Still Recording Lectures
Can you believe I have missed five of my monthly updates? I thought that a monthly blog post would be a reasonable commitment made to this new internet that I’m hoping to be a part of (you know - the blog is dead, long live the blog?), but work and life have been very busy, and so the blog had a little period of rest.
Today’s post is prompted by a letter myself and some colleagues have published in THE today.
My old blog domain, Fluffy Sciences, is no more. I recently ported some of my favourite posts to this blog, including You Should Record Your Teaching, and I haven’t changed my opinion in the intervening pandemic. We were limited to 900 words in our rebuttal, but in this slightly less editorialised space, I want to add a further comment:
We are continuously told that Higher Education is in a state of flux and disruption (I’ve always liked (this book on the subjest of TEL disruption HE)[https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10000628/1/Laurillard2008Digital_technologies.pdf]), and, in the UK at least, we are in a period of financial challenge and recruitment pressures which are going to have an impact on what universities look like in future. There is suggestion that the UK is on the brink of a great academic exodus, something I was lamenting on Saturday to some friends who work in different sectors, pointing out how many young, capable scientists I saw leaving academia in favour of the work-life balance industry gives them. We really need to take a long, hard look at that statement. It’s tempting to laugh it off, to smirk at the idea that industry has better work-life balance than academia, but regardless of whether it is true, it is perceived, and people are making choices based on that perception.
And to be honest, being one of the few of my PhD cohort still in academia, I’m not totally sure how wrong that point of view is.
We need to be aware of the wider context around higher education when we are making recommendations, and when I fully recommend that all our learning adjustments need to be based on a principle of Universal Design for Learning, I am thinking about that in the context of where higher ed is today, and where it might be in ten years time. I don’t think we can rely on university always being attractive because it is university. While those of us in the Russell Group etc. may be slightly more insulated from economic shocks, I don’t think we can expect that universities will have the kind of riches they currently do. I don’t think we can rely on things like the much gloried pension to stick around, and the subsequent benefits. I think we need to think carefully about why people come to lectures, and why people want to lecture at all.
As I have been saying for many years now, attendance is not engagement, and this counts for staff and students.