Understanding the ways people interact in an online context matters if we are interested in deliberate learning, because learning is almost always with and/or from other people: people inform us, inspire us, challenge us, motivate us, organize us, help us, engage with us. In the process, we learn. Intentional learning is now, more than ever, whether informally, non-formally or formally, an activity that occurs outside a formal physical classroom. We are no longer limited to what our schools, universities, teachers and libraries in our immediate area provide for us, nor do we need to travel and pay the costs of getting to the experts in teaching and subject matter that we need. We are not limited to classes and courses any more. We don’t even need books. Anyone and everyone can be our teachers. This matters.

Traditional university education

Traditional university education is all about groups, from classes to courses to committees to cohorts (Dron & Anderson, 2014). I use the word ‘group’ in a distinctive and specific way here, following a pattern set by Wellman, Downes and others before and since. Groups have names, owners, members, roles and hierarchies. Groups have purposes and deliberate boundaries. Groups have rules and structures. Groups embody a large set of highly evolved mechanisms that have developed over millenia to deal with the problems of coordinating large numbers of people in physical spaces and, in the context they have evolved, they are a pretty effective solution.

But there are two big problems with using groups in their current form in online learning. The first is that the online context changes group dynamics. In the past, professors were able to effectively trap students in a room for an hour or more, and to closely control their activities throughout that time. That is the context in which our most common pedagogies evolved. Even in the closest simulations of a face-to-face context (immersive worlds or webmeetings) this is no longer possible.

The second problem is more significant and follows from the first: group technologies, from committees to classrooms, were developed in response to the constraints and affordances of physical contexts that do not exist in an online and connected world. For example, it has been a long time since the ability to be in hearing range of a speaker has mattered if we wish to understand what he or she says. Teachers needed to control such groups because, apart from anything else, in a physical context, it would have been impossible to otherwise be heard without disruption. It was necessary to avoid such disruption and to coordinate behaviour because there was no other easy way to gain the efficiencies of one person teaching many (books notwithstanding). We also had to be disciplined enough to be in the same place at the same time – this involved a lot of technologies like timetables, courses, and classroom furniture. We needed to pay close attention because there was no persistence of content. The whole thing was shaped by the need to solve problems of access to rival resources in a physical space. 

We do not all have to be together in one place at one time any more. It is no longer necessary for the teacher to have to control a group because that group does not (always or in the same way) need to be controlled.

Classrooms used to be the only way to make efficient use of a single teacher with a lot of learners to cater for, but compromises had to be made: a need for discipline, a need to teach to the norm, a need to schedule and coordinate activities (not necessarily when learners needed or wanted to learn), a need to demand silence while the teacher spoke, a need to manage interactions, a perceived need to guide unwilling learners, brought on by the need to teach things guaranteed to be boring or confusing to a large segment of a class at any given time. We therefore had to invent ways to keep people engaged, either by force or intentional processes designed to artificially enthuse. This is more than a little odd when you think about it. Given that there is hardly anything more basically and intrinsically motivating than to learn something you actually want to learn when you want to learn it, the fact that we had to figure ways to motivate people to learn suggests something went very wrong with the process. It did not go wonderfully. A whole load of teaching had worse than no effect and little resulted in persistent and useful learning – at least, little of what was intentionally taught. It was a compromise that had to be made, though. The educational system was a technology designed to make best use of limited resources and the limitations imposed by physics, without which the spread of knowledge and skills would have been (and used to be and, in pockets where education is unavailable, still is) very limited.

Online learning

For those of us who are online (you and me) we don’t need to make all of those compromises any more. There are millions of other ways to learn online with great efficiency and relevance that do not involve groups at all, from YouTube to Facebook to Reddit to StackExchange, to this post. These are under the control of the learners, each at the centre of his or her own network and in control of the flow, each able to choose which sets of people to engage with, and to what attention should be paid.

Networks have no boundaries, names, roles or rules – they are just people we know.

Sets have no ties, no rituals of joining, no allegiances or social connections – they are just collections of people temporarily occupying a virtual or physical space who share similar interests without even a social network to bind them.

Sets and networks are everywhere and they are the fundamental social forms from which anyone with online access learns and they are all driven by people or crowds of people, not by designed processes and formal patterns of interaction.

