Contemplate this statement:
Media has taken over some of the teaching that normally society would have provided. And technology has driven that; it has been the conduit. So does the above come from some in depth academic work on the student learning experience?
No.
It apparently comes from the MTV Generations report described in Growing up with the wired generation (Guardian, Nov 10 2005) which contrasts the technology driven lives and values of of the MTV generation (16 to 24 year olds) and the VH1s (25 to 44 year olds); the implication being that the latter have more ‘fixed’ values and are less amenable and less open to new technologies. Oh well … that’s me out then. It’s a pity that the Guardian doesn’t provide the link or reference to the primary report so that we can peruse this for ourselves.
Nevertheless, what stimulated my neurones was comparing the above to a couple of presentations I’ve heard recently which have been explicit proponents of the belief that we are in the midst of a transformation to an industrial model of mass education, a transformation made possible, of course, through the mediation of information and communication technologies. One of these presentations was the opening keynote at ALT-C 2005 by Professor Alan Gilbert, Vice Chancellor of the University of Manchester. Unfortunately, supporting resources or transcripts for Professor Gilbert’s keynote don’t appear to be available, as yet, from the ALT 2005 Keynote and Theme Speakers site.
In this industrial model, so the argument goes, the global demand for Higher Education is now so great that existing physical estate and human resources of Higher Education can no longer cope. The industrializing argument invariably goes on to propose that the focus needs to be the study and implementation of the optimal processes using ‘best practice’ from business, design and manufacturing. For example, in A Foundation for Modelling e-Learning Processes by Pauline Wilcox, Jim Petch and Hilary Dexter (e-Learning Research Centre) we find descriptions of models such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP) which originates from the software and systems development domain but, it is argued, are applicable to other domains such as e-learning. Here is the rational world of business modelling, workflows, iterations, content/materials development, and end-to-end processes for e-learning. In describing how the RUP model could apply to e-learning, Wilcox, Petch and Dexter suggest teaching and learning ” … is concerned with the actual activities involved in the delivery of the material between teacher and learner”.
So teaching and learning is about delivery of material then?
To be fair this may not be intended to be as mechanistic as it sounds because they go on to say “Example activities will include teaching, assessment, feedback, support, tracking, progression, peer mentoring”.
But make no mistake that what lies at the core of the industrializing proponents is a belief in the need for control and management, e.g. the Wilcox et al paper states:
An understanding of the e-learning lifecycle and its constituent processes will assist stakeholders to move forward with a degree of control and management that is often lacking at the present.
Now I can almost hear the shrieks of horror from those who would resist to the death the Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) ‘tank on their lawn’. If the above fills you with despair let’s make your condition worse by reflecting on some related work I’ve often cited in other Auricle postings in which I raise my concerns that we are blind to how we are becoming the servant to technologies and not vice-versa. To support my assertion I referred to the work of Neil Pollock and James Cornford
… universities may be increasingly forced to consider institutional changes in order to maintain alignment with the system. (in Implications of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems for Universities: An Analysis of Benefits and Risks, Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, Issue 3, p13, April 2005). The OBHE is a subscription service.
And …
� the application of the new technologies is generating a myriad of demands for re-institutionalisation of the university as a far more �corporate�, one might even say concrete, kind of organization � (in Cornford J (2000) The Virtual University is (paradoxically) the University Made Concrete.
To the above you can now add my opening quote:
Media has taken over some of the teaching that normally society would have provided. And technology has driven that; it has been the conduit.
So although we are talking the talk of pedagogy and student-centredness is the reality not one of technological determinism in which prestigious keynote speakers and researchers in the e-learning field now talk openly of industrialisation and business processes?
It’s that ‘e’ in e-learning that does it. Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) has among its conceptual ingredients the radical redesign and change of processes + IT + efficiency (lower inputs, higher outputs) + ‘customer’ focus. Or to put it more starkly:
The fundamental reconsideration and radical redesign of organizational processes, in order to achieve drastic improvement of current performance in cost, service and speed. (Hammer, M and Champy, J, 2001).
But yet there could be a potentially disruptive element on the horizon. What can that be? Not a what. A who.
It’s that ‘customer’ you see.
