A feminist pedagogy through online education

Abstract

Together with rapid developments in information technology (IT), online education is emerging as a new model for higher education. Reviewing online education from a gender perspective and searching for alternatives are deemed as very important tasks. Creating new demand for gender education is also an important objective. Online education, as a new medium of feminism, can play an important role in revitalizing conventional gender education to go beyond the constraints of time and space. Amidst the increasingly globalized world trends, online teaching techniques that use “the limitless web” to connect women across Asian locales—allowing them to share concerns, discuss their common interests, and effect change—would be an important means of moving beyond temporal and spatial limitations. By examining the current practice of online education from a gender perspective, the present paper will explore how it can serve both as an opportunity and a limitation for women, particularly in Asia. Also, by looking at a specific example of gender education in a Korean online university, where its institutionalization is progressing at a fairly quick pace, this paper will offer some suggestions to substantively and systematically supplement and activate online gender education not only in Korea but elsewhere in Asia as well.

Abstract in Korean

IT 기술의 급속한 발전과 함께, 온라인 교육이 새로운 고등교육의 모델로 등장하는 이 시점에서 현재 진행되는 온라인 교육에 대해 젠더관점에서 점검해 보고 대안을 모색하는 일은 매우 중요하다. 나아가, 온라인 교육방식을 통해 새로운 젠더교육의 수요를 창출하고, 또 시공간의 제약을 넘어서는 젠더교육 활성화방안에 대해 검토해 보는 것도 의미있는 일이다. 또한 점점 더 글로벌화하는 세계적 추세 속에서 시공간적 제한을 넘어 아시아 지역 여성들이 서로 공감하며, 공동의 관심사에 대해 함께 토론하고 변화를 이루어 나가는데 limitless web을 활용하는 온라인 교육방식은 중요한 도구가 될 수 있을 것이다. 이 논문에서는 우선, 현재 이루어지고 있는 온라인 교육을 젠더 관점에서 검토함으로써 온라인 교육이 어떤 점에서 여성들, 또는 아시아여성들에게 기회가 되고, 또 제약이 되는지 살펴보고자 한다. 이와 함께, 온라인 교육의 제도화가 비교적 빠른 속도로 진행되고 있는 한국 온라인 대학 내 젠더교육의 현황을 구체적 사례를 통해 살펴봄으로써 향후 한국뿐 아니라 아시아 국가들의 온라인 젠더교육 활성화를 위한 내용적, 제도적 보완을 위한 시사점을 제시하고자 한다.

Keywords:

• feminist pedagogy
• online education
• online Asian women’s studies
• the effects of online gender education

Keywords:

• 여성주의 페다고지
• 온라인 교육
• 온라인 아시아 여성학
• 온라인 젠더교육효과

Notes on contributor

CHUNG Young Ai is a professor at Seoul Cyber University, Korea. She earned her Ph.D in Women’s Studies from Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea. Her major research interests are feminist welfare policies, work-life balance, and re-evaluation of women’s care work. In this regard, she has presented these research papers: ‘A study on the work-family balance of female North Korean defectors,’ ‘Child-care policy for work-life balance,’ ‘A long-term care policy and care work’ and other related ones. She has also published the book, The Family and Gender, which deals with family issues from a feminist standpoint.

Notes

1. Representative MOOCs currently operating include FutureLearn (UK) https://www.futurelearn.com/, iversity (Germany) https://iversity.org/, and Schoo (Japan) http://schoo.jp/guest, in Korea, K-MOOC based in KERIS and various MOOCs of independent universities.

2. An analysis of 279 courses offered by the 3 largest MOOCs with a total of 43,000 students revealed that average rate of completion per course is only 6.5 percent (Ferenstein, 2014).

3. Courses offered by MODeL are as follows: Child Rights Protection and Promotion, Business Process Management, Introduction to Inter-Local Cooperation, Business Communication, Art in the ASEAN Region, Oral Communication & Conversational Fluency in English

4. Founded in 1976 in the United States, the University of Phoenix’s (http://www.phoenix.edu/) program targets students all over the world. In 2011, over 1,000 American universities, including Kaplan University, offered online curriculums; in the United Kingdom, Open University was founded in 1971 and has been visited by over a million students from 160 countries; Athabasca University (http://www.athabascau.ca/), Canada’s first distance education program, was founded in 1972 and offers a variety of options to meet learner needs including degree courses, business project courses, and lecture-based courses

5. Students were not notified about the separate classes at the time of course registration, so the students making up the two classes were almost identical. When the course began, the students in both classes were informed of the reason for the division. During the semester many attempts were made to enhance interactions in the smaller class through replies to student comments posted in the bulletin board, feedback, additional study materials, etc.

6. The following is what the students were told at the beginning of the semester with regard to the opinion survey. “I am conducting an opinion survey to explore your opinions and perceptions about the Family and Gender course. There are no correct answers, and I plan to have you take the same opinion survey one more time at the end of the semester. I encourage you to volunteer and participate in the survey and to be honest in your responses to the questions.” The students who volunteered were understood to have given their consent to use their responses in the study.