Vignettes from the Field
Snapshot
Charles |
Lecturer |
Discipline |
Marketing |
Delivery mode |
Internal students |
Level |
Undergraduate |
Experience with WBLT |
Negative |
I don’t think it has anything to do with education or to do with work patterns for students; it has to do with putting less responsibility on students and putting more responsibility on the lecturers . Charles
Charles’ story
Charles teaches an undergraduate elective subject in Marketing. He has been teaching for 17 years and describes himself as an early adopter in using learning technologies:
I put everything up on WebCT back in 1999. I’ve been using it for quite a while now, but I always used it as a supplement to learning, not a mode of delivery.
WBLT and teaching
Although Charles initially used WBLT in his subject he has stopped using it due to a marked drop in attendance he attributes to WBLT. He is concerned that his students don’t come to lectures, listen to the recordings or look at the notes and, as a result, the use of WBLT is detrimental to their grades. He also finds he has less opportunity to communicate with his students:
You’ve really got a cohort of students now who are almost in external mode. That is, they are not really engaged in the course and they don’t really look at the materials regularly. They may not get some of the nuances of what you are doing because they are not going to the lecture and then they come to the workshop what I might call, cold. So if they come into the workshop, they haven’t done the reading, they haven’t followed the notes and they are really behind. I’m spending more time with them at the workshop to compensate that sometimes.
Web-based students were less motivated than before, but I can’t change their motivation because they are not there.
Because of this impact on attendance, Charles has now changed his delivery from lectures to tutorials to engage his students and encourage them to attend:
The idea that you can just listen to something and gain information is not true. In marketing, the examples I’m showing are websites, or on consumer behaviour. Video clips and advertisements are visual!
Prior to his changing to workshops, Charles found that the use of WBLT also impacted on his lecturing style. He acknowledges that he became more aware of spontaneous comments and reduced his movements around the lecture theatre:
You are limited by what you can do with humour in the university. You have to be very careful (about) cracking jokes, so it has really narrowed my tools to motivate and inspire right down.
Charles acknowledges that there is subtle pressure from his institution to use WBLT and it is ‘you sign up voluntarily’. However he’s concerned that,
‘the students can lodge an appeal saying I didn’t provide notes on (WBLT)e, and they couldn’t get to the lectures, so didn’t understand the unit... you leave yourself wide open.
Impressions of using WBLT
Charles is concerned about WBLT’s impact on student learning. He has experienced changes in the way he interacts with his students because it seems they have adapted external modes of study, despite their enrolment as internal students. He suspects that they don’t listen to the recordings throughout the semester and rely on cramming ‘the day before the exam.’
Learning futures
I’d say that the way things are going, (students) won’t have go into lectures or workshops, and these are sort of beamed out to wherever (students). That would make a teaching job very difficult because you now have to interact with people out there (rather than in the lecture).
Charles sees the future of learning as requiring academics to spend less time on (knowledge) and more on delivery and that’s the problem. He suggests that instead of showing up to the lecture, talking about the materials and maybe having a handout, academics have to change things to be able to fit into the online space more effectively:
I’ll give you an example. Now I do two unit outlines – a printed one, because the students must have a printed unit outline. That’s fair enough and then there’s an online version, which is a series of webpages. So I do two! I used to do one. So why don’t I just put it up and download it? That’s not good enough because that’s not using the medium properly.
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