I GOT my first email address when James Callaghan was Prime Minister. It was so new that we gathered around a computer screen to watch emails arriving. That was 1978. It seemed like a cool idea, but we had no idea that, like SMS text a few decades later, it would ever become a popular medium for communicating. By the early 1990s I was using computer conferencing to chat with a global rural development network, so it seemed an obvious choice to use when we began to teach at a distance.
Paper-based resources were posted by the team at Lews Castle College, now part of the University of the Highlands and Islands, and we linked everyone together in an online chatroom to discuss the subjects without the students needing to leave their homes. Soon after the web became public in 1993, we began to put the learning resources on the internet and dispensed with the postage. It seems a very simplistic operation now – there were no passwords to the resources, no interactive videos or audio files, but it was cutting-edge distance education.
Fast-forward 25 years and like many of my UHI colleagues, I teach entirely online. It is very much more sophisticated now, but the basic principles are the same. From the most north-west corner of the Outer Hebrides, in the heavily restricted mobility of a global pandemic, there has hardly been a blip in my teaching engagement with students and colleagues all over the world.
I realise that many educators are struggling, for various reasons, and I am not critical about that, but for nearly three decades I have been working with other academics to design ways of effective learning using educational technology. It does not ‘just happen’. A mistake is to think that because you teach one way in a face-to-face situation, you need to try to copy that online.
The digital environment of the internet has many advantages that face-to-face delivery does not have – flexibility, for one thing, allowing students to study whenever and wherever it is convenient for them. Getting lots of students to turn up in the same place, at the same time, to listen to one-off lectures that they will not be able to hear again, says nothing about ‘best educational practice’ and everything about mass production.
I believe strongly in taking high-quality education to where people are, rather than demanding that they come to me. For working adults and increasing for school-leavers who cannot afford to study in a city, a well-designed online course is the answer to their wishes. A thoughtfully delivered use of educational technology can provide a richer learning experience for everyone, and that is a standard to aim for. Most of my students do not miss student social life, they already have a community. Why should they need to leave their family, their job, or their social circle when they can have the best of both worlds – a rooted home community, and global access to learners with similar interests?
Frank Rennie, professor of sustainable rural development, Lews Castle College, University of the Highlands and Islands
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