Chapter 8 Pedagogy

Situated Action and Learner Agency

In this section, I revisit the open degree program encountered in the chapter on visual metaphors. Using a metaphor of navigation, via photocopy interfaces, this acts as an example of a broader trend in flexible education and increased control and agency given to learners. Although this is not related to a specific pedagogy, or educational technology, it is an approach that requires modifications to existing pedagogical approaches and implementation through different technologies.

When the UKOU was founded, it offered only one type of degree, a BA(Open)—there were no named degrees. This was an explicit attempt by the founders of the university to make a UKOU degree different not just in mode of study but also in substance. Students constructed their own degree pathways, meaning that the courses were truly modular and could be combined as students saw fit. The UKOU’s first vice-chancellor said “that a student is the best judge of what [s]he wishes to learn and that [s]he should be given the maximum freedom of choice consistent with a coherent overall pattern. They hold that this is doubly true when one is dealing with adults who, after years of experience of life, ought to be in a better position to judge what precise studies they wish to undertake” (Perry, 1976, p. 61).

Although most universities offer options and electives, a truly flexible and open structure is rare, not least because the physical instantiation of education means that timetabling creates a logistical problem. It is not possible to allow wide-ranging freedom of choice when competing courses occur at the same time in different physical spaces. Distance education, particularly when it is largely asynchronous and occurs part time over a longer period, means that students can combine courses from different areas.

Specialization, of course, is a desirable mode of study in many areas. But the reasoning behind the original open choice was that the changes in society and workplaces in the 1970s meant that a wide-ranging degree was suitable for many vocations. If that was true at the founding of the UKOU, then it is doubly so now. Although it is sensible to be skeptical of the many claims that universities are preparing students for jobs that do not exist (Doxtdator, 2017), it is also fair to say that flexibility and breadth of understanding are useful attributes in an evolving digital economy. Educational technology is a good example of this, as we saw in the chapter on whether it is a discipline or not. Although it is possible to create a degree program that covers much of what is required in the field, it is a varied domain, and much of the work involves having an appreciation of the demands of different subject areas. A degree with rich and unique variety in it might suit the needs of an educational technologist better than a dedicated one. That is increasingly true for many roles that involve the use of technology but are not necessarily purely technology focused.

It is often claimed that, in order to solve the complex, “wicked” problems that the world faces, such as sustainability, climate change, and social inclusion, interdisciplinary thinking is required (e.g., Epstein, 2019), and there has been encouragement to develop “T-shaped” students (e.g., Johnston, 1978; Oskam, 2009) who combine the depth of one subject (the vertical bar of the letter) with broader skills across disciplines (the horizontal bar). But the common structure for degree profiles continues to prioritize narrow specializations instead of encouraging students to develop knowledge and skills across a range of topics.

My intention here, though, is not to make the case for interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary, education per se but to view variety in the degree pathway as a function of increased learner agency, in which the learner constructs their own degree profile and takes responsibility for their pathway, by way of a metaphor. To return to the open degree, then, the courses are very modular, so often they can be studied independently; that is not always the case, particularly at higher levels where some prerequisites are necessary, but nevertheless it is possible for students to construct their own degrees, which could combine art history, engineering, and music, say. Not only can students create their own pathways, but also, perhaps more importantly, they can change and adapt them as they go along, responding to changes in their lives, interests sparked by their studies, topics that they have found less interesting than expected, or shifts in society or employment. For instance, many students start on a named degree path but switch to an open one when they find other topics of interest or are less interested in their initial choices than they anticipated. For universities concerned about student retention, this flexibility offers one means of acknowledging that students can, and should be allowed to, change their minds. Although some pathways are more popular, students do combine courses in almost all of the ways imaginable, constructing unique pathways that suit them.

This responsive, agile structure of a degree program is different from conventional degree structures, which are largely predetermined. In her influential book Plans and Situated Actions, Suchman (1987) commences with an analogy of different forms of navigation. She uses a comparison of the Trukese and European methods of navigating the open sea: the Trukese navigator “begins with an objective rather than a plan. He sets off toward the objective and responds to conditions as they arise in an ad hoc fashion. He utilizes information provided by the wind, the waves, the tide and current, the fauna, the stars, the clouds, the sound of the water on the side of the boat, and he steers accordingly” (p. vii). The European navigator, in contrast, plots a course, “and he carries out his voyage by relating his every move to that plan. His effort throughout his voyage is directed to remaining ‘on course’” (p. vii).