Many years ago Chambers, then head of Cisco, was ridiculed for suggesting that e-learning would make email look like a rounding error. He was absolutely right, though, if not in quite the way he meant it: how many people reading this do not turn first to Google, Wikipedia or some other online, crowd-driven tool when needing or wanting to learn something? Who does not learn significant amounts from their friends, colleagues or people they follow through social networks or email? We are swimming in a sea of billions of teachers: those who inform, those with whom we disagree, those who act as role models, those who act as anti-models, those that inspire, those that affirm, those that support, those we doubt, those we trust. If there was ever a battle for supremacy between face-to-face and e-learning (an entirely artificial boundary) then e-learning has won hands down, many times over. Not so’s you’d know it if you look at our universities. Very oddly, even an online university like Athabasca is largely trapped in the same constrained and contingent pattern of teaching that has its origins in the limitations of physical space as its physical counterparts. It is largely as though the fact of the Internet has had no significant impact beyond making things slightly more convenient. Odd.

Replicating the wrong things

Those of us who teach entirely online are still, on the whole, making use of the single social form of the group, with all of its inherent restrictions, hierarchies and limitations inherited from its physical ancestors. Athabasca is at least a little revolutionary in providing self-paced courses at undergraduate level (albeit rarely with much social engagement at all – its inspiration is as much the book as the classroom) , but it still typically keeps the rest of the trappings, and it uses groups like all the rest in most of its graduate level courses. Rather than maintaining discipline in classrooms through conventional means, we instead make extensive use of assessments which have become, in the absence of traditional disciplinary hierarchies that give us power in physical spaces, our primary form of control as well as the perceived primary purpose of at least higher education (the one follows from the other). It has become a transaction: if you do what I say and learn how I tell you to learn then, if you succeed, I will give you a credential that you can use as currency towards getting a job. If not, no deal. Learning and the entire process of education has become secondary to the credential, and focused upon it. We do this to replicate a need that was only there in the first place thanks to physics, not because it made sense for learning.

As alternative forms of accreditation become more commonplace and more reliable, it is hard to see us sustaining this for much longer. Badges, social recommendations, commercial credits, online portfolios, direct learning record storage, and much much more are gaining credence and value.

It is hard to see what useful role a university might play when it is not the best way to learn what you want to learn and it is not the best way to gain accreditation for your skills and knowledge.

Will universities become irrelevant? Maybe not. A university education has always been about a lot more than what is taught. It is about learning ways of thinking, habits of mind, ways of building knowledge with and learning from others. It is about being with others that are learning, talking with them, socializing with them, bumping serendipitously into new ideas and ways of being. All of this is possible when you throw a bunch of smart people together in a shared space, and universities are a good gravitational force of attraction for that. It is, and has always been, about networks and sets as much as if not more than groups. The people we meet and get to know are not just networks of friends but of knowledge. The sets of people around us, explicit and implicit, provide both knowledge and direction. And such sets and nets have to form somewhere – they are not mere abstractions. Universities are good catalysts. But that is only true as long as we actually do play this role. Universities like Athabasca focus on isolated individuals or groups in boundaried courses. Only in odd spaces like here, on the Landing, or in external social sites like Twitter, Facebook or RateMyProfessor, is there a semblance of those other roles a university plays, a chance to extend beyond the closed group and credential-focused course process.

Moving on

We can still work within the old constraints, if we think it worthwhile – I am not suggesting we should suddenly drop all the highly evolved methods that worked in the past at once. Like a horse and cart or a mechanical watch, education still does the job it always did, in ways that more evolved methods will never not replicate, any more than folios beat scrolls or cars beat horses. There will be both gains and losses as things shift. Like all technologies (Kelly, 2010), the old ways of teaching will never go away completely and will still have value for some.  Indeed, they might retain quite a large niche for many years to come. 

But now we can do a whole lot more as well and instead, and the new ways work better, on the whole. In a competitive ecosystem, alternatives that work better will normally come to dominate. All the pieces are in place for this to happen: it is just taking us a little while to collectively realize that we don’t need the trainer-wheels any more. Last gasp attempts to revamp the model, like first-generation xMOOCs, merely serve to illustrate the flaws in the existing model, highlighting in sharp relief the absurdities of adopting group-based forms on an Internet-based scale. imposing structural forms designed to keep learners on track in physical classrooms have no sense or meaning when applied to a voluntary, uncredentiallled and interest-driven course. I think we can do better than that.

