Reflecting on this sad fact with another producer of learning materials from another university, he asked me why I thought academics found writing learning materials hard. Off the top of my head, I replied that I thought it had to do with the prevailing forms of academic discourse. Academic standing and prestige comes from writing and publishing research papers, which is an entirely unhelpful model. Apart from that, there are textbooks and lectures, which are better models in that they at least have a teaching function; but they too are monologic one-to-many forms of communication. What's needed for good learning materials is a different discursive model.
Actually the best model is one with many academics are familiar, although it may not occur to them at first. At The Open University, the relevance of this model for the fledgling university’s teaching was spelled out in a 1973 memo from Derek Rowntree (discussed in more detail in my previous post):
Rowntree... asked writers of materials to imagine what their ideal form of teaching would be if they had a learner in their company for several hours: what would they do as teachers and what would the learner be expected to do during that time. [He] argued that … it was highly unlikely that you would simply talk at the learner for hour after hour; he didn’t believe it would happen. Instead he thought you would probably regard a one-to-one tutorial as an ideal form of teaching. (Lockwood, 1992 p 25)This was the model for classic OU learning materials during the 1970s and '80s: what Rowntree called the “tutorial in print”. Some thirty years later, a similar model was adopted by the very successful Khan academy videos, which (as I have already observed) are not video lectures but video tutorials: the camera does not look at the teacher but at the paper or screen on which the teacher is writing down the maths: the view you would have while sitting beside your maths tutor.
What the tutorial model does for the teacher is to replace the one-to-many communication of a lecture with communication that is one-to-one, or one-to-a-very-small-group. Unless a writer of learning materials makes this shift, they will be like one of the speakers in the early days of radio broadcasting who would deliver their talk in stentorian tones, thinking of the millions of listeners they were aiming to reach instead of the individuals or family groups who would each be listening on their own wireless set. Early radio producers, such as Hilda Matheson, the BBC's first Director of Talks, needed to work on speakers to get them to make this transition.
The models for BBC broadcasts were the public lecture, the political speech, the theatre and the variety hall. One of Matheson’s many achievements was to realise that the microphone demanded an entirely different manner from the podium. “It was useless to address the microphone as if it were a public meeting, or even to read it essays or leading articles,” she wrote. “The person sitting at the other end expected the speaker to address him personally, simply, almost familiarly.” She rehearsed, coaxed and harried speakers until they found a mode of speech that worked. (Higgins 2014)If the one-to-one personal style has been found to be essential for broadcast media, how much more essential it is for learning materials, in which, as Diana Laurillard argued long ago (2002, pp 86-87), the critical element is the conversation or dialogue which goes on between teacher and learner.
References
Lockwood, F. 1992, Activities in Self-Instructional Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, London, Kogan Page.
Higgins, C. 2014 'What can the origins of the BBC tell us about its future?', The Guardian 15 April 2014, online at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/apr/15/bbc-origins-future, accessed 30 September 2018.
Laurillard, D. 2002, Rethinking University Teaching; A Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nd edn, London, RoutledgeFalmer.
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