Suchman (1987) uses this analogy to frame how people act, in particular what she calls “situated actions,” those “actions taken in the context of particular, concrete circumstances” (p. viii). In such circumstances, she contends, we act like Trukese navigators, taking in available information and (re)acting accordingly with an overall objective in mind. This is in contrast to when we have a definite plan and steps to follow. Suchman looked at how people interact with photocopiers, where the interface is often confusing and when they do not behave how users expect them to behave. People might start with a plan, but they react and adapt, in situ, to the context. The overall goal remains the same (e.g., to get so many copies made), just as it does for Trukese navigators, but how it is achieved is determined by smaller actions that are responses to what has just occurred. Suchman suggests that this is actually how people operate much of the time, although we often talk in terms of executing plans.

This analogy works for the choice of modules in the open degree that I have outlined. This is particularly true if students are studying part time and thus over a longer period than the traditional three- or four-year full-time degree. Over this period, there is a greater chance that circumstances will change, so the degree pathway itself needs to be flexible. As an example, consider what has happened in world politics since 2016: a student might have started off with a plan for their degree but become interested in economics, or have had a career change forced on them that now requires some expertise in European politics, or might now have an idea to develop an app for their company, and so on.

This analogy for flexibility and adaptability does not apply just to the overall course structure. As Veletsianos (2019) asked, “in education, what can be made more flexible?” and correctly stated that “flexible learning most usually focus[es] on enabling learners [to gain] some degree of control and freedom over the location, time, and pace of their online studies.” He proposed a number of further aspects of flexibility, including assessment in which students can choose from a menu of assignments, attendance in which students can choose to attend face-to-face or online courses, and course duration and pace in which students can vary the intensity of their study. In each example, greater agency and licence are given to learners through modifications to pedagogy. An open degree requires pedagogy that facilitates the independence of courses, while flexible assessment demands an approach that can be assessed in a variety of ways, and so on. More effort from the educator is often required, and is not without cost, but—like the Trukese navigators—this allows for a more responsive curriculum that can adapt to the increasingly complex and varied lives of many students.

From a broader open education perspective, the work of OER, open textbooks, open access, and MOOCs can all be viewed as providing the necessary foundations for a wave of more interesting exploration of what flexible approaches offer. For example, learners can take open courses and then bring this knowledge into formal study, as with the OER university model, which allows for a first-year free study then assessed formally by institutions, or how Delft universities recognize some MOOCs from other providers to offer a broader curriculum than they themselves can offer (Pickard, 2018).

There is much talk of personalization in education, and it is often portrayed as each learner being given different content within a course, often based upon analytics or artificial intelligence. But this ability within the degree structure to be responsive and adaptable—allowing students themselves to modify their approaches in response to changes—will be more significant I believe.

Rhizomes

In some parts of this book, the emphasis has been on highlighting when a metaphor is used, and what its implications are, for example in the sections “Digital Natives” and “Education Is Broken.” Rhizomatic learning is a more explicit metaphor in contrast in that it shapes the approach to learning, and students are encouraged to learn the metaphor itself to appreciate how it differs from their previous experiences. In this section, I make no proposition about the value of rhizomatic learning; rather, I focus on its use as a direct pedagogical metaphor.

Rhizomatic learning gained favour following the initial MOOC phase, when educators were experimenting with different approaches that could utilize the open web, such as connectivism. Dave Cormier hosted an influential MOOC in this area, Rhizo14, an open course that itself was about rhizomatic learning. Cormier (2008) suggests rhizomatic learning as a solution to some of the problems of constructing knowledge in complex, distributed networks: “A botanical metaphor . . . may offer a more flexible conception of knowledge for the information age: the rhizome. A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat.”

Rhizomes spread by sending out shoots and putting down new nodes. They are often treated as weeds, and their method of spreading makes them incredibly resilient. For example, Japanese knotweed is listed as one of the most invasive species by the World Conservation Union (Lowe et al., 2000), and its strong roots can cause damage to buildings and roads. Even small segments of its rhizomes can survive and then begin to proliferate again. In this sense, the metaphor is one of robustness as well as a decentralized, connected model, but as we shall consider it might also be one of danger.