The key steps are to disaggregate learning and assessment, and to do away with uniform courses with fixed schedules and pre-determined processes and outcomes. Outsiders, from MOOC providers (they are adapting fast) to publishers are beginning to realize this, as are a few universities like WGU.

It is time to surf the adjacent possible (Kauffman, 2000), to discover ways of learning with others that take advantage of the new horizons, that are not trapped like horseless carriages replicating the limitations of a bygone era. Furthermore, we need to learn to build new virtual environments and learning ecosystems in ways that do not just mimic patterns of the past, but that help people to learn in more flexible, richer ways that take advantage of the freedoms they enable – not personalized (with all the power assertion that implies) but both personal and social. If we build tools like learning management systems or the first generation xMOOC environments like edX, that are trapped into replicating traditional classroom-bound forms, we not only fail to take advantage of the wealth of the network, but we actually reinforce and ossify the very things we are reacting against rather than opening up new vistas of pedagogical opportunity. If we sustain power structures by linking learning and formal assessment, we hobble our capacity to teach. If we enclose learning in groups that are defined as much by who they exclude as who they encompass (Shirky, 2003) then we actively prevent the spread of knowledge. If we design outcome-based courses on fixed schedules, we limit the potential for individual control, and artificially constrain what need not be constrained.

Not revolution but recognition of what we already do

Any and all of this can change. There have long been methods for dealing with the issues of uniformity in course design and structure and/or tight integration of summative assessment to fixed norms, even within educational institutions. European-style PhDs (the ones without courses), portfolio-based accreditation (PLAR, APEL, etc), challenge exams, competency-based ‘courses’,  open courses with negotiable outcomes, assessments and processes (we have several at AU), whole degrees by negotiated learning outcomes, all provide different and accepted ways to do this and have been around for at least decades if not hundreds of years. Till recently these have mostly been hard to scale and expensive to maintain. Not any more. With the growth of technologies like OpenBadges, Caliper and xAPI, there are many ways to record and accredit learning that do not rely on fixed courses, pre-designed outcomes-based learning designs and restrictive groups. Toolsets like the Landing, Mahara or LPSS provide learner-controlled ways to aggregate and assemble both the process and evidence of learning, and to facilitate the social construction of knowledge – to allow the crowd to teach – without demanding the roles and embodied power structures of traditional learning environments. By either separating learning and accreditation or by aligning accreditation with individual learning and competences, it would be fairly easy to make this change and, whether we like it or not, it will happen: if universities don’t do it, someone else will. 

All of traditional education is bound by historical constraint and path dependencies. It has led to a vast range of technologies to cope, such as terms and semesters, libraries, classrooms, courses, lessons, exams, grading, timetables, curricula, learning objectives, campuses, academic forms and norms in writing, disciplinary divisions and subdivisions, textbooks, rules and disciplinary procedures, avoidance of plagiarism, homework, degrees, award ceremonies and a massive range of other big and small inventions and technologies that have nothing whatsoever to do with learning.

Nothing at all.

All are contingent. They are simply a reaction to barriers and limitations that made good sense while those barriers existed. Every one of them is up for question. We need to imagine a world in which any or all of these constraints can be torn down. That is why we need to think about different social forms, that is why we continue to build the Landing, that is why we continue to explore the ways that learning is evolving outside the ivory tower, that is why we are trying to increase learner control in our courses (even if we cannot yet rid ourselves of all their constraints), that is why we are exploring alternative and open forms of accreditation. It is not just about doing what we have always done in slightly better, more efficient ways. Ultimately, it is about expanding the horizons of education itself. Education is not about courses, awards, classes and power hierarchies. Education is about learning. more accurately, it is about technologies of learning – methods, tools, processes, procedures and techniques. These are all inventions, and inventions can be superseded and improved. Outside formal institutions, this has already begun to happen. It is time we in universities caught up.

References

Dron, J., & Anderson, T. (2014). Teaching crowds: social media and distance learning. Athabasca: AU Press. 

Kauffman, S. (2000). Investigations (Kindle ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. 

Kelly, K. (2010). What Technology Wants (Kindle ed.). New York: Viking. 

Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. Retrieved from http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

We might as well start with exams

In case anyone missed it, one of countless examples of mass cheating in exams is being reported quite widely, such as at http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/hundreds-expelled-in-india-for-cheating-on-pressure-packed-exams-1.2289032.

The videos are stunning (Chrome and Firefox users – look for the little shield or similar icon somewhere in or near you browser’s address field to unblock the video. IE users will probably have a bar appearing in the browser asking if you want to trust the site – you do. Opera, Konqueror and Safari users should be able to see the video right away), e.g.:

As my regular readers will know, my opinions of traditional sit-down, invigilated, written exams could not be much lower. Sitting in a high-stress environment, unable to communicate with anyone else, unable to refer to books or the Internet, with enormous pressure to perform in a fixed period to do someone else’s bidding, in an atmosphere of intense powerlessness, typically using a technology you rarely encounter anywhere else (pencil and paper), knowing your whole future depends on what you do in the next 3 hours, is a relatively unusual situation to find yourself in outside an exam hall. It is fair enough for some skills – journalism, for example, very occasionally leaves you in similar conditions. But, if it actually is an authentic skill needed for a particular field, then it should be explicitly taught and, if we are serious about it, it should probably be examined under truly authentic conditions (e.g. for a journalist, in a hotel room, cafe, press room, or trench). This is seldom done. It is not surprising, therefore, that exams are an extremely poor indicator of competence and an even worse indicator of teaching effectiveness. By and large, they assess things that we do not teach.

If that were all, I might not be so upset with the idea – it would just be weird and ineffective. However, exams are not just inefficient in a system designed to teach, they are positively antagonistic to learning. This is an incredibly wasteful tragedy of the highest order. Among the most notable of the many ways that they oppose teaching are that:

• they shift the locus of control from the learner to the examiner
• they shift the focus of attention from the activity to the accreditation
• they typically punish cooperation and collaboration
• they typically focus on content rather than performance
• they typically reward conformity and punish creativity
• they make punishments or rewards the reasons for performing, rather than the love of the subject
• they are unfair – they reward exam skills more than subject skills.

In short, the vast majority of unseen written exams are deeply demotivating ^{(naysayers, see footnote)}, distract attention away from learning, and fail to discriminate effectively or fairly. They make the whole process of learning inefficient, not just in the wasted time and energy involved surrounding the examination itself, but in (at the very least) doubling the teaching effort needed just to overcome their ill effects. Moreover, especially in the sciences and technologies, they have a strong tendency to reinforce and encourage ridiculous content-oriented ways of teaching that map some abstract notion of what a subject is concerned with to exercises that relate to that abstract model, rather than to applied practices, problem solving and creative synthesis – i.e. the things that really matter.  The shortest path for an exam-oriented course is usually bad teaching and it takes real creativity and a strong act of will to do otherwise. Professional bodies are at least partly culpable for such atrocities.

There is one and only one justification for 99% of unseen written exams that makes any sense at all, which is that it allows us to relatively easily and with some degree of assurance (if very expensively, especially given the harmful effects on learning) determine that the learner receiving accreditation is the one that has learned. It’s not the only way, but it is one of them. That sounds reasonable enough. However, as examples like this show in very sharp relief, exams are not particularly good at that either. If you create a technology that has a single purpose of preventing cheating, then cheats (bearing in mind that the only thing we have deliberately and single-mindedly taught them from start to finish is that the single purpose of everything they do is to pass an exam) will simply find better ways to cheat – and they do so, in spades. There is a whole industry dedicated to helping people to cheat in exams, and it evolves at least as fast as the technologies that we use to prevent it. At least twenty percent of students in North America admit to having at some point in the last year cheated in exams. Some studies show much higher rates overall – 58% of high school students in Canada, for example.  It is hard to think of a more damning indictment of a broken system than this. The problem is likely even worse in other regions of the world. For instance, Davis et al (2009) reckon a whopping 83% of Chinese and 70% of Russian schoolkids cheat on exams. Let me repeat that: only 17% of Chinese people claim never to have cheated in an exam. See a previous post of mine for some intriguing examples of how that happens. When something that most people believe to be wrong is so deeply endemic, it is time to rethink the whole thing. No amount of patching over and tweaking at the edges is going to fix this.

