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Jim Taylor provides an opening for what I will say here, although, to speak honestly, my story is more like an anecdote from a university in the third-world. Perhaps my title should have been 'A tale about enthusiastic amateurs with minimal resources', and I shall tell it in a straightforward narrative style.
Some years ago a colleague and I at the University of the Western Cape were faced with the task of teaching history and philosophy of education to a class of 150 Higher Education Diploma (Postgraduate) students for a full semester. Over a period of some five years the class size expanded six-fold, to nearly 1,000, on average almost doubling each year. Human and material resources available in our Department did not even nearly keep pace with this expansion, and we were confronted with what was, potentially, a suicidal task. Had we continued to think of our teaching tasks in conventional terms we would have faced an increasingly impossible situation, one which would probably have driven us to insanity or at least the abandonment of our professional responsibilities.
In 1988, a year in which the class size reached about 450, we 'stepped back' from our tasks and re-thought them in a different mode. We asked ourselves what our professional responsibilities were in the situation we found ourselves in, and how, in practical terms, we could meet them. We did not know anything about distance education in any serious analytical way, and it never entered our heads that there might be those elsewhere who had though about teaching large classes.
We explicitly adopted as our central guiding question: What would it be fruitful for our students to do to learn what we were trying to teach them? Impressed by some Open University (UK) course material we knew of, we decided to use it as a rough model for the design of our own material. We were amateurs in the sense that we had none of the human and other support systems typically available in well-constructed distance education operations—we had no course designers, editors, sophisticated production facilities, ways of pilot-testing our material nor even reliable typing assistance—nor did we have any articulated knowledge of course design. We simply depended on our intuitions as teachers, and our determination to avoid betraying our students.
We reconstructed our current lecture courses into units, each conceived of as a week of 'student study time', and put together a package of materials for each unit. We produced our material under enormous pressure, and at great speed. The first versions of our packages were, in effect, simply an expanded version of our erstwhile lecture notes, together with the readings we expected our students to do. But we did, in the light of our central question, list in linear sequence the tasks we were asking students to undertake. The style of these lists was: 1 Read Section A, 2 Now Read Reading K, etc.
Our material, amateurish as it was, was flexibly designed so that, as the years passed, when we could find the time to do so, we could improve it piecemeal. One of our earlier realisations was that we had hugely unrealistic expectations about how long it would actually take a normal student to work through our material. After the first year or two we quite dramatically reduced the number of pages in each unit, and this had the positive effect of forcing us to achieve much sharper focus.
Over the years we replaced some part of our original text, removed or replaced Readings, gradually introduced exercises which we thought of as trying to help our students to engage more actively and critically with the material, and developed what we saw as more adequate lists of tasks; lists which were less linear than our originals and which tried to encourage students to track back and forth in our material ('Now re-read Section D and think about how your view of it might have been changed by what you have read in Reading M'.) We also tried to become much clearer about what the central questions or issues were for each unit, and there were times at which we abandoned a whole unit and substituted a new unit for it, or changed the sequencing of the units.
I need to emphasise that the 'improvements' we made were not guided by anything like a serious empirical investigation of our students' responses to our material. I suppose, if I am honest about it, apart from a few sporadic informal comments from some of our students, our criteria for improving our material had more to do with our gradually dawning clarity about what we were trying to teach; we began to use the word 'intelligible structure' as an evaluative criterion for our material and we tried to achieve more lucid conceptual clarity.
I suppose also, if I am honest, we sometimes depended simply on our 'feeling' that such and such a unit was 'not working well' or a kind of an aesthetic sense of success or failure. I need also to emphasise that we were always short of enough time to do the job as well as we imagined we could have. I am talking about only one part of our teaching load, and those years at our University were frequently punctuated with class stoppages and other forms of sometimes quite vigorous political protest. We did not have a long-term plan for our project—we were driven by circumstances, and discovery, invention and on-the-spot improvisation played an important role.
