Are central e-learning support services the problem?
‘How many people here work in a central support service for e-learning at a university?’ (about half the people put their hands up) ‘Oh dear, I’m afraid what I am going to say you may find very offensive’. So started Jonathan Darby’s short paper at the Alt-C 2006 conference.
What Jonathan then said was indeed uncomfortable to listen to. Reporting on his observations of the workings of traditional, mainly Russell group, universities he argued that central e-learning support services simply were not working. Well funded national projects hardly connected with the majority of the academic community; things were changing only very slightly; we needed to be honest about what is going on.
Jonathan is a well-respected figure in the university e-learning community. He has visited and spoken at UoD. But is he right?
It is difficult to know what Jonathan was proposing other than that things weren’t working. There was an implicit suggestion that we have bitten off more than we could chew, or as Jonathan put it e-learning is a discipline in its infancy. Maybe we shouldn’t be making such grand plans? But isn’t a bigger problem the lack of vision, that we are using outdated methods of learning and assessment; that our students see an education system that is increasingly archaic whilst they see continuing revolutions in technology in every other area of their social life?
For me the existence of grand e-learning schemes is not the major problem, neither is the existence of infrastructures and services in can act on them. The problem is that these visions and plans belong to either the exclusive set of people who are specialists or the set of people in senior management whose functional focus isn’t directly on learning needs on a day-to-day basis.
I’m not saying that the latter have no concerns for learning needs, it is just that those concerns are mediated through institutional plans and the ultimate requirement to keep the ‘customer’ satisfied. The chalkface, or graphical user interface, academic who may know least in a university about business is consequently marginalised in the decision making process in every way including e-learning plans.
Our learners and academics are desperate for ‘grand plans’ and the support services that can really help them meet the huge demands on them and their students. What we need is a little more democracy, accountability and better alignment of the grand plans with the wider community.
