I’ve just been listening to this podcast of a keynote by Dr Phil Long. Apart from the content of the talk, this is interesting because Dr Long has just recently started work at the University of Queensland (which is just down the road from here) at the Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology.
There is much good content. I particular recommend listening through the question and answer section at the end for a story about a “student/teacher” relationship that is very inspiring.
The bit that sparks this post is also in the question and answers at the end and is interesting to me because of a nascent idea I have for some experimentation. When talking about the future of university campuses, Dr Long suggests that classrooms will become marginal and goes onto say
Most institutions, when it comes to infrastructure, spend 8 of 10 dollars on physical classroom infrastructure, and if you do any study on where students learn you will find that less than 7% of the time when they are working on class related work happens in that box. How do you spend 80% of your dollar on where students are spending 7% of their time?
There’s a growing interest at my current institution in the question of learning spaces, though much of the interest I’ve seen so far seems to be stuck about 5 years ago. The nature of my current institution is such that for a large proportion of our students, the 7% figure would actually be 0%. In some cases, a large number of our students never set foot on a campus.
And yet, much of our expenditure, our concerns, our learning and teaching practice and our management and workload calculations are built around the assumption of the classroom. Even though it is increasingly problematic.
It’s as if, in the words of Postman, that the lecture and its associated goods and chattels continue to be mythic.
