Vignettes from the Field
Snapshot
Julia |
Lecturer |
Discipline |
Law |
Delivery mode |
Internal students |
Level |
Undergraduate |
Experience with WBLT |
Negative |
(If students are) using (WBLT) as a substitute to coming to the actual lecture, then they’re actually missing out on that active learning. Julia
Teaching Context
Julia teaches fully on-campus classes in the discipline of Law. She has been teaching for only two years but has developed a strong commitment to her teaching philosophy of engaging students in ‘active learning’. She teaches in an area that she considers tobe ‘highly sensitive’ and uses lectures to gauge student responses to the content and to provide support as required.
Julia’s lectures change throughout the semester. At the beginning of the semester she uses the lecture to ‘impart a lot of information’ but later when the students have some basis for discussion, the info becomes less important than the dialogue in the class.
Communication between students is one of the key benefits Julia sees in on-campus lectures:
I throw them some really weird examples and let them try and work them out, and why these are occurring, I throw out something quite controversial and let them fight about it. It’s always fun when you have (people with opposing views) together.
WBLT and teaching
Julia has stopped using WBLT this semester, as a result of her concerns about student attendance. She is also concerned that students need support when dealing with the often confronting materials that are in her unit:
‘It’s a subject area where people need support while at the same time, getting information and learning. I don’t want a school leaver, a young girl listening to that at home. I want her in the room with me so that I can see their reactions, and usually, on average I have one or two people run from the room crying.’
She realises that some students want to use the recordings for revision and often finds rows of digital recorders on the lectern as she presents:
At the lecture, I have half the students’ MP3s lined up. If they want to listen to it later, then they can tape while they are there.
Julia is concerned about the University’s push to blend on-campus and external delivery using technologies such as WBLT. She considers that external units should be developed and delivered differently from on-campus units:
There is the perception that (WBLT) creates an external unit. I have no problems with students studying externally, but if you’re studying externally, it has to be set up correctly, so you have a study guide that essentially (guides your learning). I see (WBLT) would contribute towards that beautifully, but it’s not a case of simply recording lecture and having it as an alternative. It has to be set up according to what we know what makes a successful externally taught unit.
As a result of these concerns, Julia has avoided making changes to her lecture delivery to accommodate WBLT and has instead restructured her unit to encourage attendance:
I just do what I’m doing, and I feed off the people in the room, I react to their questions, I can see when they’re getting bored with something, I can see when they would find something quite interesting, which I haven’t quite expected. So I very often follow that.
Impressions of using WBLT
Julia describes her experiences of using WBLT as rarely or almost never positive. She disagrees that the tools have helped students achieve better results because of what she sees as a ‘passive’ style of learning that is encouraged. As a result of these concerns, she has stopped using WBLT in favour of more active ‘workshop’ style classes:
I guess my perspective on that is I know what good teaching is, and I’m going to do good teaching, and if you don’t like it, don’t do my unit.
Learning Futures
Julia describes the future of learning as ‘worrying’, because of two competing forces at work:
‘One is the economic realistic force on teaching, which is increasing your student numbers, making it so that students who have to work full time can also study full time, and all of those things eat away good pedagogy. But at the same time, we’ve got this force that says we’ve got to be better teachers, we need to be more interactive, lots of stuff written in the literature about how passive learning is not providing good, deep learning. And I don’t know how they are going to be reconciled. I think we’ll end up with two types of universities.
 |
 |
 |
 |