Response to Derek Morrison's argument about the attraction of non–institutional elearning services

Follow-up to Shock of the Old Conference, 2005 from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

In his keynote speech at the Shock of the Old conference at Oxford, Derek Morrison argued that much of the current elearning infrastructure does not support the kinds of high-level social process that HE users require. And as a result, they are turning to services not provided by the institution. In a question at the end of the presentation i responded by saying that at Warwick we have observed this, and that in some areas we are attempting to provide the kinds of services that students want, but with valuable additional functionality that only university can offer. I now add to this the further argument that students do also value good guaranteed support.

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We have observed that students, and to a lesser extent lecturers, are using external services in a self-organized way. However, they are quite smart about the risks in doing so.

I have had discussions with students who are maintaining blogs on both external systems and on our Warwick Blogs system. They understand the dangers of being tied into external services that are run for profit. They also know the limitations of free services, and the lack of guarantees that they offer.

They are, therefore, less likely to use such external services for critical activities. They are used heavily for less formal and less critical (although often important) activities.

On the contrary, now that our IT Service department is being much more serious about stating and maintaining levels of service, whilst offering the kind of services that student want, I suspect that students will start using our provisions more fully. The trick is to get the right provisions, with added functionality beyond external offerings, and furthermore, to support interoperability with the informal learning that students are carrying out on non-university systems (the filling-station model is an example of where we must get this interoperability right).

Robert O'Toole : 09 Apr 2005 22:59 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem