This is roughly the content of my 3 minute pitch to explain (some of) my research, that I gave at the OUNL research day in Heerlen, Netherlands yesterday. I was allowed one slide:
This is (very roughly) what I said:
Mediaeval scholars were faced with the problem that knowledge (doctrine actually), often found in rare and expensive books, needed to be passed from the few to the many. Lecturing was an efficient solution, given the constraints of physics. Because everyone needed to be in the same place at the same time for this to work, we developed schools, universities, classes, courses, timetables and terms and semesters. We built resources like libraries. We created organizational units to manage it all, like faculties and colleges. Above all, for efficiency, we needed rules of behaviour and a natural power dynamic putting the lecturer in control for every moment of the learning activity in a classroom.
Learning (like most things) works best – by far – when learners are intrinsically motivated. It barely works at all when learners are amotivated. Self determination theory tells us that three things are needed for intrinsic motivation: support for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The mediaeval solution was good for relatedness, but bad for competence (some found it too challenging, some not challenging enough) and terrible for autonomy. The chance of amotivation is thus very high. Many of our pedagogies, processes, and much of the art of teaching since then have been, in one way or another, attempts to deal with this one central problem. The most common solution to the lack of intrinsic motivation that resulted was to apply externally regulated extrinsic motivation – rewards like grades and qualifications, rules of attendance, punishments for non-compliance, etc – which, self determination theory shows, is infallibly fatal to intrinsic motivation, making things far worse. How crazy is it that we have to force people to do the one thing that makes us most human, a drive to learn that is arguably stronger than sex or even the pursuit of food? Good teachers using well considered teaching methods can usually overcome many of the issues, at least for many students much of the time. But that’s what good pedagogy means. It is highly situated in solving the innate problems of in-person teaching.
On the whole, for perfectly understandable reasons (much distance teaching evolved in an in-person context with which it had to interoperate) we have transferred those exact same pedagogies unthinkingly to open, self paced, self directed, distance learning. ‘Teaching is teaching’, advocates claim, and so they try, as much as possible, to replicate online what they do in a classroom. But the motivational problems faced by distance learners are almost the exact inverse of those of in-person learners. They have lots of autonomy – you can’t really take it away – and can take different paths and pacing to gain competence (e.g. rewinding or skipping videos, re-reading text, augmenting with other resources, etc), but tend to suffer from reduced relatedness, especially when learning truly independently, in a self paced modality. Given this mismatch and the lack of well evolved support and processes for this very different context, it is not surprising there is often a high rate of attrition, especially when teachers (lacking the closeness and authority or in-person colleagues) double down on rewards and punishments through grades, even to the extent of rewarding participation, thus making it even worse.
There is no such thing as a disembodied, abstract, decontextualized pedagogy – it is all about orchestrating technologies- so any solution must be as much about buildings tools and structures as it is about using techniques and methods. They are entirely inseparable. A significant part of my current research is thus an attempt to design native online pedagogies, technologies, and other parts of educational systems (including credentialling) that don’t rely on reward and punishment; that are built for supporting learning in the complex, ever changing modern world that does exist, rather than for the indoctrination of mediaeval students.
