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Since reading Jean Twenge’s (excellent) book Generations, I’ve been thinking about what I get wrong in my online learning job.
As an older Gen Xer (1965–1979; I was born in 1969), most people I work with are younger than I am. Unless I can figure out how to learn from my millennial (1980–1994) and Gen Z (1995–2012) colleagues, as well as my generational contemporaries and those who came before (boomers, 1946–1964), I’ll keep making the same mistakes at work.
I have three objectives in listing the big things I think I may be getting wrong at work. First, by thinking through some potential blind spots, I hope to figure out a path forward for change. Second, I’m hoping we can talk about what you get wrong and how you’ve figured out how to do better. Finally, I’m wondering about the degree to which my academic blind spots are generational—or due to another cause.
- Wanting More On-Campus Collaboration
When it comes to hybrid academic work, my head and my heart don’t agree. My head tells me that online collaboration, hybrid university jobs and fully remote academic work options are good things. In my heart, I want to see colleagues face-to-face more often.
As with most things, I suspect the correct answer for creating a post-pandemic academic workplace culture is finding a middle ground. Everyone benefits from academic workplace flexibility. The performative culture of logging long hours in the office as a signifier of commitment and productivity is thankfully dead.
I don’t understand how to make hybrid academic work lead to thick collaborations. I learned to be effective in higher education through unscheduled conversations and ad hoc discussions. The real work of moving the university forward seemed to take place outside of scheduled meetings. Change depends on trust, and trust is hard to build on Zoom.
At least in the worlds of alternative academia and digital learning, we are never going back to a time when everyone was always on campus. Nonfaculty educators now structure their work in much the same way that faculty have always done—meaning with more flexibility.
On the nonfaculty educator side of the academic house, we need to find new ways of working together that retain the benefits of flexibility but provide opportunities for unplanned and unstructured knowledge sharing and trust building.
- Expecting Night and Weekend Communication
If you work in online education, you know that much of the action occurs outside of normal working hours. Students, especially adult working professional students, do most of their work on nights and weekends.
As an academic who has spent a career teaching, developing and working on online courses and programs, I’ve grown accustomed to the idea that much of the work will happen at night and on the weekend. (I’ve always been good at going off-line during vacations, but many of my digital learning colleagues seem to be never not available.)
I’m intuiting from my millennial and Gen Z colleagues that they will be better at setting working limits and defining workplace boundaries. This is a good thing. Being constantly on email (text, Slack or whatever) is a recipe for burnout.
- Thinking Colleagues Should Do Things How I Think They Should Be Done
This last blind spot is the most difficult to admit and the hardest to overcome. After doing this online learning thing for 20 years, I think I know how things should go. The reality is that I probably don’t.
Most of my examples of how I did things when I was hands-on building online courses and programs are now years in the past. What we know about digital and online learning has changed. The tools have changed. The context has changed. Leadership in online education is now at least as much about listening as it is about expertise.
Figuring out how to refrain from inflicting on my colleagues my vision of how online programs should be designed, developed, launched and run is proving difficult.
What are your academic workplace blind spots?
