RECOMMENDATIONS
Overall, students tend to foreground the practicalities of accessing materials and have very little to say about actual content and/or dynamic uses of e-learning. Their associations with Blackboard seem predominately to be about accessing information, simply and speedily. This is borne out in their behaviour too, since the majority turn to Blackboard only at key moments in a module, at the very start and around the time of deadlines. Thus, whilst it is certainly laudable to be concerned with the intricacies of learning and improving learning, it would seem equally crucial to get the practicalities right (and if only because it would seem significant with respect to student motivation and attention). With this in mind, the following practical concerns might usefully be considered:
- the need for greater consistency in information delivery;
- improved aesthetics as an aid to students with learning difficulties;
- the need to bring the VLE into classroom teaching as a means to providing overall coherence to the delivery of a taught module.
Assuming access is available, explicit use of the VLE whilst teaching in class sessions is a simple adjustment for lecturers to make, but with potentially high-value impact. It is significant that for the BA Performance (Music) degree, where Blackboard usage amongst staff and student has been much lower than on the BA Media programme, network access has – until recently – not been available in the music classrooms. As a result of this testbed project a business case has been successfully made to enable wi-fi access to these rooms, which will mean Blackboard can be accessed as a group.
Lecturers can also aim to achieve greater consistency in design and layout and improve aesthetics. Yet, workload pressures remain ever an issue. Blackboard is a powerful tool, but sophisticated use takes a great deal of time and competence. For the current project, the lecturers involved were able to buy out time from their normal teaching load to generate the new materials. Nevertheless, the experience was that they needed far more time than could be allocated. Within the American higher education system there is an established practice of Graduate Teaching Assistants and Information Technologists working alongside lecturers in preparing teaching and learning materials. It is no accident that Blackboard – an American product – is clearly designed to allow for a distributed workflow, to have Section Designers, who are not necessarily Tutors etc. Achieving greater consistency in design and layout, not just of a single module but across all modules of a programme, requires a more strategic approach. Similarly, achieving aesthetic designs that comply with special needs and can match the kind of creative designs we have come to expect from using the World Wide Web requires more expert input. These may sound rather expensive practical measures, but if they prove to have significant impact on student perceptions (and so experience) of their learning environment there would seem to be a strong case.
E-leaning and other associated forms of delivery have perhaps too easily been seen a quick fix to issues of access. Yet it is not the presence of e-learning technologies that counts, but their up-keep and their synthesis with teaching and learning. For Brabazon (2008) ‘too much attention is spent on institutional marketing and “access” and not enough time and commitment is granted to motivation and the information scaffold that builds “teaching and learning” cultures’ (16). It is about widening participation, not simply access, she suggests. The ‘information scaffold’ she refers to, is about responding to the information rich context of digital culture, to slow the student research process down, to create more time for reflection and planning. ‘Instead of assuming that “technology” can solve educational “problems”, attention is placed on “more extensive support” through curriculum, assessment and literacy’ (16). The ‘design’ of the study pack materials used in the current project adopts a similar approach. Nevertheless, at a more pragmatic level and picking up on the metaphor of scaffold, there is just as much need to make informational structures architecturally sound. To ensure they are consistent, accessible and navigable.