In a rhizomatic course (the term “course” might not even be appropriate), there is a good deal of negotiation between learners and facilitators. For example, though broad topic areas might be suggested, how they will be approached might be framed by questions that learners suggest. Cormier (2008) states that, “in the rhizomatic model of learning, curriculum is not driven by predefined inputs from experts; it is constructed and negotiated in real time by the contributions of those engaged in the learning process. This community acts as the curriculum, spontaneously shaping, constructing, and reconstructing itself and the subject of its learning in the same way that the rhizome responds to changing environmental conditions.”

Bali et al. (2016) participated in Cormier’s Rhizo14 course and provide an auto-ethnographic account. They emphasize the emergent nature of the course: that is, the constituent elements combined to create something new that was unpredictable. This was realized through connections that the participants made and content that they produced, largely through blogs. The authors report a largely positive experience and the generation of a community formed as a result of the importance placed on making connections, which persisted long after the course had finished (although, again, perhaps to talk of a start date and an end date with rhizomatic learning is inappropriate).

Others did not report such a positive experience, feeling excluded, lost, or unable to make connections (Mackness & Bell, 2015). For a course designed to have no centre, perhaps this is not surprising, but one should also recognize that many students feel this way about conventional approaches to learning.

Cormier (2014) suggests that rhizomatic learning is a method of dealing with complexity and abundant content. Beyond the courses on rhizomatic learning itself, a model from more everyday experience might be how many of us learn to operate in social media contexts such as blogs and Twitter. As with rhizomes, we make connections in these contexts, and there are clusters of people or interests operating as nodes. We learn not by formal instruction but by interaction, experimentation, negotiation, and observation of the abundant resources (in this case, other tweets, links, or blog posts). In an analysis of Twitter for the subsequent rhizomatic course, Rhizo15, Bozkurt et al. (2016) found that hashtags linked different communities and that social presence was more salient than teaching presence. That is, people were making connections and emphasizing social communication over formal pedagogical exchange. This might reflect the type of emergent learning that we all engage in when using social media.

Rhizomatic learning might be an example of a metaphor that is too explicit. Mackness and Bell (2015, p. 89) argue that “using the rhizome as a metaphor for teaching, learning, and course design requires knowledge and understanding of the theoretical principles outlined by Deleuze and Guattari (rhizome as a concept) and of the potential limitations of the metaphor for application to teaching and learning.” If learners need to read Deleuze and Guattari to be able to benefit from a rhizomatic course, then that seems to require an excessive load. In this case, the rhizome metaphor behaves like the rhizome plant in a garden, taking over beyond its boundaries.

However, if the rhizome is taken at the more generative level of metaphor, then it need not be as overpowering. For example, Sanford et al. (2011) detail how video gamers learn in online communities and offer the rhizome as a means of understanding this approach to sharing and adapting. It is likely that all of the video gamers in their study were unaware of the rhizome metaphor and not explicitly trying to establish a community based upon this model. But it does offer an insight into how they were learning, and there are elements of that learning that can be adapted into more formal education.

In the section “The Problem with the Internet Trinity,” we saw that many of our initial beliefs about the internet can be reinterpreted in light of the more dystopian turn that much internet use has taken. The same might be true of rhizomatic learning. Its strength as a metaphor for learning is in the resilience of the rhizome: it grows and spreads through nodes. This resilience is useful in courses such as Rhizo14, but one could also consider it as a metaphor for how misinformation spreads and why it can be so difficult to shake beliefs in conspiracy theories. Veletsianos (2021) suggested on Twitter that “rhizomatic learning is a pretty great idea, until you realize that the bamboo rhizomes in your back yard are attacking your maple tree and you’re waging a losing battle against an invasive species. There’s a misinformation metaphor here.”

The aggressive recommendation algorithms of social media platforms such as Pinterest, YouTube, and Facebook act as the spreading rhizomes, until a stable structure is established, which will survive the removal of any one node. We have seen during the pandemic that belief in anti-vaccination conspiracies has proven to be very stubborn despite any one claim being debunked. This is in part because of a rhizomatic form of “learning” that the conspiracy theorist has undertaken, facilitated by the algorithms of social media. This is to suggest not that rhizomatic learning is therefore a “bad” metaphor for learning but that it can offer insights into how to combat such harmful conspiracy theories, against which conventional approaches to education have struggled.

The Lecture and Online Education

The lecture might seem to be an odd choice as a metaphor because in most instances we mean it literally: students attend lectures in a lecture hall. But for online learning, it has served as a model that is either replicated or presented in terms of its difference. This became particularly apparent during the online pivot, in which the lecture was deemed the only, and best, method to realize higher education. All online options were then presented as attempts to recreate lectures online or as deficit models compared with face-to-face lectures.

