»Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral«
Melvin Kranzberg, six laws of technology, 1985
we have acquired – for better or worse – a reputation for experimenting with the online systems that support teaching and learning at the university level. over the last fifteen or so years, we explored new forms of using learning management systems to change teaching and learning. we not only worked on this, we also wrote about it [1,2,3,4]. We put a lot of effort into creating or applying interesting forms of teaching and learning. A driving force was to create environments where students can allow their potential to unfold, and become the best version of themselves. As we have a lot of students – around 650 each year – we cannot just coach them Ted-Lasso-style, we have to use intermediary systems.
It was also an effort to meet students half-way in their transition from school to university, as our course was set in the first semester. I believe that university should be different from school, driven by curiosity and a hunger for learning instead of a need for grades. Students need a space where they can develop these qualities, or maybe traits, early on in their studies. Unfortunately, too many university courses in the first two years rely on the tried and tested ways of teaching and learning from school.
I should not conceal that another part of our motivation always was to make teaching more interesting for us. Unfortunately, »interesting« has a lot of different implications, one being that it is a lot of work.
The life and death of Aurora
Until 2021, we used a learning management system that we developed ourselves. It was the third attempt to create a system that lets us experiment and try out new things. The system was called Aurora, and a good portion of our publications from the last couple of years come from what we did in Aurora.
»Ourselves« in this context is of course a very elastic term: as we teach in an informatics/computer science program, our students are always on the lookout for interesting opportunities to do their mandatory project work in, as well as their bachelor- and master theses. We offered opportunities to many of these students who worked with us to create a system that was as unique and extraordinary as it was buggy and full of spaghetti code. Over time, it became more and more unmanageable, to the point where it was irresponsible to use it in a course with ~650 students. Also, the amount of stress it generated during the semester for us as the designers and managers of Aurora
So, in 2022, we pulled the plug. For winter term 2023, we resolved to use the resident version of moodle which is called TUWEL. It is a fairly standard moodle instance, with the usual bunch of extensions installed. The version of the course, the structure of the exercises and the communication with the students, everything was changed so that it was possible to implement it using TUWEL.
For winter 2023, our experimental imp caught up with us, and we developed a grand plan: we should create the practical part of the course in a way that gives students a lot of autonomy (and responsibility) in organizing their own work, up to the point where we proclaimed the end of given deadlines, defining a process where students set their own deadlines. Let me explain.
The course consists of eight chapters [5, 6], and we want students to hand in some work in each chapter. We developed eight different forms of exercises.
work on a small project (usually choosing from two or three possible assignments in each chapter)
do some (guided) literature research (choosing from two possible assignments in each chapter)
organize a conversation with a practitioner in the field
write a reflection on a panel discussion (that we organized)
evaluate an external MOOC with simliar content
play some learning games
creating an infographic or explainer video
organise a one-our workshop for peers
Our assignment to the students was: make a plan at the start of the semester for which of the eight chapters you want to do which exercise, and when you want to hand it in. We had a couple of boundary conditions such as that the exercise cannot be done before the chapter was completed in the lecture, or that they could not hand in two elaboration within one week. We created little trailer videos for the eight chapters, and short descriptions of the exercise formats and assignments, and we gave them three weeks to figure out their working plan. We even created four template plans to give them something to start with.
When you think about it, this is basically a portfolio-kind of organization, with some extra bits like the working plan.
This was our plan before we started the semester. If you know moodle, you know the world of pain we just invited ourselves to. Later we would come to think that maybe we were just a tad optimistic (or naive) about what can be done with moodle.
Remembering the radical portfolio
It is a bit ironic that when we started our journey into new forms of teaching and learning twenty years ago, our first approach was portfolio-based. We were so confident about the portfolio that I talked about it at conferences [7] and even was invited to give a TEDx-talk in 200on the »radical portfolio« [8] concept.
It was mainly inspired by the guide-on-the-side reframing of the teacher´s role: inspire students to do extraordinary stuff, to explore their own interests and find whatever moves and motivates them, and create a structure where they can show you what created to show their learning. In a time where the illusion of learning objectives has pretty much pervaded the practice, if not the academic discourse, of teaching and learning, this idea is even more radical. It is a radically constructivist idea, based on the assumption that students should have more agency in their own learning.
This was of course overly optimistic then, as well as it is now . The advent and failure of MOOCs have shown us that self-directed learning is something only around 5%-15% of students [9] complete MOOCs. If we can’t (or don’t want to) question the overall setup of university education (which we will eventually be fored to do, but this is a topic for another blog post), we have to adhere to being more than a guide at the side; we have to be the tour guides in front, who, holding up our yellow umbrellas, tell people where to go next. we have a responsibility in this process that goes beyond catering to the interested.
These days, we are much more aware of this responsibility. We reduced the number of lecture hours in favour of interactive formats. in some of them, we students the opportunity to have shared experiences in the lecture hall (using mentimeter); in others, we let students ask questions to a changing panel of experts in the respective fields. in return for reducing the frontal lecture situations we now create extensive written and video materials for the students to peruse on their own terms, but incentivised by quiz-like formats.
as for the portfolio, our recent interpretation is much more guided and »hand-held« than in 2010. It does not even look like a portfolio – which is what mislead us about moodle.
The horrors of the wrong structure
WIth the start of the semester approaching, we tasked a very moodle-exerienced tutor as the TUWEL admin person and worked with them to set up the system accordingly. We quickly found out that while everything is possible, some things cost an inordinate amount of time and pain. Moodle is quite stubborn about how a course should be run, and doing something out of the ordinary will make you ache.
While we managed to avoid the worst case 8x8=64-possible-activities-scenario, the moodle course turned out to be an organizational and design nightmare. The idea that students set their own deadlines was of course orthogonal to the organizational principles of moodle, so that the guidance the system can provide under »normal« conditions was completely shut down.
In other words: moodle made it very clear to us that what we did is not how we should organize a course. in other words: even the relatively open and extendable structures of the open-source LMS moodle forces us to choose more traditional forms of teaching, as it is organized around traditional teaching concepts.
So, while moodle is neither good nor bad, it is also very clearly not neutral. As it is pretty obvious, there is no way for any such system to be neutral. It is an impossible proposition to create a technical system that does not impose its structures on the people using it.
1 https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_276821.pdf
2 https://ixdea.org/wp-content/uploads/IxDEA_art/42/42_4.pdf
3 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3507923.3507955
4 https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_294728.pdf
5 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3329674
7 https://repositum.tuwien.at/handle/20.500.12708/85084
8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMaywdSMtYQ
9 http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
all links accessed on 22. feb 2024.
title image generated using midjourney