THE EDUCATION OF BC NOTARIES
TECH & ETHICS
Educational Shifts in the SFU MA-ALS for Notaries John Whatley, PhD
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n terms of its educational design, the MA-ALS Program for Notaries has become a model of the successful use of technology to deliver an applied graduate program. In the Spring of 2021, it is now 13.5 years old and, through the COVID-19 lockdown, the Program continues to enroll and graduate 25 to 30 students per cohort. This success has certainly been the result of the oversight of the SFU School of Criminology and the BC Society of Notaries, plus the dedication of its faculty. It is also the result of exceptional technological management and design. Much time has been spent on how to make an excellent applied MA work remotely. The changing technology and its interwoven changes in the ethics of remote education make an interesting narrative in their own right. Tech The Program’s technological base was ready-made for the COVID-19 lockdown. And it allows depth and highly flexible access to a university graduate education for remote students from all over the province and across its diverse ethnicities, indigeneities, genders, abilities, and geographies. That flexibility is the strength of the Program and shows on both the tech side and the ethics side.
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The SFU Centre for Educational Excellence (CEE) runs the tech side for the MA-ALS. Its stated mission is “to collaborate with SFU’s learning and teaching community to inspire and support innovative, inclusive, and reflective teaching approaches that create engaging learning experiences for students.” Two values are inscribed in the mission statement. CEE is dedicated to using technologies for inclusivity, fair enough. But that singular word “inclusivity” has a double connotation. First, it entails a specific reference to an expanding range of technology and second, it is part of a specific educational goal. Let’s Look Further at the Diversity of the Tech Side. The remote palette has been widely increased to include most of the kinds of tech now available, including the latest version of the Canvas Learning Management System plus the real-time collaborative tools, Black Board Collaborate Ultra, and now Enterprise level Zoom. Together, they provide a platform that balances synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning in new ways. Lectures and seminars are beginning to become high-techinformed with instantaneous links to libraries, websites, video, graphics, remote-student desktops, news, and the sharing of all media with and between students, on multiplatforms and with a worldwide reach. BC Notaries Association
And yes, they are supplemented by text-based discussion groups and grade books that update percentages automatically. But the interesting change, the vital innovation, is the use of lectures and seminar style discussion in real time. In its current iteration, I’m not sure if we yet understand the revolutionary nature of that change. The breakthrough comes not from the teaching side but from the other side of the equation. The COVID-19 lockdown and the switch to home-based work and offices has dramatically increased the technical capabilities of university students. Students have become very good at real-time tech in the university “classroom.” I’ve enclosed the noun in quotation marks because the nature of that “room” is changing. Students now expect their own tech sophistication to be reflected in online teaching and its approaches and increasingly press for more use of their media—from cell phone skills to Twitch, Twitter, TikTok, What’s App, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, Facebook, and video gaming. We are not yet at the point where a multimedia Youtube clip has become the equivalent of a text-based academic research paper, but we are getting close. That is, with real-time tech, that screen-full of 25+ student presences plus an instructor has become the new in-person, face-toVolume 30 Number 1 Spring 2021
