color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Theses on the Philosophy of History, #9

My wing is ready for flight,

I would like to turn back.

If I stayed timeless time,

I would have little luck.

Gerherd Scholem, ‘Gruss vom Angelus’

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Benjamin, Walter. 1940 [1999]. "On the Concept of History." In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, 389-400. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

This chapter argues that online education should not merely digitize traditional teaching but serve as a catalyst for deep pedagogical reform. Cope and Kalantzis contend that while digital technologies are often framed as “disruptive,” they frequently reproduce and even ossify transmission-based practices such as lectures, textbooks, rigid syllabi, and standardized testing. Technology itself does not determine change; rather, its educational impact depends on how its affordances are designed and used.

The authors advance five theses outlining a “new school” enabled by thoughtfully designed online learning infrastructures. First, there should be no pedagogical distinction between in-person and remote learning, since online systems can transform both. Second, instruction and assessment should be fully integrated through continuous, formative, and transparent feedback rather than episodic testing. Third, class size should become flexible, allowing learning to scale up or down dynamically without loss of quality. Fourth, adaptive and personalized learning should strengthen, not weaken, learning communities by foregrounding collaboration, peer feedback, and social knowledge-making. Fifth, education should abandon its structural insistence on unequal outcomes and instead design for mastery, so that all learners can succeed.

Drawing on their CGScholar platform, the authors illustrate how online environments can support reflexive pedagogy: learners actively produce knowledge, assessment is embedded in everyday activity, analytics make progress visible, and diversity of perspectives becomes a resource rather than a problem. In conclusion, the chapter positions online learning as the most significant opportunity for educational transformation since the invention of the classroom itself, with the potential to make learning more equitable, participatory, and intellectually demanding.

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2022. "The Changing Dynamics of Online Education: Five Theses on the Future of Learning." In Foreign Language Learning in the Digital Age: Theory and Pedagogy for Developing Literacies, edited by Christiane Lütge, 9-33. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003032083-3
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Five Theses on the Future of Learning