When Cambridge University announced that it was moving online, the headline was “All Lectures to Be Online-Only” (BBC News, 2020). Not that all learning was moving online, but the stress was on lectures. There was a call that students should be offered refunds because they might deem online learning inferior (Palfreyman & Farrington, 2020). The UK education secretary reportedly demanded that universities should resume face-to-face lectures or have their funding cut (Neilan, 2021). The Sunday Times ran the headline “Universities Refuse to End Online Lessons” (Griffiths, 2021), with the implication that online learning should be stopped as soon as possible. Others went even further, declaring distance education and online learning to be an existential threat: “Continuing with virtual learning threatens the entire concept of the college experience. Higher education, like K-12, depends on proximity to real people, not squares on a screen. Educators at all levels have dedicated themselves to teaching students during the pandemic, but they know that they’re offering thin pedagogical gruel. . . . The main reason why the ‘distance learning revolution’ didn’t replace the traditional model is that online learning just isn’t as good” (Laporte & Cassuto, 2020).

Figlio et al. (2013) compared face-to-face lectures with streamed online versions and found that students preferred the face-to-face versions. This is perhaps unsurprising, rather like comparing the live performance of theatre to seeing it on television. But the comparison is unfair if it is meant to demonstrate that online learning is inferior. This is clearly not learning designed to be taken online, so it always suffers in comparison. Courses designed specifically for online delivery make use of the affordances of that medium, such as a rich mix of resources, asynchronous delivery, embedded communication and commentary, and so on. To return to the theatre analogy, the comparison would be not with theatre streamed to television but with a more internet-native form of entertainment, such as online gaming. The desired outcome for people who partake of both is similar—to be entertained—but the environments in which this goal is realized offer different possibilities.

During the early stages of the online pivot, it was understandable that the lecture was the means by which higher education could provide a continuation of service. There simply was not time to do anything else. Hill (2020) suggested that the online pivot would go through different stages.

• Phase 1 (February–March 2020): rapid transition to remote teaching and learning
• Phase 2 (April–July 2020): (re)adding the basics
• Phase 3 (August–December 2020): extended transition during continued turmoil
• Phase 4 (2021 and beyond): emerging new normal

It is likely that in Hill’s model only at Phase 4, when online and blended provision becomes part of the normal offering, even when the pandemic is over, will we see extensive course redesign.

These objections to online learning maintain the central belief in the superiority of the lecture. Indeed, it seems that no other model is imaginable. With that basis, online learning becomes a mere replication of the lecture, and inevitably this is seen as a deficit. Even in this limited frame, there is some room for debate since lecture capture (in which a face-to-face lecture is recorded and can be viewed by students at any time) has been in place for some time on many campuses. The results are varied, but it can lead to a decline in attendance (Morris et al., 2019), which prompts the question that, if the face-to-face experience is unarguably superior, then why do students opt to watch lectures online? They might do so for a variety of reasons, including convenience, improved note taking, and controlled pace of the lecture. In short, the kind of flexibility that asynchronous online learning can offer compared with synchronous face-to-face learning, but lecture capture really hints only at the difference rather than an approach designed specifically for online delivery.

What this reliance on the lecture demonstrates is a paucity of metaphors or models for other ways of learning. The default metaphor becomes the lecture because that is all that people have experienced. How did the lecture get to this position of dominance as the sole measure of pedagogical excellence? As a means of knowledge transmission, it is not that effective generally, with Laurillard (2001, p. 93) concluding that it is “a very unreliable way of transferring the lecturer’s knowledge to the student’s notes.” She goes on to decry the persistence of the lecture despite this inefficiency: “Why aren’t lectures scrapped as a teaching method? If we forget the eight hundred years of university tradition that legitimises them, and imagine starting afresh with the problem of how to enable a large percentage of the population to understand difficult and complex ideas, I doubt that lectures will immediately spring to mind as the obvious solution” (p. 93).

Partly, the lecture’s continuation is a result of cultural inertia. As Laurillard (2001) points out, there are some 800 years of history that are hard to overcome. Students are taught via lectures, and when they become educators that is the model that they know and perpetuate. It is also true that lectures can be effective means of combining different media such as video, image, text, and spoken word. They are also performances that the learner participates in, along with others, making them social events (Friesen, 2014). And, despite Laurillard’s objections to the format overall, we can all cite examples of highly effective lectures.

