Barend Vlaardingerbroek: My reluctant induction into the brave new world of e-learning

After the bumpy ride we had endured towards the end of last year (see my article “What’s been up in Lebanon?”, Breaking Views 7 Jan), we had been hoping for a return to normality in the spring semester of this year – but, after the first few weeks, COVID-19 struck and emptied the place again.

We were exhorted to complete our courses using electronic media. Not being all that well up on that kind of thing – I am one of those neolithic characters who doesn’t own a ‘phone’ other than an updated version of Alexander Graham Bell’s famous invention – this was quite a challenge for me. It was an even greater challenge for my long-suffering HOD who brought one of the departmental laptops into my office and patiently trained me in the use of ‘Zoom’ until I could get it more or less right.

I am an unashamedly old-fashioned guy when it comes to teaching. I like having warm bodies rather than postage-stamp-sized little rectangles on a black screen in front of me – for reasons that elude me, the students invariably disable the video at their end when we ‘meet’ (even that term doesn’t ring true!), so I am gawking at my own dishevelled mug throughout rather than reading students’ faces to see how the material is going down.

What really brought home the new reality was my jokes not working – all I ever got was a titter from a girl I already knew from a previous course taught by conventional means.

Lebanon has been subjected to not a double whammy but a triple whammy – civil/political unrest, a failing economy and a currency apparently intent on following in the footsteps of the Zimbabwean dollar, and the coronavirus pandemic. To think now of ‘returning to normal’ is akin to hankering for a return to the Garden of Eden.

I could see what was on the horizon and converted all my courses into e-mode. This involved writing lectures (colloquial spoken style, not textbook style) with links to internet resources scattered throughout the text. I am now trialling two of those courses during the summer term. I send them the printed lectures for the week by email every Monday and we ‘meet’ on Zoom on Mondays and Thursdays.

The university – which is, after all, a private company – is, like its host country, in dire financial straits. The axe fell last month – there will be redundancies and departments have to come up with ways of making their operations far more cost-effective. This will include a shift towards e-learning. At least my crystal ball got that right.

Anyway, e-learning is the way of the future, or so we are being told; we don’t want to be left behind, do we?

There is already quite a lot of e-learning going on in universities. Many full-time students learn more from material on platforms such as Moodle than by attending lectures in the flesh. But the term is here being used in the context of distance education.

Not that there is anything new about distance education at tertiary level. I did my first degree as a conventional internal student in Auckland but subsequently attained two more Bachelor’s degrees and a Master’s extramurally from two Australian universities in the 1980s (the PhD was nominally internal but I was in PNG where I was collecting my data most of the time). The last exams I sat were with the Uni of London (PGDipLaws) at the British Council in Beirut 6 years ago.

Caveat emptor!

The ‘on-line degree’ sector has been mushrooming but ‘on-line degrees’ remain the poor relations of ‘real’ degrees which fortunately include traditional extramural qualifications such as the ones I pursued. I made sure that courses I did extramurally were offered as internal ones as well, and were assessed in the same manner. For it is not how a course is taught but how it is assessed that matters. Every exam I sat as a distance student was under tight supervision at a designated examination centre. The reason why ‘on-line degrees’ generally have little credibility is not because they are taught on-line but because they are assessed on-line.  

Ironically, on-line assessment is becoming a feature of many ‘conventional’ university operations, with students sitting standardised exams in front of a computer screen. Millions of students sit exams such as the MCAT every year. These machine-administered tests tend to be of the closed-ended type, specifically multiple choice. This just doesn’t strike a responsive chord with me at all. Shoving the answer under candidates’ noses isn’t my idea of evaluating candidate competence. Old stick in the mud that I no doubt am, I firmly believe that the only way to truly gauge an exam candidates’ ability is to present the candidate with an open-ended question which s/he has to write an answer to, preferably on a piece of paper with invigilators keeping a watchful eye out for any irregularities.

I am glad I am approaching the end of my career. I do not enjoy my classes any more – hey, what classes – those little black boxes on the laptop screen? It’s all part of what I call the ‘robotisation’ of human interactions. All those androids running around glued to their little plastic control boxes have, in part at least, abandoned their humanity. I came across a prediction a couple of years back that the first sexual experience the next generation will have will be with a robot. I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

That’s progress, huh. Well, it certainly is for the companies making a bomb out of creating dependency on their e-products.

I will do my job, but my heart is no longer in it. Perhaps hearts no longer have a great deal to do with it, for the way things are going, the likes of me are likely to be replaced a few years from now by a bit of silicon with no heart at all.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek BA, BSc, BEdSt, PGDipLaws, MAppSc, PhD is an associate professor of education at the American University of Beirut and is a regular commentator on social and political issues.