I am on the fence with this point of the manifesto (Bayne, 2020). I can see the advantages and limitations of both the physical campus and online learning. My indecision led me to decide to use this blog post to chronicle my thought process and research on this topic. This is my attempt to use a “stream of consciousness” approach. I will stop when I reach a part that captures my attention, highlight it and document my own relevant experiences and the resources I look up. The goal of this post is not to seek answers but uncover other areas of inquiry.

The term distance is itself a negative definition – ‘distance’ education is distant from something; it is what is not located on-campus; it is described and often downgraded, seen as other to the norm.

Why do people still attend live concerts when we have high-definition screens? If they were the same, then the entire tourism and entertainment industry would collapse. A comparison between a live concert and one that is streamed is similar to that of face-to-face learning and online learning. Could it be that a digital experience is less multi-sensory than a physical encounter? Even if we were to use virtual reality to conduct lessons, it would always be virtual, which is by definition “almost of nearly as described”. We are still not able to digitise smell and taste.

The material campus continues to be symbolically and materially significant to them.

The material campus can be a sanctuary for some students. In this sense, it can be a great equaliser. Students come from different socioeconomic backgrounds and learning on campus may be more conducive than an online environment. All online learners have a physical environment. They need to be somewhere physically to log onto the internet. They need to have a surface to place their laptops. They need to be in a position (be it sitting in a room, standing in a train cabin or driving with the audio on) where they can attend to the lesson.

For those from more impoverished or broken homes, the campus provides a better learning space. I once saw a student sitting on the kitchen floor of his family’s studio apartment because there was simply no other space at home. During another lesson, a student did not participate much because her was sitting beside her listening in to our discussion. Some students may have poor relationships with their family members. Some may even have abusive caregivers. For them, the campus is a second home and their schoolmates are a form of surrogate family. A article by the BBC (2020) that talks about the rise in domestic abuse during the Covid-19 lock down highlights this point. Closer to home, this article by Yip (2020) discusses the obstacles of working from home and how working remotely can be stressful.

It is partly through this fetishization of the campus that the university is able to create its ‘insiders’ and its ‘outsider’, in a dependence on the idea of the university as a space which bounds and constitutes its authenticity.

Education can be an equaliser, but education systems are, and arguably should be, also used to stratify. The fact that most accredited and more significantly reputable university have acceptance rates means that there are more applicants, and by extension students, than there are places in a course or institution. Why is this so? This is partly due to prestige and competence hierarchies. Controversial psychologist and professor, Jordan Peterson, explains in the video below (see video 1) that:

“All of the value of is in the screening before the education starts… Every university contains more information than any student could ever process”.

Video 1: Simulation. (2018, February 21). Jordan Peterson using money productively [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fbNZ0UapeA

It is difficult to remove the notion of competence hierarchies. Even if an online medical degree could accommodate fifty thousand students, is there the same number of jobs? Education systems perform much of the heavy lifting in terms of assessment and stratification for society. Without assessment and stratification, how would we know if a student is capable of cognitively coping with the next level of education?

Similarly, no one is capable of processing all of the information available on the internet. In this respect, an online campus also creates “insiders” and “outsiders, especially if it requires students to pay a course fee. To remove this divide is to mean making a course available to everyone and anyone. This is extremely difficult to achieve because even the most egalitarian institutions need to deal with costs.

References

BBC. (2020, June 11). Coronavirus: Domestic violence ‘increases globally during lockdown’ [Video file]. Retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-53014211

Bayne, S. (2020). The manifesto for teaching online. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Yip, W. Y. (2020, August 17). Singaporeans are adjust to working from home, new poll shows. The Straits Times.  https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/sporeans-are-adjusting-to-working-from-home-new-poll-shows

Week 1: Thoughts on “Place is differently, not less, important online”. / Illyas Lim Effandi / An introduction to digital environments for learning (2020/2021)[SEM1] by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0