Teachers' Fears with More Empowered Learners

When looking into transforming the learning experience into a learner centered experience, the role of the teacher becomes vague and quite questioned. Does independent learning promote teacher-less experiences, or is the teacher still the centre and obtains the main role within the learning experience?

The role is being looked at from complete opposite sides, but no one can deny, and as I teacher myself I do feel a little intimidated by the idea of active learners.

Teachers' fear list:
1- Teachers shouldn't be way older than their students (McLoughlin, 2008), so they can understand their interests and be able to emerge as a friend.
2- Teachers should have high digital literacy (McLoughlin, 2008),no matter what their field is since technology will have a major presence.
3- Teachers should keep up with every single social media tool out there since it might be used in class by the students' choice. Social media apps are plenty and every single day a new one emerges.
4- Teachers should carefully  handle their image on social media since  their students might have access their personal account. The balance between students' freedom of self expression and the respect based teacher- student relationship paradigm might be threatened. Teachers need to be less judgmental and very open minded.
5- While teachers should expect to see provoking content in their students' social media, they should be weary and selective when putting content on their personal sites as students might doubt them professionally based on their personal life(McLoughlin, 2010).
6- Fear 4 and 5 might result in a feeling of injustice and frustration within teachers. Are they being marginalized and judged? It feels as if the power is being put in students' hands.
7- The teachers know all the right answers mentality will be shaky. Teachers will encounter topics they are not necessarily familiar with if any student did some further reading based on a personal interest.
8- Enabling students to use the online abundance of resources might result in them say ''no, teacher what you said is wrong, according to what I read......''. Teachers' knowledge will be tested more often, and they should have ability to acknowledge their lack of awareness in certain areas.
9- Teachers will face challenges when designing tasks that appeal to all students. They will have to involve the student in the curriculum and assignments choices, and this will hinder and slow they fluidity  of the course.
10- Another challenge is assessment. Coming up with a whole new -not number based- way of evaluating students won't be a piece of cake especially if students deliver their final tasks in different forms as each mediums will be judged differently (McLoughlin, 2010).
11- Enabling the freedom in online knowledge seeking and insuring the students' safety from inappropriate content create an issue that some might blame the teachers for especially with younger learners or provoking topics that students actually like.
12- The role of the teacher is no longer internationally defined (Markel, 1999), and thus the expectations aren't crystal clear. Therefore, teachers' success- not students'- might be doubted even by the teachers themselves.

video source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsVKXdrtnxI

This video explains the basis for how the teachers' role changed and is still changing due to the possibilities created by technology.

References( Only to gain knowledge used my own words):

Markel, M. "Distance Education and the Myth of the New Pedagogy." Journal of Business and Technical Communication (1999): 208-22. Print.
McLoughlin C. & Lee M. ''Future Learning Landscapes: Transforming Pedagogy through Social Software'' (2008). Innovate, 4, 5. 
McLoughlin C. & Lee M. ''Personalized and self regulated learning in the Web 2.0 era: International exemplars of innovative pedagogy using social software'' (2010). Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 26(1), 28-43. 

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