Sphinx

Whether or not anyone noticed, I’ve been less present on the internet over the last few days, as a lightning strike last week took out the WiFi router. While waiting for a new one to turn up, I’ve been discovering the delights of persuading the laptop to talk to the phone and persuade it to share its data, with a moderate degree of panic as I was scheduled to participate in a virtual Open Day this afternoon – and the joys of paying lots of extra dosh for additional data, as my usually ample allowance quickly ran out. And it’s not as if I stream stuff…

It is another addition to the list of Things That Might Go Wrong This Term – how many students are liable to find their broadband giving out at critical moments, and be struggling to keep up with different requirements and activities? It’s tempting – and I suspect an awful lot of us lecturers have been devoting many hours to this – to try to anticipate every possible issue and develop guidelines and protocols to address it. Certainly it is sensible for us to keep in mind that everything is unlikely to run perfectly however much time we invest in course revisions and online learning development – but then to approach this by building flexibility and resilience into the system where possible, precisely so that we can cope with the things we haven’t foreseen.

We offer lots of guidance in the hope of alleviating concern and showing that we care about these things, but also often as a means of control, especially when embarking on a trip into the unknown. If we overdo it, there’s an obvious risk that students pick up more on the control than the concern. The student who faces a problem that isn’t covered anywhere in the guidance shouldn’t feel that therefore they are the problem or therefore there is no redress for their difficulties.

Tone is therefore vital. I like the discussions that Amy Pistone (@apistone) has been having on the Twitter about the development of guidelines for Zoom seminars – emphasising that she’d like to see everyone’s faces but recognises that this might not be possible for some, acknowledging that pets/children/family members will at some point or other wander into view and again this is not an issue. (As my podcasts over the years have regularly been interrupted by yelling cats, I’d be hypocritical not to take the same attitude).

Meanwhile, the automatic captioning software merrily rendered “Hello, I’m Neville Morley” as “Hello, I’m level Molly”…

Update: a few additional thoughts, prompted partly by an article on WonkHE this morning that offers a bleak if not rather cynical take on the shift to online learning, and partly by the massive panic occasioned by an email that seemed to imply that I should already have recorded five weeks’ worth of lecture material and uploaded it onto the VLE. The latter – which turned out to be a suggestion rather than a command – seems to me another example of the wish to exert control and anticipate all possible problems (even if I fall ill during term, there’s less chance of lectures being interrupted if they’re already recorded, and I’ll have more capacity to respond to other things) at the expense of flexibility (what happens if student feedback or my own experience suggests I need to change my approach?).

And also at the expense of pedagogy – I keep my lectures and seminars quite loose and improvised so I can respond to student interests and questions, and that definitely includes picking up themes and threads from one week to the next, rather than sticking rigidly to The Plan – which is why my response to the WonkHE piece is complex; yes, the massive changes in teaching this year may be problematic, but they don’t have to be. If all we do is record lots of lecture material and just test students on their capacity to regurgitate it: problem, exactly as outlined. If, as I’ve discussed before, we take full advantage of the new opportunities presented by asynchronous online discussion, new forms of assessment (since the usual restrictions have been relaxed), and so forth, then this year’s teaching could be closer to the pedagogical principles that we seek to implement.

While that article insists that we’re dealing with the ‘infantilisation’ of universities rather than of students, I can’t help feeling that this is partly a rhetorical move to deflect accusations of blaming/shaming students, while the attitude that student demands and requests are a problem remains embedded in the substance. I suppose this is preferable to articles that overtly complain about students who don’t simply accept what they’re given without a murmur… From that perspective, my comments above could be criticised as surrendering to a consumer model of education in which lecturers are terrified of any adverse feedback and so desperately try to anticipate possible problems; it’s about enabling the ‘performance’ of learning rather than ensuring actual learning.

Well, that’s not the spirit in which I approach this; rather, it’s about removing possible barriers to students engaging in deep learning, exploration of interpretations and arguments, discovery of complexity and ambiguity and so forth, using the tools and methods appropriate to the situation. Currently, we are constrained to some degree by the pandemic; in the past, we were constrained to a considerable degree by tradition and embedded expectations – by which I don’t just mean the fetishisation of the good old-fashioned lecture, but also such attitudes as the assumption that students may cheat so take-home papers make no sense, and that online discussions are a mere add-on so you can’t enforce participation (my experience when I tried to use them a decade or so ago…).

This is new for all of us, and difficult – and actually one could argue that it’s therefore closer to the spirit of the seminar, in which lecturer and students explore ideas together, rather than the standard model in which the lecturer’s knowledge and understanding is assumed and we just worry about ‘modes of delivery’. It’s good for us to have a sense of the issues our students are facing in trying to engage with our subjects – including the issue of failing broadband…