In July this year we conducted our annual staff survey about our services, i.e. the support and guidance we provide and the technologies we promote/ support. The survey tells us what academics think of our workshops, what else they need from us, what they think about the benefits of using educational technologies as well as what obstacles to using them exist, and more. You can find the fairly short report on our website.
Two things stood out for me that I would like to raise here. 1. “lack of time”, an issue that has cropped up in our surveys since at least 2010. This isn’t unique to our staff, nor is it only related to learning technology, and it isn’t a modern phenomenon either: we are all time-poor, “there are only so many hours in a day”. Hence, one must prioritise, and it seems that to engage with the benefits of educational technologies isn’t high on everyone’s list. We can only hope to raise the profile of our work even more to tip the scales in our favour. 2. A final comment explains that “I get the impression you are trying to push a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist, i.e. too much tech does not necessarily get students to study better, or for learning to improve”. That second clause is of course trivially true: we would never say otherwise. But that is exactly why we do not push technologies for their own sakes only. Rather, our role as learning technologists is to explore the benefits of technological solutions to problems that we know do exist. For example, we know that students feel that they don’t get consistent feedback, so we offer staff a variety of ways of providing better feedback, more conveniently, e.g. through moodle (including use of voice tools for audio feedback). Or we do know that students like to revisit aspects of lectures that they didn’t understand at the time. If staff agree to be recorded, we offer a lecture capture system that allows students to review those lecture sections. And we allow staff to take control of how they release these lectures, too. We know that very large lectures can be alienating and aren’t particularly good learning opportunities. So we offer ways in which lectures can be changed to make them more engaging, by introducing video elements, or using instant voting systems to allow students to think through their learning together.
But at no moment do we push any of these and certainly not if we haven’t at first identified a problem to which these technologies might be a solution. If you think that we are too pushy (perhaps we have been too enthusiastic in conversations?), then do always feel free to come and speak to any of us, engage us in the debate, explain to us what we can improve about how we go about embedding educational technologies. That is the main purpose of our annual survey, but if we get to speak with you in person, that’s even better!