Proper live blogging

What an enjoyable way to spend a morning. A colleague doing PhD research on integrating IT into teaching (we call it 'blended learning', presumably because we mush it up to spoon feed the students) got me in, switched on a dictaphone and set me off. It was honestly like blogging in meatspace, and I duly rambled/ranted for 45 minutes without pause. Even better, I was rewarded at the end with a bottle of home-brewed Santa's Winter Warmer. In a bottle, that is, not a foaming pint at 10.45 a.m.

My thoughts on our IT-learning strategy aren't confidential… or original. I'm a fan, just a critical one. I blog, tweet and run discussion fora in the course of my teaching (in fact, I should be marking one right now).

However, I'm wary of the uncritical rush to incorporate IT into every corner of our activity. Some staff and students feel that pedagogical requirements come a very poor second to institutional pressures. Economic and spatial restrictions mean that some in higher management - many of whom are literally ignorant of IT's potential - see 'blended learning' as a way to reduce face-to-face contact, cut down on staff and economise on the use of teaching rooms: we're a large university in a very small space. So naturally, they think that a) all our students are online constantly, b) they'll be impressed if we do everything online and c) we'll save loads of money.

Wrong. Those teachers who use IT as a complement to in-person encounters are the experts. It works. A forum gives students the time and space to research ideas and discuss them with other people in their own space and time: my Shakespeare fora are creative, supportive and intellectually rigorous. But we know, and the students can tell, when IT learning is being used to cut corners. In the midst of the government's swingeing, Philistine attacks on education as a public good, it's important to say, over and over again, that education is not the linear transmission of data, a trap into which many IT-education boosters fall. True education is personal, messy, intellectually and emotionally demanding. It's a herd activity. Unintegrated IT is reductive and isolating. It assumes that education = facts, when in fact the free-flowing seminar should be at the heart of education. I can't tell from a forum post how a student is feeling about an idea or a text. I can't alter my approach or go off on a tangent if my students are posting at midnight, 4 a.m. or when I'm having breakfast. They can't tell me to slow down or speed up, nor can they direct the experience to so great an extent.

One anecdote springs to mind. When I did The Hegemon's postgraduate certificate in education (yes, students, I'm actually qualified!), the session leader proudly announced that in America, English essays were marked by machines, and that this would soon spread to the UK. To him, this was logical and convenient. Lots of students + few staff = a problem solved by software. My horror, to him, was the mark of the Luddite.  I think it's a monstrous idea. On a very basic level, students will be paying £9000 next year. Will they be pleased to know that their fees don't pay for an actual teacher looking at their work? I don't think so. A computer can't detect the subtleties of a student's creativity. It can't work out where the intellectual sticking points are, or remember that X wrote it while caring for a couple of children or that Y has a totally different viewpoint on the subject. It can't spot the qualitative difference between a good pastiche and a stumbling attempt at originality.

We have an official policy that 25% of all learning should be conducted electronically. I didn't know that learning could be quantified, but that's not the only problem. Why 25%? I don't know. It seems to be a magic figure dreamed up without regard for pedagogical research or the requirements of the people actually doing the teaching. There's a suspicion that we're in the hands of the neophiliacs: if it's new, it must be brilliant. This is why we had a Second Life presence - rapidly abandoned. That's why the institution has Facebook and Twitter pages which ignores the fundamental characteristic of those media: interaction. I think it's deeply patronising and reactionary to assume that our students will be impressed by IT as a primary medium: they're bright and know that some activities should be electronic, and others should be face-to-face.

What we need to successfully integrate IT into learning is research and a critical engagement with their wonderful possibilities. Without this, we become cheerleaders for 'efficiency', which means isolation, convenience, distancing ourselves from our students, and reductiveness.

Rant over.

Blended Learning Has No Clothes - or it's Scantily-Clad At Best

Like many institutions, The Hegemon is keen to make us look all whizzy and cool by making e-learning a compulsory segment of every module (the misleadingly-titled 'Blended Learning Entitlement'). I'm a cautious fan: Plashing Vole was born when I tried to teach some MA students about blogging (one of my worst experiences in the classroom). Sometimes, online activities are useful and pedagogically justified. Sometimes they aren't, and there's a strong suspicion that e-learning is a way to reduce staffing and building costs.

My major problem with online courses is that they imply that education is the linear transmission and regurgitation of information. It isn't. That's training. I can send you a video of how to operate a MacDonalds deep fat fryer and you'll pick it up. Painfully, I imagine, but it's possible.

But if you watch my lecture on post-structuralism, there are advantages and disadvantages. You can pause it while you check the references or read the primary text I'm discussing, which is great. But you can't put your hand up and ask for advice, or disagree with me, or test out your idea on me and your classmates. Without comrades, you're not learning. So much of what I think I know is picked up from seminars, or in the pub afterwards, or in corridors. Education is a much wider experience than e-learning alone implies. If you're not a genius, or you have family/work ties as well, you'll need a lot more support than you can get via e-mail: academic, psychological, social.

So I'm very wary of full-on distance courses of the kind that the Open University definitely doesn't do, and various other colleges do flog. I'm less than impressed the courses where we sell the material to colleges in other countries to be taught by others, then we mark the work: attainment is always lower. The stats are with me too, at least from the US - from this fascinating article:

countless studies showing success rates in online courses of only 50 per cent—as opposed to 70-to-75 percent for comparable face-to-face classes… Online enrollments across the country are strong and growing, while success rates stay about the same: abysmal

Online has its place: as supporting material for face-to-face, and when it's that or nothing:

For students who aren't able to attend college in the traditional way, "good enough" can be a godsend. But that doesn't mean that all students, or any student who wants to, should take online courses. Our collective failure to recognize that fundamental reality is primarily responsible for the high failure rates we see in online courses.

many institutions … are even complicit in perpetuating the notions that any student can succeed in online courses and that as many as possible should be encouraged to try. (I'm sure we've all seen multiple variations on the "Go to college in your pj's" marketing campaign.) 

Let's be honest: these people are treated like second-class students. Their existence doesn't cross my mind when I'm writing lectures and posting Powerpoint slides (which won't help them: they provide a skeleton around which I put verbal flesh, and lots of it). I've never been trained in writing material for an audience I'll never meet, and nobody's ever mentioned their needs and educational contexts. Is that wrong? Of course it is.

I'd like us to be more honest with students. Generally speaking, online courses are harder than face-to-face ones, not easier. Online courses require a tremendous amount of self-discipline and no small amount of academic ability and technical competence. They're probably not for everyone, and I think we need to acknowledge as much to students and to ourselves.

In the meantime, though, we need to think long and hard about which courses should be taught fully online, and which students belong in online courses. If students and their prospective employers ever begin to suspect that, in our rush to offer everything online, we have oversold and underdelivered, then it's going to be too late for us to have that discussion. Politicians will have it for us.

This is the key. Online components have enriched many of my courses immeasurably. But it shouldn't be seen as a cheap or easy option either for students to get an easy degree, or for institutions to make a fast buck. One of the things that infuriates me is the lazy assumption that students are all technically skilled and hugely impressed by anything on a screen, while being turned off by an actual person speaking to them.

Put it like this: are you thrilled by an automated telephone service when you call the bank? Or do you curse and groan, before sighing with relief when an actual human being talks to you? If you prefer talking to someone at a call centre, then I think the least we can do for our students is to extend them the same courtesy when it comes to their educations.