E-Learning and Academic Authority

I have recently left my job at the Freie Universität Berlin’s Center for Digital Systems and am trying to find a way to support those who are making an honest effort to advance e-learning, such as those contributing to the student blog, FU Watch. Below I paste my recent contributions.

Hi Niklas:

I’ve very much enjoyed following this blog, and now that I no longer work for CeDiS I am free to contribute.

The problem with such descriptive, “customer satisfaction” surveys is that they assume we are all stupid, passive consumers and should be content with things that are “nice to have” and the status quo,

We do not find here, for example, any meaningful cost/benefit analysis. To say, for example, that “e-Learning war nützlich für die Vermittlung der Lehrinhalte’” does not explain why, in some large lectures, students download and print out one copy from Blackboard and then take it to the copy shop where it can be printed out for everyone else at a tiny fraction of the cost. As CeDiS is an administrative unit, you would think that a cost/benefit analysis would be central to their enterprise.

For the academic faculty and students I suspect the questions would be far different. It seems to me that, as an intelligent student or instructor, I first want to know how e-learning might help me research, understand, present, discuss, evaluate, and otherwise further my research, teaching, and learning: how it might deliver significant, tangible outcomes, such as: higher student understanding and achievement, lower dropouts and failures, lower costs, etc.

For an example of such evaluations, please visit the website of the “Program in Course Redesign”, run by the U.S. National Center for Academic Transformation.

The CeDiS surveys are limited by design to “nice to have” results plotted on basically meaningless scales: they do not evaluate how any of this might actually contribute to teaching and learning or explore how some uses might be more useful or appropriate than others: they neither evaluate the costs and benefits nor help me figure out how to use the technologies better to achieve my ends, nor consider the alternatives. These surveys do, however, paint a glowing picture of the current (Blackboard) technologies and bureaucratic arrangements.

I would think FU students, faculty, and tax-payers deserve more. But I haven’t figured out where at the FU such questions are being asked. Have you any idea of who else is asking such questions, and if not, who at the university ought to be asking them?“

All the best,

Bruce

Niklas replied:

“Well, in WS 06/07 Heinz Gralki planned a more critical e-Learning survey. But as far as I know he put the project on the back burner. The draft is still online. In addition he framed a couple of assumptions (scroll down to read Katrins critical remarks as well).

And now my present comment:

Thanks for the reply, Niklas!

I’m well aware of Dr. Gralke’s excellent “6 Thesen zum E-learning” and support him and the many others who feel the same way, but who abandoned attempts to participate actively in the direction of e-learning at the FU because they could not see how they might work with CeDiS in substantive terms. I remember well, for example, sitting beside Prof. Joachim Stary for three hours of Blackboard training about three years ago and his asking, at the end of it, “that’s all very nice, but how might you use it for teaching and learning?” — and how ill-prepared we were to answer him.

We lost him, and no matter how often I brought up this story at CeDis and pressed the issue little progress has been made: the CeDiS approach to “e-learning” remains as it started almost three years ago: as little more than an introduction to the manipulation of the user interface based on the operating instructions published by the Blackboard Corporation and a very general idea that e-learning is serving “content” provided by experts — much as Gralke referred to the Nürnberger Trichter. How this might actually work out in practice was not, we were told, our concern, and of course, those of us who were committed to other e-learning concepts, such as communications-oriented e-learning models, received no support at all.

The lack of relevant examples in the CeDiS training programs is breath-taking. When I recently asked one of the current “e-teaching” program’s organizers what examples were being presented, she answered: “we have none, and we are hoping the participants will come up with some.” How is it that a university that includes such well-informed, thoughtful, and committed instructors as Gralke and Stary, and dozens of others, could develop e-learning policies governing the expenditure of over 1 million euros per year without them, and when they showed up, disappoint them so completely — as Gralke’s extensive, well-founded comments on the web document so clearly?

Things could be done much differently, and we do not lack good examples. For instance, consider the ETH Zurich. There, support for e-learning technologies is embedded in a larger research and continuing education program run by accomplished researchers and teachers; their program begins not with the technology, but with a variety (over a dozen each term!) of seminars based on current, state-of-the-art teaching methods and principles. And following current beliefs, instruction begins with an explicit criticism of the file storage or “content” model CeDiS advances exclusively: the first topic title of their current (Summer 2007) program offering is “Paradigmawechsel: Die Lehre ist mehr als Stoffvermittlung”. Where at the FU support for “e-learning” is technical, at the ETH Zurich instructors receive support for instruction; moreover, they get this support from their peers: fellow instructors with PhD’s in relevant fields, with considerable experience in the classroom, and able to engage in the disciplinary conversation.

So, why is it that our qualified instructors have not played an active role in the design of the FU’s e-learning strategies and why are they not playing a leading role in the offering of seminars, workshops, lunchtime sessions … why do they now appear in CeDiS-sponsored events only as the winners of prizes and not as those determining who wins them? Why were they not part of the application process for the Project FUeL, why were they not consulted in the process? How is it that we do not find at least one of them on the CeDiS staff, or on the LG-eL that administers CeDiS, or on a consulting committee that might advise either office in a regular fashion?

Or more generally, why do we not find in the current arrangements that elaborate framework of research and collegiality that is the distinguishing feature of professorial and academic authority? Why is it that the only time they appear at the Ihnestr. 24, and for that matter in their applications to the Office of the President, is as petitioners for peanut-sized grants of 10-20,000 Euros: why is their role limited to that of clients and not educational professionals, certified by their disciplines, holding themselves in every other sphere accountable to a critical community of their peers? If their proposals have pedagogical dimensions, is it really the case that only those whose major qualification and experience is administration are the best to judge? How is it that the university has long established that the faculty are responsible for instruction, but when it comes to educational technologies, they are prevented from exercising any meaningful execution of that responsibility except in individual, or better privatized, terms and accountable to no one but those administrators?

Finally, as noted in my previous post, the one claim that administrators might make, that e-learning might somehow contribute to achieving efficiencies, is hardly measured either: we do not find any evidence that e-learning is being subject to a cost-benefit analysis: we are given user-satisfaction surveys that merely support the status quo, but no research suggesting that the FU, or more properly, the German tax-payer, is saving any money with its investment of one million Euros per year in e-learning never mind, for that matter, that it contributes in any substantive way to “excellence.”

Advertisement