In addition to social inertia, there is an economic model for lectures. Online learning can offer cost savings (Battaglino et al., 2012), but often this is through the sort of reduced labour models highlighted in the section “Uber for Education.” Developing online learning nearly always turns out to be more expensive than anticipated, as evident from much of the investment in MOOCs (Hollands & Tirthali, 2014). Cost saving is not the best reason to pursue online learning, although it is not necessarily more expensive than constructing a campus and maintaining physical buildings. However, once those construction costs have been paid, there is an economic argument for continuing with the lecture model. Although the campus-based lecture model is not necessarily more cost effective than the purely online model, and vice versa, they do involve different types of costs. For example, online learning typically requires more investment in course production than a face-to-face lecture series, whereas the campus model necessitates building and maintenance costs. It therefore becomes expensive to run both specialized online learning and campus-based learning simultaneously since they have different cost requirements.

It has been the case for many years that universities have offered a form of blended, or hybrid, learning that combines some face-to-face and online elements. A model that has gained popularity during the pandemic is that of hyflex (Beatty, 2007), combining the terms “hybrid” and “flexible,” in which students can attend face-to-face lectures or online lectures, giving them flexibility. Irvine (2020) notes the semantic confusion among online, remote, blended, flexible, and hybrid learning, making comparisons difficult, and stresses that pedagogy is separate from modality. However, if the lecture is taken as the basic model for online and, by extension, blended learning, then a number of assumptions follow.

• Education is largely based upon synchronous lectures.
• It deploys a one-to-many model.
• It uses a largely didactic pedagogy.
• The significance of timetabling for interdisciplinary study is reinforced.

An online course, in contrast, can be asynchronous, so the learner can control the time when and the place where she engages in study. It can be collaborative in a variety of ways, for example by creating shared documents or wikis, aggregating blog posts together, sharing found resources, commenting on a peer’s work, engaging in discussion on course content, annotating web pages, editing an open textbook, et cetera. All of these tasks can be done face to face also, but by shifting online and combining synchronous and asynchronous elements many of the tasks are easier to achieve. The asynchronous, online approach also allows for the multidisciplinary study and flexibility that arise when timetabling becomes less significant. Shifting away from the lecture as the central model creates space both cognitively and in the course study calendar for such approaches to be explored.

The architecture of the university campus shapes much of how higher education is realized. It undertakes a significant amount of the labour required in terms of organization for students and staff: they arrive at a certain place at a certain time to receive content (the lecture); they go to another place for discussion (a seminar), another location for laboratory work, a separate building to access resources (the library); they undertake socialization in cafés and bars designed to promote it. When learning shifts online, these cues are lost, with two consequences: the learner must take on more responsibility to organize their own learning, and the educator must explicitly build these different types of interaction into the course design. The architecture no longer performs much of the implicit work, but this is also liberating. Following are some examples from my own experience.

• Group activities that can be done quickly face to face take much more time online, particularly if they involve allocating roles and tasks to people.
• In online discussion forums, it can be the case that people who do not often speak up in class have more to say.
• Instructions and contents that might seem to be obvious will not be to some learners. If something can be misinterpreted, then inevitably it will be, so using critical readers prior to delivery is important.
• Once a mistaken belief takes hold, it is very difficult to rectify, much more so than in face-to-face learning, so it needs to be dealt with quickly.
• Students will study at different times, with different amounts of material, and at different paces.
• Social interaction can be achieved with as much significance for its participants as face-to-face social bonds, and students will often self-organize to realize this, for example via Facebook or in forums designed for other purposes.
• A distant, aloof air in a face-to-face lecture will seem to be even more cold and remote online.
• It is more important to structure different types of activity explicitly to maintain engagement.
• Peer-to-peer interaction needs to be designed more explicitly with clear outcomes.

There are different considerations in each mode, and if possible some blend might well be beneficial; for example, initial face-to-face meetings to start group projects can save a lot of time. The dominance of the lecture metaphor often prevents such consideration from occurring since it represents the starting point rather than one possible element in a mix. The lecture is so entrenched that many do not perceive it as a metaphor when considering an online design. This is a feature of metaphors: they shape our responses to a new environment. Martínez et al. (2001, p. 966) sum this up with respect to educational metaphors, stating that “we may not be aware of the pervasive influence under which we act, because our prevailing metaphors usually represent the undisputed state of the art in our community of practice.” This seems to be the case with the lecture, but perhaps as we enter later phases of the online pivot there will be a more sector-wide shift to reframe the discussion.