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ON CAMPUS
Overly bureaucratic practices are divisive and toxic to change .
Digital shift
Are digital classrooms a viable permanent alternative ?
By Greg Whateley and Jim Mienczakowski
Some practices and ways of working , historically , have proven more enduring than others .
Digital nomadism actually represents a huge step away from the long-established experiences and traditions of human learning which have customarily relied upon F2F ( face to face ) human interactions .
COVID-19 may have been an accelerant for the uptake of electronically mediated engagement , but will it be an enduring shift into working from anywhere ( for students and academics for example ) or will such a transition take much longer – or simply return to F2F at some stage .
So , a major question arises , if , technically , we are on the cusp of sufficient infrastructure for digital nomadism and a working from anywhere culture to become standard fare – do we have the right teaching approaches to sustain and operate effectively in such an environment ?
Or will F2F , classroom based teaching traditions and practices overwhelm these new approaches ? There is also a subsidiary question worth considering .
To date , universities worldwide have been geolocation driven . They are places , buildings , subsets of business dependencies - Oxford , Harvard , Sydney ,
Melbourne , Bordeaux - places you go to and live in carrying high educational real estate values . The rise of digital nomadism may be seen as a threat to this class of business investment .
DEFINITIONS OF TEACHING One of the stumbling blocks of educational change relevant to DN ( digital nomadism ) relates to our own experiences and understandings of ‘ teaching .’ Whilst the annual teaching survey QILT goes some way towards determining the causes of student failure and non-performance it could go further .
One of the un-tackled issues lies in the very definitions and perceptions we all have around the generalised terms ‘ teaching ’ and ‘ teachers .’ ‘ Teaching ’, often simply defined as a mode of instruction , doesn ’ t always imply ‘ learning .’
University teachers are on an entirely different pedagogic spectrum to school teachers . In ‘ lecturing ’ or ‘ instructing ’ there resides a strong element of passivity and simple presentation of knowledge and learning transmission as opposed to directly engaging with learners .
IN BETWEEN ERAS Certain teaching environments are always going to be more demanding of teachers / lecturers than others .
Understandably , the teaching approaches required for digital transmission are a skill set and acculturation which many school and university teachers are yet to comfortably master .
It is a new mode of student engagement . We are moving between eras in the conception of what teachers must actually do . We need to develop some more nuanced definitions to embrace the new digital arena we find ourselves inhabiting – ones that are different to the current understandings developed under QILT .
MORE OF THE SAME Noticeably , it appears that a few larger tertiary institutions have been languishing in a COVID-19 malaise ( long COVID ?) as their ways of teaching are entrenched and invested in industrialised work practices , comfortable routines and traditions .
Changing staffing levels and modes of student engagement become expensive and difficult industrial activities . Big universities also enshrine their work practices in an unwieldy barrage of impenetrable policy bureaucracy - as much ensuring work for administrators as in protecting the values of the institution .
Of course , a level of bureaucracy is essential , but overly bureaucratic practices are divisive and toxic to change and , often , stall progress . Consequently , DN exponents are likely to prosper in fields other than higher education for the time being .
There is also a lock-step approach across Australia ’ s public institutions which , in reality , inhibits real change .
The recent Universities Australia Conference ( 2022 ) was an opportunity for Australian university leaders to seek new directions but , predictably , its keynote address set the tone by congratulating the sector on its achievements and turning to government to fund even more of the same .
Change , of course , is unwelcomed by those who prosper under the current circumstances .
Ultimately , DN represents a massive disruption in how work has been conceived in those areas of the economy in which DN is a viable practice . ■
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