I am a big fan of university campuses so, while I appreciate its importance and am glad it exists for other people, online learning has never been appealing for me. The discussions this week have helped me think a bit more about the sources of that resistance.
I found it interesting that many people in the class mentioned the ability to do things at your own pace and to fit studying around other commitments as a key advantage of online learning. One of the reasons I haven’t really been much of an online learner is because I’ve never had to fit my studies or work around anything else. Because I have no other commitments, I think I work better if learning is structured with set times. Unless I’m in a scheduled activity, I always feel I should be doing something else more urgent instead. From a teacher’s perspective, I also struggle to compartmentalise online-based work. This is a well-known aspect of connected working lives, where work expands to fill time way beyond office hours. Since there is always more work you could do online (design more activities! respond to more posts! send out some links! create a website! and so on and on), then having the opportunity to work online just means having the perceived obligation to work all the time. I thought about that as I saw Ros responding to our discussion posts.
Last semester my class had a student blog, and it was easy to see that the more I interacted with student posts, the more responsive they were; however, it was impossible for me to keep up with it. In comparison, I can prepare a lecture or a seminar, and deliver it, and know that there isn’t anything else I can do after that point. There are boundaries to that work, which I find harder to see when working ‘at my own pace’ ‘in my own time’. Thus I really appreciated the webinar, because it showed me how remote co-presence could work, and it had a clearly bounded time frame.
To finish up on a related thought about labour: One risk of designing learning to accommodate the busy lives of students is that it removes incentives to campaing for their right to be students. As much as we support parents, carers, and other workers to be able to access higher education, we should also demand better maintenance grants, subsidised accommodation, and no tuition fees, in order to reduce the need for students to work.
Maria,
Some real food for thought in this blog post. I can totally see both sides of the coin. I did my first degree on campus, totally immersed in my student world, free to spend countless hours exploring all sorts of things with no other commitments. The freedom was immense. I wish, in hindsight, I had made more of it. My Masters was a different kettle of fish. A full-time job, two pre-school children and Saturday schools to support my studies. I had the luxury of a few full days in the library to complete assignments. My dissertation was actually written in 2 days – having spent months on the notes and research work! A totally different experience and sometimes I envied the young, carefree students I could see giggling in the library when I knew how much awaited me when I got home. But I was also so desperate to do the studying. I wanted to know more and to work harder. I had to make compromises over the quality of some of my work and the extra reading I wanted to do. But I felt a huge sense of loss once it was all over.
As tutors, our students will all have their own agendas. I was discussing on another post how some people may find they are much better suited to online learning than others, but we can all work to our strengths. I love teaching online- but also face-to-face. They are two completely different experiences for me. Some may well prefer one over the other.
Your question at the end about student rights is very challenging. Maybe we do need to ask more about what those who are studying actually want. Given the chance and the right circumstances, I may well have done that Masters full-time, but it just wasn’t possible, so is distance learning a compromise we accommodate or something that is genuinely what people want?
Thank you for a super blog post – keep writing!