One thing i like about teaching at a university is that, for all its other hassles, those of us in the classroom have pretty wide latitude in how we teach our classes, and there aren’t too many efforts to mandate particular practices, software, etc.
I’m supposed to use the university’s chosen Course Management System (in our case, Moodle) to post my syllabus, class assignments, etc., but apart from that, there’s no-one telling me what types of assignments to set, or pushing me to use particular software systems.
The only pressure we get to use certain programs or online software comes from the publishers. A huge part of the publishing industry now involves not just producing textbooks and monographs and readers, but flogging a whole bunch of ancillary stuff like online quizzes, exercises, assignments, maps, videos, pictures, etc., etc., all of which are allegedly designed to improve student learning while also making our jobs easier. Every few weeks i have a rep from one company or other wanting to show me their latest online offerings.
So far, i really haven’t gone down the online route much at all, and that’s not because i’m a luddite or opposed to the use of technology. And it’s also not because i’m lazy, because one of the biggest selling points pushed by all these publishers is that using their online exercises will dramatically reduce the amount of time faculty spend grading papers and other assignments.
For a while, the main types of online quizzes available were multiple choice tests, which can easily be graded by the computer. But some publishers are now pushing software that, they claim, will grade proper written work, pointing out errors of spelling, grammar, sentence construction, and even content.
By refusing to move to online work and multiple choice tests, i make more work for myself. I spent yesterday grading essays written by my students, and because i want to provide feedback both on their historical understanding and on their writing skills, each paper takes some time. But i firmly believe that history is about demonstrating skills like reading comprehension, analysis, synthesis, and the ability to construct an argument, and it’s my job to help my students with that stuff.
My students would probably also prefer that i move to the new technology, because most of them hate writing papers, and quite a few of them also complain when i correct basic errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence construction. But if you’re a university junior and you can’t tell the difference, or are too rushed or lazy to care about the difference, between “their” and “there,” or if you can’t manage basic subject/verb agreement, or if you can’t make the antecedents of your pronouns clear for your reader, you need to be corrected, because this stuff affects your ability to make yourself understood.
One big selling point for the online stuff, according to the publisher reps, is that it is more “engaging” for the students. I’ve even had one or two of them imply that i’m somehow remiss in my duties as a teacher for sticking to old fashioned books and documents in the classroom. But, as a historian, i happen to believe that the stuff we study in my class is inherently interesting, and is made even more interesting if you are willing to read, engage with, and talk about the material. If someone wants to sit in the back corner of the room all semester and do nothing, then yes, they might have a boring semester. But, as our students never tire of pointing out, they are adults, and i’m not going to pander to their desire for videos or games just because they’d prefer those things to reading.