But it’s not just exams

This is part of a much broader problem, and it is a really simple and obvious one: if you teach people that accreditation rather than learning is the purpose of education, especially if such accreditation makes a massive difference to what kind and quality of life they might have as a result of having or not having it, then it is perfectly reasonable that they should find better ways of achieving accreditation, rather than better ways of learning. Even most of our ‘best’ students, the ones that put in some of the hardest work, tend to be focused on the grades first and foremost, because that is our implicit and/or explicit subtext. To my shame, I’m as guilty as anyone of having used grades to coerce: I have been known to annoy my students with a little song that includes the lines ‘If a good mark is what you seek, blog, blog, blog, every week’.  Even if we assume that student will not cheat (and, on the whole, mature students like those that predominate at Athabasca U do not cheat, putting the lie to the nonsense some have tried to promote about distance education leading to more cheating) it challenges teachers to come up with ways of constructively aligning assessment and learning, so that assessment actually contributes to rather than detracts from learning. With skill and ingenuity, it can be done, but it is hard work and an uphill struggle. We really shouldn’t have to be doing that in the first place because learning is something that all humans do naturally and extremely willingly when not pressured to do so. We don’t need to be forced to do what we love to do. We love the challenge, the social value, the control it brings. In fact, forcing us to do things that we love always takes away some or all of the love we feel for them. That’s really sad. Educational systems make the rods that beat themselves.

Moving forwards a little

We can start with the simple things first. I think that there are ways to make exams much less harmful. My friend and colleague Richard Huntrods, for example, simply asks students to reflect about what they have done on his (open, flexible and learner-centred) course. The students know exactly what they will be asked to do in advance, so there is no fear of the unknown, and there is no need for frantic revising because, if they have done the work, they can be quite assured of knowing everything they need to know already. It is a bit odd not to be able to talk with others or refer to notes or the Web, but that’s about all that is inauthentic. This is a low-stress approach that demands nothing more than coming to an exam centre and writing about what they have done, which is an activity that actually contributes substantially to effective learning rather than detracting from it. It is constructively aligned in a quite exemplary way and would be part of any effective learning process anyway, albeit not at an exam centre.  It is still expensive, it still creates a bit more stress for students who have learned to fear exams, but it makes sense if we feel we don’t know our students well enough or we do not trust them enough to credit them for the work they have done. Of course, it demands a problem- or enquiry-based, student-centred pedagogy in the first place. This would not be effective for a textbook wraparound or other content-centric course. But then, we should not be writing those anyway as little is more certain to discourage a love of learning, a love of the subject, or a satisfying learning experience. 

There are plenty of exam-like things that can make sense, in the right kind of context, when approached with care: laboratory exercises, driving tests, and other experiences that closely resemble those of the practice being examined, for example, are quite sensible approaches to accreditation that are aligned with and can even be supportive of the learning process. There are also ways of doing exams that can markedly reduce the problems associated with them, such as allowing conversation and the use of the Internet, open-book papers that allow students to come and go as needed, questions that challenge students to creatively solve problems, exams that use questions created by the students themselves, oral exams that allow examiners to have a useful learning dialogue with examinees, and so on. There are different shades of grey and not all are as awful as the worst, by any means. There are other ways that tend to work better – for instance, badges, portfolios, and many other approaches that allow us to demonstrate competence rather than compliance, that rely on us coming to know our students, and that allow multiple approaches and different skills to be celebrated – but not all exam-like things are as bad as the worst of them.

And, of course, if we avoid exams altogether then we can do much more useful things, like involving students in creating the assignments; giving feedback instead of grades for work done; making the work relevant to student needs, allowing multiple paths, different evidence; giving badges for achievement, not to goad it, etc, etc. There’s a book or two in what we can do to limit the problems though, ultimately, this can only take us so far because, looming at the end of every learning path at an institution, is the accreditation. And therein lies the rub.

