Should We Standardize Online Education?

[snugent]

This past week this article, Standardization in Online Education, came by my social media feed. It was particularly interesting to me because we are knee deep in discussing the very issues that are discussed in this article. I have very mixed feelings about standardization of online education. I want course sites to adhere to accessibility and usability standards because this makes the design of the course site more inclusive to all students. However, on the other hand I don't want instructors shoehorned into teaching with a course site that is totally locked down by a Blueprint master course. Some of the best teaching and learning often happens outside of the Canvas using other software that wasn't specifically designed for teaching and learning. We are also discussing how to use more open educational resources in place of textbooks and it seems to me that these two subjects are intertwined in our discussions. Not long after reading the previous article this blog post, This is not the online learning you (or we) are looking for by Alan Levine showed up in my social media feed. Wow what a juxtaposition from the first article! This brings up many questions in my mind. I feel like these are tough questions to answer for my self and my institution so I'm curious to see what other people think about this issue.

• How do we "standardize" online learning while providing flexibility needed for teaching and learning? 
• What professional development really works and has successful outcomes? 
• How do we build a culture of open pedagogy using open educational resources?