Sphinx

Further musings on what next year’s teaching might look like… Yes, I know that there are already highly successful distance-learning models out there, above all from the Open University, and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I suspect that what we end up doing will be rather different: we don’t have the time to develop all the material and supporting framework for full-blown online courses by September (especially with the likelihood, given recruitment freezes due to enormous financial black hole, that we’ll all need to take on more courses than planned), and most of us lack the experience (and probably skills) to make that work – better to produce a hybrid that plays as far as possible to our existing strengths – and finally universities are likely to want to distinguish their offerings from what’s already available from the OU.

Of course, there’s a big risk there: that they decide to distinguish themselves by making some big headline commitments that turn out to be horrendous to implement in practice. I’m reminded of the obsession with contact hours of the last decade; the idea that a simple metric tells you all you need to know about the quality of a programme, the efforts involved in justifying to higher powers the benefits of small-group teaching (with lecturers, not just PG lab assistants) that then set limits on how many hours we can offer at existing staff levels, the time wasted on creating new activities to bulk up the notional contact hours count that students never attended because they didn’t see the point (hello, dissertation workshops!).

So, what I dread is a blanket edict that students will be guaranteed x hours per week of face-to-face contact with lecturers, or that current class hours must be exactly replaced with online sessions – ignoring all the evidence that asynchronous interaction may be much better for many activities for many students, especially if there are issues with their access to the internet. It’s going to be enough work turning e.g. my Thucydides class – which currently consists of a very flexible, improvised discussion around the set topic and passages for a given week – into something that offers students a lot more support and guidance; it will be so much more work if I have to guarantee a full two hours of online seminar as well as creating online material, moderating discussion boards and so forth. Guidance and advice, great, and I can see the argument that we won’t want too much disparity between what different lecturers offer. But as far as possible we need flexibility to produce something that suits both us and the students, with the demands of the marketing programme a very low priority…

Not least because this will inevitably work best with proper buy-in from lecturers: we (mostly) care deeply about our teaching, and enjoy the challenge of developing it, even under circumstances not of our choosing – but only if there is acknowledgement that we have actual experience and expertise, and know something about students and their needs. And, just as important, we will need buy-in from students, and the ability to make adjustments if not radical changes in the course of the term if/when it becomes clear that some things simply aren’t working. We haven’t done this before; we’re certainly not going to get everything right first time, and we can’t afford to impose constraints on ourselves in advance that will prevent any attempt at resolving issues.

Given the possibility of flexibility, we can unleash the enthusiasm! I’m actually delighted, for example, that we’ve had to switch conventional unseen exams for 24-hour take-home papers this term; it’s something I have long wanted to do (I hate unseen exams for anything besides basic language assessment), and suddenly all the usual objections have been swept away, guidance and principles have been developed pragmatically in a matter of days, and here we go – and, with a bit of luck, here we stay.

I’m also reminded a bit of the idea that past leisure activities can suddenly take on new significance…

Yes, all those hours spent in online communities, especially the late lamented Readers Recommend music blog on the Grauniad, learning how to interact with total strangers through mutual interest in a topic (and wildly diverging views on it), watching how the discussion could become more engaged and personal as people got to know one another (even behind silly avatars and pseudonyms; what mattered was the persona presented in the interaction), and the community started to develop its own etiquette, norms and in-language. How can this not be useful?

As has been observed by others, there’s an enormous difference between providing online classes for students who have signed up for this from the beginning, providing them for a couple of weeks for students who already know one another pretty well from the previous two terms – and starting from scratch with a group which may not have met at all. My experiences so far of Teams, Zoom and the like is that they work better, at least with larger groups, with a clear structure and a fairly firm directing or coordinating hand. How is that going to work with my teaching style, I wonder (can everyone break into smaller groups?)? Even more, how does that support the small personal interactions, the chats before and after class, that gradually build a group identity? Simple answer: it doesn’t.

But I’ve seen it happen in online discussion boards. Yes, some people participate more than others, some are more interested in the serious business of suggesting Songs About Fish than the joking around (and vice versa), and it is inevitably going to make a difference that we’ll be doing it with our real names on a university system (the Uncanny Treehouse Problem), and it’s compulsory rather than voluntary. The point is that the potential exists, and I have ideas about how it might be coaxed into existence.

And a major part of that is thinking about how to avoid the standard blog problem – exemplified here – of a long discussion followed by stony silence. One key point – equally valid for normal classes, of course: always ask open questions. So, people, what does or could excite you about these new teaching conditions..?