Moving forwards a lot

The central problem that we have to solve is not so much the exam itself as the unbreakable linkage of teaching and accreditation. Exams are just a symptom of a flawed system taken to its obvious and most absurd conclusion. But all forms of accreditation that become the purpose of learning are carts driving horses. I recognize and celebrate the value of authentic and meaningful accreditation, but there is no reason whatsoever that learning and accreditation should be two parts of the same system, let alone of the same process.  It it were entirely clear that the purpose of taking a course (or any other learning activity – courses are another demon we need to think carefully about) were to learn, rather than to succeed in a test, then education would work a great deal better. We would actually be able to do things that support learning, rather than that support credit scores; to give feedback that leads to improvement, rather than as a form of punishment or reward; to allow students to expand and explore pathways that diverge rather than converge; to get away from our needs and to concentrate on those of our students; to support people’s growth rather than to stunt it by setting false goals; to valorize creativity and ingenuity; to allow people to gain the skills they actually need rather than those we choose to teach; to empower them, rather than to become petty despots ourselves. And, in an entirely separate process of assessment that teachers may have little or anything to do with at all, we could enable multiple ways to demonstrate learning that are entirely dissociated from the process. Students might use evidence from learning activities we help them with as something to prove their competence, but our teaching would not be focused on that proof. It’s a crucial distinction that makes all the difference in the world.  This is not a revolutionary idea about credentialling – it’s exactly what many of the more successful and enlightened companies already do when hiring or promoting people: they look at the whole picture presented, take evidence from multiple sources, look at the things that matter in the context of application, and treat each individual as a human being with unique strengths, skills and weaknesses, given the evidence available. Credentials from institutions may be part of that right now, but there is no reason for that idea to persist and plenty of alternative ways of showing skills and knowledge that are becoming increasingly popular and significant, from social network recommendations to open badges to portfolios. In fact, we even have pockets of such processes well entrenched within universities. Traditional British PhDs, for example, while they are examined through the thesis and an oral exam (a challenging but flexible process), are examined on evidence that is completely unique to the individual student. Students may target the final assessment a bit, but the teaching itself is not much focused on that. Instead, it is on helping them to do what they want to do. And, of course, there are no grades involved at all – only feedback.

Conclusion

It’s going to be a long slow struggle to change the whole of the educational system across most of the world, especially as there’s a good portion of the world that would be delighted to have these kinds of problems in the first place. We need education before we can have cheating. But we do need to change this, and exams are a good place to start. It changed once before, with far less research to support the change, and far weaker technologies and communication to enable it. And it changed recently. In the grand scheme of things, the first ever university exam of the kind we now recognize as almost universal was the blink of an eye ago. The first ever written exam of the kind we use now (not counting a separate branch for the Chinese Civil Service that began a millenium before) was at the end of the 18th Century (the Cambridge Tripos) and it was only near the end of the 19th Century that written exams began to gain a serious foothold. This was within the lifetime of my grandparents. This is not a tradition steeped in history – it’s an invention that appeared long after the steam engine and only became significant as the internal combustion engine was born.  I just hope institutions like ours are not heading back down the tunnel or standing still, because those heading into the light are going to succeed while those that stay in the shadows will at best become the laughing stock of the world. 

On the subject of which, do watch the video. It is kind-of funny in a way, but the humour is very dark and deeply tragic. The absurdity makes me want to laugh but the reality of how this crazy system is wrecking people’s lives makes me want to cry. On balance, I am much more saddened and angered by it than amused. These are not bad people: this is a bad system. 

Reference

Footnote

I know some people will want to respond that the threat or reward of assessment is somehow motivating. If you are one of those, this postscript is for you. 

I understand what you are saying. That is what many of us were taught to believe and it is one way we justify persisting despite the evidence that it doesn’t work very well. I agree that it is motivating, after a fashion, very much like paying someone to do something you want them to do, or hitting them if they don’t. Very much indeed. You can create an association between a reward/punishment and some other activity that you want your subject to perform and, as long as that association persists, you might actually make them do it. Personally speaking, I find that quite offensive, not to mention only mildly effective at achieving its own limited ends, but each to their own. But notice how you have replaced the interest in the activity with an interest in the reward and/or the desire to avoid punishment. Countless research studies from several fields have pretty conclusively shown that both reward and punishment are strongly antagonistic to intrinsic motivation and, in many cases, actually destroy it altogether. So, you can make someone do something by destroying their love of doing it – good job. But that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, especially as what they have learned is presumably meant to be of ongoing value and interest, to help them in their lives. It is my belief that, if you want to teach effectively, you should never make people learn anything – you should support them in doing so if that is what they want to do. It is good to encourage and enthuse them so that they want to do it and can see the value – that’s a useful teacher role – but it’s a whole different ballgame altogether to coerce them. Alas, it is very hard to avoid it altogether until we change education, and that’s one good reason (I hope you agree) we need to do that.

For further information, you could do worse that to read pretty much anything by Alfie Kohn. If you are seeking a broader range of in-depth academic work, try the Self Determination Theory site.