Now as customers of products and services we’ve all invariably experienced the negative effects of BPR where only the first parts of the formula appear to have been implemented, i.e. radical redesign + IT + efficiency but the last part ‘customer focus’ somehow didn’t quite work out. For example, tried telephoning your Internet Service Provider or your bank lately? How much tinkly music? How many automated selections? How many automated apologetic messages informing you that your are in a queue but your call will be answered eventually, maybe, perhaps? The net effect of re-engineering of the business processes and the use of technology has been to place barriers between you and the person you want to talk to. But, the businesses will cry, “this is what enables us to compete in the global marketplace and keep our costs down”.
In focusing on industrialisation and Business Process Re-engineering the expectations and experiences of the key stakeholders, i.e. the students, are in danger of being forgotten.
On the one had we’ve got the language of industrialization, participating in the global market place, and optimizing business processes, and on the other hand we’ve got student-centredness and focusing on the student experience. What if the two don’t mesh?
For example, what do students really value in Higher Education? There’s a couple of sources that give us a good idea. First up, pay a visit to the first UK National Student Survey at the Teaching Quality Information (TQI) site. The BBC news site also gives a useful overview of this 2005 survey. Second, have a look at the Scottish Funding Council’s Survey of Student Experience 2005 p16. The latter is particularly interesting because of its 2,115 responses which puts the number of contact hours, relevance of the course to a job, and support from teachers right at the the top of the list before computer and library facilities.
So there’s a tension here. It would seem that if the industrialisation of learning is translated as more people going through a system more efficiently but, yet, if the result is a perceived reduction in contact hours and teacher support where then ‘customer’ satisfaction? Such ‘efficiency’ may not be welcomed by the customer and since at least the rhetoric of BPR is customer satisfaction … ? 🙂
Of course, in a global marketplace with a desirable product the loss of some disgruntled customers may be acceptable as long as sufficient new recruits keep coming in to compensate for the loss. Ahh … but let’s remember that this is the technically savvy MTV generation we are now dealing with.
Let’s say I’ve become very unhappy with the lack of contact time and support from the University of Poppleton who recently overhauled its business processes and now declares a highly efficient technology facilitated system which has enabled them to increase signficantly the number registered students undertaking Poppleton programmes of study. My parents also aren’t very happy because student fees have recently risen and so their expectations are now much higher than when my brother went to Poppleton.
The very technology which enabled Poppleton to re-engineer its business processes now become a problem for them. I post my concerns to my blog and my post is picked up by an ‘alpha’ blogger, i.e. one who is read by a lot of people and provides syndicated feeds for automatic use on other sites. The net result is that the Google rating for this blog posting goes up and up and eventually reaches a point that whenever anyone searches for ‘University of Poppleton’ in Google they get my critical commentary first. Not good for Poppleton and disgruntled student didn’t have to wait for an annual survey to get the point across. If you want to hear a more dramatic rendition of what I mean then download Tod Maffin’s podcast The Age of the Review Blog.
Part of the difficulty is that the technologies of the industrial revolution made the production of ‘things’ more efficient and the technologies of the information revolution certainly make offering some services easier; and so it’s tempting to make a conceptual leap and argue that the industrialisation of education is now underway. But, as we’ve seen with the earlier commercial examples, the ideal of what should be possible can easily degrade into a poorer quality service for the end-user because, in pursuit of efficiency, the technology ends up not so much facilitating contact , communication, personalisation, and feedback but impeding it, particularly in a centralist command and control model where the view of is of consumers of products and services rather than participants in a process. Alternatively, the business process being re-engineered views the ‘product’ as learning materials instead of that unpredictable wetware called students who have dynamic and growing expectations that can easily confound such attempts at industrialisation if industrialisation compromises what they (and their parents) value in a Higher Education.
The proponents of the industrial model always equate industrialisation with technology and a throughput of very large numbers (in the HE context that means students). But there is much that can disturb that throughput. From a domestic UK perspective, we are already receiving warnings about the dramatic fall in school-leavers post 2010 and that global education market is ever more competitive and ever so vulnerable to global political changes.
And finally, it fascinates me how easily we slip into analysis and considerations of the processes of this thing called ‘e-learning’ in a way we never did for ‘traditional’ methods of pedagogy. Of course the latter implies some homogeneity that doesn’t actually exist. Hang on! Wait a minute … can we therefore assume that e-learning is homogeneous, and if so, what is making it so? Is it that dratted technological determinism again? 🙂
Any views expressed in this Auricle posting are mine and should not be construed as necessarily representing the views of any other individual or organisation.
