Reported by Rebecca Atwood in the Times Higher Education Supplement (who was also one of the interviewees and round-table participants)
Demos – a left-leaning think-tank based in London – has released a report titled The Edgeless University. From Rebecca’s summary:
Universities are becoming defined by their function, not their form, and knowledge is no longer restricted by campus buildings, it explains, but this does not make institutions redundant.
“The noise of information and knowledge needs filtering; students need guidance and expertise. They also need the ‘brand value’ of institutions and the validation they provide. Universities have to capitalise on the connections and relationships made possible by the new information technologies,” the report says.
It suggests that the value of universities lies in their “institutional capital” – “the spaces they create for learning, the validation they provide for learning and research, and the returns people get from it”.
The report covers a lot of ground in its 95 pages – and goodness knows when (if ever) I’ll be able to read the report properly. But the subsection “Why we still need universities” seems quite topical, given recent blogosphere posts on just that topic. There is also material on Open Education throughout the report, and discussion on the use of a range of Web 2.0 technologies (Second Life even merits a small mention).
As well as wealth of opportunities, the report also identifies some challenges:
Many academics find it hard to envisage the possibilities that technology affords, not least because often they lack the basic skills to use the new tools. The UCISA survey noted that staff skills were ‘overwhelmingly seen as the greatest challenge for these new demands’. The answer is not to barrage teachers with imperatives to change how they behave, but to help them find space and the capacity to develop new ways of working for themselves. This needs more resources, incentives and support. (pages 58-59)
June 25, 2009 at 10:33 am
I felt that a classroom environment is imperative for motivation! Technology has no doubt made information and learning materials more accessible, but face to face communication and classroom interaction makes learning much more enjoyable and effective.
I feel that in a classroom teachers can pick up on how individual students learn and can explain things in ways that individual student can understand.
June 25, 2009 at 11:39 am
Hi Liam – nice to hear from you again!
Yes, the personal touch is important – there are actually some comments on that in the report. Distance learning is replacing contact learning for many, but a blended approach which retains a degree of personal contact can be better.
Meanwhile, in universities some class sizes can be vast – and unless supported by small tutorial / seminar groups, its entirely possible for students on campus to miss out on the personal touch too.
June 25, 2009 at 1:07 pm
I actually did 2 weeks of demo work in the uni for multimedia after graduation. The class size was 120 across 3 rooms, Patrick Walder did the lectures, Me and Ian Cousins were there to help out with the labs. I must say it was a nice experience. I can see how it can be difficult to retain a quality of teaching with such high numbers.
When I was in my JavaScript Class in 3rd Year there was so many students the lecturers could maybe only spend a minute with you before he had to move on to the next student. This crippled many of the 3rd year access students who had not done javascript before.