One dramatic discovery we made was that our rudimentary conception of the use and purposes of contact time became transformed. We came to realise that, contrary to the stories we used to tell ourselves, our previous use of contact time had been very much a somewhat laboured public oral presentation of what we wanted our students to learn; our guiding question forced on us the realisation that we had previously expected our students to do little more, in contact time, than what could be called 'passive reception' and that that mode fitted very comfortably with what our students expected to do. The project of jointly paying closer attention to the preparation of our material and thinking about our guiding question released us from what we had (implicitly) previously seen as our obligation to use contact time to tramp systematically through what we wanted our students to learn.
In our new mode we told our students that they would be expected to prepare in advance the unit for each week, either on their own—or in self-formed study-groups, which we tried to encourage. We knew that for many of our students this was a revolutionary expectation but we tried to reinforce it by explicitly rethinking our use of contact time with that as a basis, and resisting student pressures to fall back into a more conventional mode.
We gradually developed an elastic practice of using contact-time to pick up one or two main points in the material, to provide a few further examples, to ask students to come with questions which had arisen for them in the material, etc. We became much more playful, and sometimes thought of what we were doing as a form of entertainment—what the psychologists call motivation. We sometimes also saw ourselves as trying to bring the written material to life by lifting it off the pages and talking about it in an interactional conversational mode. Contact time remained important for us, but it was knocked off its pedestal as the principal moment of our teaching.
One further risky step we took was to move into computer-checked multiple-choice testing procedures. We knew that this mode of testing has a bad reputation, that it can degenerate into merely reinforcing rote learning and simple recall but, in a sense, we had no option. The idea of marking 900 or 1,000 'essays' with any hope of reliability, or with any hope that one could provide something like illuminating feedback to their authors was simply a fantasy. Our self-understanding was constructed around an interpretive epistemology, the view that all knowledge is interpretation, and we tried to generate questions on that basis. As is well known, of course, this mode of testing takes enormous time in preparation, but it is magic at the time of the test. One positive spin off from this aspect of our project was that after generating possible questions independently we would discuss them together in setting up the actual papers, these discussions themselves compelled us to achieve a sharper understanding of
what we were trying to teach.
One problem, which was brought to our attention by our external examiners, was that our questions depended very much on the semantic weight and nuances of particular words. This is an especially important problem when a significant proportion of the students do not have English or Afrikaans as their first language, and when many of them learnt these languages in a very mechanical way. We had to face the fact that our course was very much teaching a particular language in which to talk about education, and this realisation began to play a part in our ongoing 'improvements' or our material.
An additional spin off of our moving into multiple-choice examining was that the processes were 'depersonalised' and this reduced the volume of complaints and special pleading which frequently accompany more conventional types of examination where the personal prejudices, or even passing moods, of the examiner are commonly seen to play a major role.
My tale would not be complete without mentioning the often passionate opposition our project drew from some of our colleagues in the Faculty. Many, I think, saw us as abandoning our responsibilities as teachers, as moving in a 'technicist' direction, perhaps even as threatening the principles of 'People's Education' or 'democratic education', or deeply embedded, and precious, conceptions of what teachers should be doing. One particularly potent site at which this collegial resentment emerged most clearly was when, in sharp contrast to the typical nightmare of marking' after the examination, we were able to publish our results a mere few hours after the examination had been sat.
I tell this tale in this context because I know that in many universities in this country, and especially historically black universities, the pervasive might almost say overwhelming, problem is that of overload. The huge pressures for access, simultaneously with declining resources, have faced teachers in these institutions with a backbreaking challenge. My tale is a tale about conceptual change, in the struggle to meet that challenge.
Although from the start we knew about distance education (although, as I have emphasised, in nothing like a really professional way) it was not until literally last week that I heard about 'mixed-mode teaching'. As recently as eighteen months ago I first discovered that there are international discussions about 'large class teaching'. Perhaps these are symptoms of the academic isolation we in South Africa have suffered over the past decades. In retrospect I can redescribe what my colleague and I were doing as tackling a problem of 'large class teaching', that we reached towards our limited knowledge of distance education (essentially of UNISA and The Open University (UK) materials) for possible solutions, and we developed a practice of 'mixed-mode teaching'.
I have tried to tell my tale honestly, but I would not like to leave you with an impression of blinding success. We stumbled across our new practices, driven by circumstances and frequently frustrated in our efforts, but I think we stumbled in more or less the right direction given the likely future of tertiary education in our country.
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