Pass the SoLT

This week Ralph Springett, President of the Extramural Students' Society (EXMSS) at Massey University, issued a press release challenging the assumptions of New Zealand's Tertiary Education Strategy. In particular, Ralph points out how the Government's narrow focus on under 25-year olds may be limiting opportunities for a significant group of distance students over 25 who make a major contribution to New Zealand's, social, cultural, ECONOMIC and environmental development. Put another way the press release observes how the current policy fails to take sufficient account of the importance of life-long and life-wide learning. The Tertiary Education Union supports the position expressed by EXMSS in their latest Tertiary Update.

Earlier in the week I came across an interesting article published by the BBC News entitled, A New Journalism on the Horizon. Although the piece is really about the future of journalism in the new digital landscape, it makes a couple of salient points relevant to my posting last week on the future of learning resources.

First, the story reports an Amazon announcement that over the past three months 'sales of digital books for its e-reader Kindle are outstripping hardback books in the US, at the rate of 143 e-books for every 100 hardbacks'. On face value these sales figures are impressive and certainly outstrip my own sense of the growing demand for e-books and e-book readers. That said, these figures reflect online sales (i.e., print vs. digital) and the profile of internet purchasers is likely to be heavily predisposed towards digital downloads. The price advantage of buying traditional printed books through Amazon is not the same as an e-book, so these data don't tell the full story--just yet.

Second, following on the Amazon data, the story reports John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe predicting a cascade of new iPad-like tablets in many sizes arriving by the end of this year. He goes on to claim that the new wave of mobile devices will produce '... turmoil for cinemas (which will mostly go), bookshops (ditto), and broadcasters'. While in the past predictions of the impact of new technology have proven to be way off the mark there is a sense that the writing is on the wall for traditional bookstores.

In a similar vein, universities, in particular, need to be prepared for the growth in demand for digital content and the proliferation of new iPad-like devices, as they rely heavily on scholarly publications. Whether this will cause turmoil for the sector remains to be seen; however, digitally-savvy learners are unlikely to accept a 'pump, pump, dump model' of higher education where no added functionality or educational advantage is offered through digital delivery. Rather, they will be demanding 'added value' in the transition from print to digital learning resource as otherwise the move will be seen as nothing more than a cost saving exercise. Just what added value means in the new environment has yet to be defined but as a recent EXMSS feature in the Off Campus magazine reports (p.22), 'the future is digital' at Massey University.

In the 1980s, it was Seymour Papert who first spoke about the dangers of technocentric thinking in the context of the claims about the potential of educational computing.

Last week I was reminded of this debate when the Massey University Extramural Students' Society (EXMSS) published in their OffCampus magazine the findings of the latest RateIt survey. This survey provides an independent student evaluation of teaching in which distance learners report on their university experience. The article reports a quantitative analysis of student qualitative feedback according to a number of categories. The first sentence of the article begins, 'Students rate Massey staff highly but some of the support systems need attention' (p.20).

Although no one would deny there is plenty of room for improvement in University services, the irony is that students rate staff highly but the quality of the online learning experience is deemed poor. As one student reports:

“As an extramural student I didn’t feel as supported by my tutor through WebCT as I thought I would be. I expected that he would check more regularly to help with queries – it’s hard when you feel so isolated.”

There is a basic flaw in the interpretation of this feedback. Put bluntly, the article is technocentric. The analysis fails to recognize that teachers and technology are deeply intertwined in realizing the benefits of any online learning experience. Thus, the above student's concern has little or nothing to do with the Learning Management System (LMS). The system on its own has limited pedagogical value. Its real value depends on how people decide to use it. And ironically it would appear that students rate staff highly; so either there is a fundamental mismatch in what students have reported or the LMS is just a convenient scapegoat for some deeper concerns which are not identified in the article.

The key point is that the 'added value' of technology does not come from asking what the system has done for me but rather how have I been able to use the technology to better engage with the content and fellow students in my course.