About this blog

This blog critically reflects on the uses of digital technologies in higher education. The practical suggestions and case studies included here may reflect a cautious optimism about the potential of emerging innovations in education, yet acknowledges (and grapples with) the immense, complex challenges associated with online learning models.

As a researcher, I am interested in investigating how online courses could be designed, and should be facilitated, to cultivate dialogic learning. 

In order for the virtual classroom to be designed as such a richly educational, dialogic space, continual learning and reflection would be required from a network of stakeholders: Instructional designers, teaching practitioners, online facilitators, and academic administrators are but a few role players that could augment the nature and quality of online learning interventions, but they may not share the same goals in terms of intended operational or pedagogical outcomes.

A wider debate

Education practitioners are increasingly encouraged to explore online learning models as a means to increase teaching and assessment productivity, deliver market-responsive academic content and lower the cost of course facilitation. The rapid adoption of online learning models, however, has been widely critiqued as a corporate-style pursuit for income-maximisation  and labour cost control in a labour intensive sector  (Garnham, 2000).  Within an African context, it has been argued that such online learning approaches tend to disguise marketisation agendas which have further marginalised local, African knowledges (Johnston, 1999; Levidow, 2002).

Conversely, the social and collaborative affordances associated with Internet-based education include the potential opportunities for students and teachers to draw from global, multicultural perspectives in the process of acquiring and co-constructing new knowledge (Wegerif, 2013). HE educators are increasingly encouraged to move beyond traditional, monologic recitation (Alexander, 2017) and online learning platforms could arguably assist them in extending and mediating students’ educational interactions, beyond the traditional university classroom.

This gives rise to a tension between the operational and pedagogical imperatives of the university: On  the one hand, ICT-mediated instruction is pursued as a financially-efficient, market-competitive, solution – aligning with a generally neoliberalist agenda  (Maryam, 2014) but with the possibility of massifying delivery within a monologic pedagogical framework. On the other hand, online learning models could potentially become a vehicle for adopting rich, collaborative and social learning strategies, aligning with the holistic goals of higher education to enable students to draw significant connections between diverse perspectives (Shirley, 2009) and to engage in critical dialogue (Zembylas, 2015) and to develop the collaborative skills to co-design solutions to real-world problems.

HE policy-makers and teaching practitioners in favour of online teaching and learning have argued that, if used in meaningful ways, ICTs can enrich dialogic learning. Examples of oft-cited findings include case studies claiming that online learning

•  fosters communities of inquiry (Garrison, Anderson and Archer, 1999) and communities of action (Hofkirchner, 2007),
•  strengthens social ties for better peer-to-peer co-operation  (Benkler, 2006) ,
• creates more opportunities to engage in proximal development (Hung and Der-Thanq, 2001) and
• promotes reflective dialogue (Wegerif, 2013).

The optimistic consensus arising around online learning has, however, sparked much debate in HE research. It has been argued that pedagogic theories such as constructionism, experiential and situated learning can easily be added as post-hoc rationalizations for using ICTs for learning (Laurillard, 2010). The continuing focus on the rapid developmental changes and promised affordances of technology has been critiqued for obscuring the more pressing sociocultural issues affecting the quality of education (Wessels, 2010). Critics of web-based education further warn against the adoption of technicist notions when evaluating online teaching practices, arguing that a too-narrow focus on specific ICTs quickly becomes irrelevant due to the rapid pace of product revisioning (Lovink, 2011).

Another strand of critique focuses on the educational limitations of the technology itself. The quality of text-based computer-mediated communication has been found to be over-reliant on oft-misinterpreted emotive cues (Vandergriff, 2013) whilst video-based technologies can lead to an adoption of non-dialogic,  passive learning patterns (Zavala and Kuhn, 2017). In terms of Internet-based courses, access to the required hardware and software could be a practical barrier for students.

Literature shows that teaching practitioners generally find it challenging to instigate student engagement with valuable  academic opinions and views online (Cramp, 2015). In particular, asynchronous online communication requires course facilitators to demonstrate a rich understanding of how the visible recording of online threads (De Vries, Lund and Baker, 2009), the creation of online profiles, the effect of anonymity (Camp, 2015), and the reliance on visual or textual symbols as opposed to facial and vocal expression (Hull and Saxon, 2009) can potentially hinder the quality of educational dialogue.

An interrogation of online higher education, then, calls for an awareness of the ideological notion associated with the affordances of ICTs, coupled with a critical examination of the resulting strategic policies, operational processes and teaching practices within HEIs .