutally reshaped higher education. Institutions accomplished what many believed impossible. Almost overnight, thousands of courses moved online. Faculty adapted under extraordinary circumstances. Instructional designers worked around the clock. Technology teams built infrastructure at unprecedented speed. The resilience, creativity, and commitment demonstrated across higher education deserve enormous recognition.

But it appears that some of those practices that emerged under emergency conditions have become permanent habits.

For decades, SUNY invested in preparing faculty to teach online through dedicated professional development, individualized instructional design support, and intentional course development processes. That commitment is reflected in SUNY’s ongoing work to establish and support systematic approaches to online course quality, including the development and implementation of the OSCQR rubric and process. During the pandemic, many of those requirements and processes were necessarily bypassed as faculty moved rapidly into emergency remote teaching. While some subsequently sought additional preparation and developed considerable expertise, others have continued to teach online without the benefit of the foundational training and support that had previously been expected.

Having taught remotely during an emergency became, for some, sufficient evidence that they knew how to teach online. But emergency remote teaching and intentionally designed online education are not the same thing, a distinction clearly articulated by Hodges et al. (2020).

The subsequent SUNY system-wide migration to Brightspace added another layer of disruption, requiring institutions and faculty to migrate, rebuild, or adapt courses while still recovering from the demands of emergency remote teaching. Together, these circumstances may have created conditions in which practices once considered temporary became normalized, and established expectations for online course development, faculty preparation, and quality review became less consistently applied.

At the same time, publisher platforms offered increasingly comprehensive, convenient, and ready-made instructional resources. For faculty facing heavy workloads, unfamiliar technologies, and competing demands, these tools could offer an attractive way to deliver content, assignments, quizzes, and assessments without having to build or rebuild everything themselves.

The convergence of these developments may have contributed to an unintended consequence: some online courses are no longer being designed as coherent institutional learning environments. Instead, they have become gateways to external publisher platforms.

That realization came into focus for me earlier this year during a conversation with colleagues at one of our institutions. They reported seeing an increasing number of asynchronous courses where the LMS contained only the bare minimum required by institutional policy: a syllabus, a course outline, perhaps a welcome announcement, and maybe a Zoom link for office hours. Everything else, including the readings, videos, assignments, quizzes, exams, and in some cases even the feedback, occurred almost entirely within a publisher’s platform.

At first, I assumed this was an isolated problem. It wasn’t.

Since then, I have become aware of similar concerns from instructional designers, faculty developers, online learning leaders, quality reviewers, and system-level trainers across multiple institutions. Some of these concerns have come from campuses with long histories of online education and highly experienced online learning, instructional design, and faculty development teams.

That is what makes this so alarming. This is not simply a problem of institutions new to online learning. It appears to be part of a broader post-COVID drift, although its prevalence and causes have yet to be systematically established.

The canary is singing.

This Is Not a Story About Publisher Platforms

Let me be clear: this is not an argument against publisher platforms.

Many publisher resources are excellent. They can provide rich multimedia, adaptive learning tools, simulations, test banks, auto-graded practice opportunities, and resources that would be difficult or impossible for most faculty members to create on their own. Used thoughtfully, they can strengthen an online course.

The problem arises when the publisher platform becomes the course.

That distinction matters. Once that happens, institutions may no longer be simply adopting instructional resources. They may be gradually outsourcing pieces of teaching itself. Content is selected elsewhere. Learning pathways are predetermined. Assessments are automated. Feedback may become algorithmic. Learner interaction and collaboration are absent. The instructor’s role can shift from designing and facilitating learning to managing access and monitoring grades.

Of course, the use of a publisher platform does not automatically mean that teaching has disappeared. Faculty can design meaningful interaction, provide substantive feedback, contextualize learning, and maintain a strong instructional presence while using external courseware. The concern is what happens when those elements are absent or become peripheral to the experience.

Perhaps most importantly, the institution itself can begin to recede into the background. Students may no longer experience the course primarily as part of their college or university. Instead, they experience it as a commercial platform attached to a course registration.

That raises a much bigger question about what institutions are actually providing when they offer an online course.

Why This Matters Beyond the Individual Course

What concerns me most is that the implications extend far beyond instructional design or the quality of an individual course. When institutions allow the substance of their online courses to migrate into external platforms without adequate expectations, oversight, or accountability, they may also be exposing themselves to significant pedagogical, institutional, regulatory, financial, and reputational risks.

These risks are interconnected, and many may remain invisible until a student complaint, accessibility concern, accreditation review, or other institutional challenge brings them to light.

This is fundamentally a question of institutional stewardship. What responsibilities can institutions delegate to external providers, and what responsibilities must remain their own?

In Part 2 of this series, I examine eight institutional risks associated with this shift and consider what higher education leaders can do to reclaim responsibility for the quality, integrity, and sustainability of online learning.

The Canary Is Singing

The canary in the coal mine was never intended to create panic. It was intended to provide an early warning before a small problem became a catastrophe.

I believe that is where higher education finds itself today.

The quiet outsourcing of the online course is not universal. It is not inevitable. It is not irreversible. But it is becoming visible, and visibility gives us an opportunity to act intentionally before diminished expectations become institutional culture.

Higher education has solved difficult problems before. We can solve this one too. But first, we have to recognize it.

A publisher platform can enrich an online course, but it should never replace one. The LMS should not become a hallway leading students to someone else’s classroom.

The canary is singing. The question is whether we are listening.

Are we seeing an erosion of the expectations and practices that have defined quality online education, or are we witnessing something else? What are you seeing at your institution, and how are you responding?

References and Resources

  • Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2–3), 87–105. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1096-7516(00)00016-6

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