Universities' ed-tech conundrum (3/5)

The following is the third installment of five short essays about the central but misunderstood role educational technology is playing in today’s universities. Between 800 and 1200 words (I transgressed my rule this month by 200 words), each passage will discuss the learning management system (LMS), the nerve centre that now supports the delivery of virtually every university course. I will post every 30 days. The project is part of my tenure as President’s Teaching Scholar at the University of Regina’s Centre for Teaching & Learning, a gig that ends in August 2024.

LMS's coming clash with the 19th-century academy

At the end of last month’s essay, we observe that our university system remains stuck in the nineteenth century. The third instalment of the series you find below talks mostly about that odd state of affairs.

The university system as we know it really goes back about two centuries. Wilhelm von Humboldt was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, diplomat—and accomplished bureaucrat. Taking advantage of his perch as privy councillor in the Interior Ministry, he founded the University of Berlin in 1810, and laid the foundations for the Humboldtian university and our modern university system. That early version of the academy carried on some ancient learning traditions going back to classical antiquity and the seven liberal arts: the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music). But Wilhelm’s ideas also brought several revolutionary but eventually enduring features to the academy. Universities should be open, he proposed, not constrained by arbitrary or fixed curricula; professors followed their own paths of scientific inquiry and students chose their own courses and instructors. More important, teaching and research was no longer neatly separated. Research informed teaching and teaching informed research. The system produced talented but eccentric, free-spirited faculty members—some of them overbearing, some of them withdrawn—incentivized to focus more on science than on their students. The students who eventually filled prestigious faculty chairs would be little different. Meanwhile, such comingling of teaching and research handed professors complete control over seminars and scientific laboratories, giving them enormous power in university bureaucracy.

Implicit in the Humboldtian university seminar is both simplicity and inefficiency. A teacher dumps a pile of books on the table, sends each of the students home with one of them, and promises to reconvene the following week. While a thoroughgoing discussion of this and that theme is planned, both the teachers and students know this will never happen. Next week, the class will get caught up on one line of one paragraph of one book, and the discussion will venture off somewhere interesting. Such has been the magical experience of higher education for the past several centuries.

This venerable tradition would be powerfully challenged—and right from the beginning. In fact, upheaval came on May 1, 1851. The first world expo, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations and the all-glass hall in which it was housed, struck everyone dumb. It was not just the Great Britain’s agricultural implements, marine engines, looms, and steam engines housed in the entire western half of the all-glass hall. The stalls operated by foreign countries on the east wing were astonishing, too. The mind-bogglingly diverse commodities, curios, spices, instruments, tools and dyes found in the exhibition catalogue all had to be named and classified and the cultural and physical geographies that produced them, understood. Meanwhile, fields like commercial law, commercial geography, and political economy exploded into the public consciousness. With its obsession with abstract mathematics, Greek and Latin, classical cultures, and natural science, the university was distinctly ill-equipped to deal with this complex global world of commerce. “Higher” commercial and technical colleges with intensive lock-step programs in commercial geography, chemistry, international commerce and language training sprang up all across Europe to fill this vacuum.

The “massification” of the university system further challenged the global university system. In Canada’s case, the “Veterans Charter” began this process, providing funding for veterans to access higher education as a strategy to integrate them back into civilian life and prevent a glut in the post-WWII labor market. The end of the war would of course also lead to a baby boom, and an explosion of college-age kids in the 1960s and 1970s. Burgeoning demand for seats in higher ed in combination with society’s widespread belief in the causal relationship between the education of society and economic growth prompted federal and provincial governments to step up. They invested in existing institutions and established new ones. They established a raft of community colleges, making career-focused training a permanent fixture of higher education. They spent hundreds of millions on scholarships, grants, and loans. But by the end of the 20th century, university enrollments had either plateaued or begun to decline, threatening budgets and forcing universities to off-shore their recruitment strategies. The ballooning and subsequent shrinking of higher ed threatened the old Humboldtian model in two ways. Higher ed was no longer the rarefied realm it once was. Those who could afford the fees could go. And that timeless seminar-based relationship with a professor began to lose its value. If there really was no guarantee to join society’s educated elite or to get the old guy’s chair when he died, then what was the point?

The professionalization of the academy also threatened the Humboldtian system. As society became increasingly sophisticated, demand for specialization and credentials grew. Indeed, professional schools have been there all along. Penn Med, the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania just turned 250—you read that right. Harvard Law School appeared in 1817. And over the subsequent two centuries, professional programs in universities have exploded: Nursing, medicine, dentistry, agriculture, physical therapy, architecture, engineering, social work, business, and information technology programs all lead to professional credentials. The clash between this system and the old 19th-century German academy is obvious. Professional credentials of faculty members are valued at least equally to their academic excellence. Arts and science faculties, the core of Humboldt’s university, merely provides padding for the real education that goes on in students’ third and fourth years. Government funding agencies, regulating bodies, alumni associations, donor corporations, and industry leaders have all stepped in to interfere with the curriculum. So much for academic freedom. So much for the free-wheeling grad seminar. ?

But the Humboldtian university model capably fought off all its challengers. By the beginning of the 20th century, the reputations of the regimented “higher” commercial and technical schools had begun to wane. Universities embraced economics, political science, statistics and other fields upon which global trade depended, and the captains of industry began to send their kids to newly established faculties of “commerce.” More recently, universities have added departments, research centres and chairs in fields as diverse and specialized as bioinformatics, environmental engineering, and cybersecurity. They adapted. Meanwhile, the world’s most prestigious universities grew up in the world’s economic and geopolitical centres of power. They sent their graduates out to the periphery, and a stable, enduring hierarchy formed. The tenure track system strings everything together. Regardless of their field, “tenured” faculty have the important Humboldtian status of researcher-teacher (in that order) conferred on them, maintaining the prestige of the entire system.

Until now. The advent of the learning management system presents the university system with an existential challenge.

Why? The entire university system is built around the inefficiency of the seminar, even in classrooms with hundreds of students. But intrinsic to the LMS are basic premises of online consumption: consistency, accessibility, and seamlessness. When students do online banking at any bank, they expect the webpage’s color scheme to be different, but the functionality and experience to be essentially the same. The same set of basic tabs spread down the left and across the top. So students reasonably expect the same accessibility from the university LMS: How do I find the report due date, sign up for a group project, breeze through a few review questions for the midterm exam? Oh, I am supposed to go back to that pdf-format syllabus, skim over the long section on academic misconduct, and find out what to do at the bottom of the page. I will do it when I get back from work, sigh.

Practical factors prevent professors from delivering a consistent, banking-standard product even if they believed that were their mandate. Instructional design is specialized, time- and resource-intensive, and increasingly professionalized. And discussions about the LMS amongst professors tend to center on a bells-and-whistles kind of functionality: Every semester there are new plugins, new interactive features, and new analytic report tools to be tried and then discarded or deployed. Do those enthusiastic discussions by the early adopters filter out to their faculties in the form of best practice? Don’t count on it. The late adopters and non-adopters don’t want to hear about it. Meanwhile, there are philosophical reasons students don’t get their course delivered to them in one slick package on the LMS. Teachers know that deploying all the crisp functionality of the LMS will get rid of a lot of that inefficiency. That’s the problem, they think.

Whatever the case, we have never dealt with the value clash between the 19th- and 21st-century academy. That clash is about to break out into the open.

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