As is normal with smaller conferences, it is both easy to get an idea of the general opinions of the participants in general – these participants were, after all, uniform in being required by their universities to ‘do’ e-learning – and much easier to contribute to the sentiments the conference helps to express. The following featured heavily in discussion:
1. Beyond an archival function (‘lost your module guide? can’t get the reading? it’s on the web’) there are no immediately apparent uses for e-learning in the humanities – it is, by and large, not a tool that has been supplied in response to a widespread demand.
2. There are no rewards for doing e-learning. It is not factored into workloads as something that needs an investment of lecturer’s time if it is to deliver the enriched learning experienced expected.
3. Students will probably negate the paper-saving possibilities of virtual learning environments by just printing files out.
4. Students will by and large not use a virtual learning environment unless they are assessed in doing so, and they will use it unimaginatively if their participation is assessed.
5. One other probable result of shifting students further into virtual learning environments is that they will become versatile internet plagiarists.
6. Alternatives to the virtual learning environments Blackboard and WebCT are necessary.
7. The unquestioned assumption at the root of the pressure put on us to ‘do’ e-learning is: ‘It must be good, or at least useful, because it’s ‘e’’.
8. The emphasis on student activity that results from the use of most e-learning tools is the main impetus in getting what Stuart Boon called its ‘champions’ to use it.
9. ‘E-learning’ for many rightly represents a lengthening of the list of pieces of technology that can malfunction or be incompatible with each other.
10. Related to point 1, there is a voluntary impetus amongst academics to use virtual learning environments but little corresponding theorising of what function they can actually perform in relation to face-to-face teaching, little idea about when not to use e-learning, the ‘Announcements’ function of Blackboard being a typical problem-causing ‘tool’.
An example of the last point underlay the event. On the one hand, Brett Lucas (English Subject Centre) wanted desperately to know how academics thought e-learning could be useful for them, particularly given the money the Subject Centre was able to make available for pioneering projects. On the other hand, the academics wanted to know just what was meant by ‘e-learning’, what the technologies were and how they worked, reflecting a widespread lack of training in universities. I became aware of how little I know, coming away, for example, wanting to know what my university at the time had done with the £150,000 given to it in May 2005 to develop e-learning.
Nonetheless, there were involving examples of how software has been used, including Rosie Miles on how to use discussion forums to properly make class time the tip of the iceberg, Gail Ashton on student behaviour in discussion forums, Alice Jenkins on how the instant feedback aspect of electronic voting systems can reliably get all 150 students in the lecture room able to identify ‘iambic tetrameter’ in ten minutes, and Stuart Lee on the Learning Activity Management System (http://www.lamsinternational. com/about/), whose ‘learning designs’ enable students to complete work online in a linear fashion as opposed to the ‘web page’ format of the average virtual learning environment. One thing that became apparent was that our universities’ intended meaning of ‘e-learning’ – converting our teaching into a distance-friendly and reproduction-friendly format – was not what we were finding the technologies useful for. BlackBoard’s status as a ‘[p]rovider of products that enable universities, schools, and corporations to host their classes on the World Wide Web’ (http://www.blackboard.com/us/index.aspx) is not compatible with what we do.
Brett’s overview was hugely informative on the language and categories of e-learning, mostly absent from what university-specific training exists. Stuart Boon’s summary of his AHRC-funded project on ‘Information Literacy’ pointed out the gap in the average humanities degree where teaching students how to research should be an essential palliative for some of the endemic problems in getting internet-literate students to write. ‘Epic’, the 2014-based account of the ascendancy of corporate control of internet content, by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson (http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/), shown by Sue Thomas, gave a shocking account of the power politics of the internet, although her argument that it is the responsibility of academics to blog had a mixed reception. Lawrie Phipps from the accessibility educational advisory service TechDis (http://www.techdis.ac.uk/) presented in an area widely neglected in the majority of virtual learning environments, most of which are haphazardly put together: protocols governing how virtual learning environments should look. And Hermann Moisl pointed out not only that we need to use e-learning tools like we use whiteboards, but also that the lack of any institutional commitment in UK universities to working out how to best employ virtual learning environments – resulting in considerable stress for academics being told to use them – was a part of a general impoverishment of teaching by the new research-led conception of the university.
The consensus at the end of the event was positive: the extra time needed to deliver e-learning must be addressed by commitments at a higher level – it can’t just be the thing that a handful of champions do and that is done in addition to existing workloads. Because most of us who use virtual learning environments do not actually do e-learning – since the wholesale dumping of content to students is no guarantee that they will do anything with it – academics’ choice about using e-learning should be the same choice about whether to pick up the board marker at a particular point in class, not a response to an imperative to use it. An account of when not to use e-learning is necessary to make e-learning a teaching tool, and I vowed to gut my Blackboard sites of counter-productive functions immediately. Nonetheless, the e-learning techniques I came away having decided to use to make my modules work harder included peer-monitored and assessed forum discussion, the netiquette guide for forums and occasional structured forum tasks, the use of images with alt-tags, live discussion rooms as a way of enforcing good seminar etiquette, and making colleagues who do not use virtual learning environments get rid of any sites set up for them since empty websites encourage students to ignore virtual learning environments in general. I also became aware that there are websites that can be used to develop teaching, not least the oddly-named ‘T3’ pages on the English Subject Centre’s website (http://www.english.heacademy. ac.uk/explore/resources/t3/index.php), for sharing ideas about ways of structuring English seminars. As ever, organisers Stacy Gillis, a lecturer who makes use of virtual learning environments, and Brett Lucas, a learning technologist, made a perfect e-learning double-act, their partnership being a result of successfully turning ‘e-learning’ into good teaching. If you have a vague idea that these tools may be useful, you’ll find on the English Subject Centre website that you’re not alone.
