A post today on the uses of virtual environments to help teach Literature. From the title you can see that this week I have been learning to use Moodle, maybe much later than you, my reader (if you exist), as it seems dear UAB has not been exactly in a hurry to open its Moodle classrooms. We’ve had our own platform, Virtual Campus, for a number of years now and even though it is less flexible than Moodle it seems both are going to coexist for a while. I myself feel right now too laaazzzzyyyy to open my Moodle classrooms.
Moodle, all considered, seems fine to me, maybe a bit overwhelming at first with all those mysterious menus. It is also time-consuming, which makes it particularly apt for courses of fixed content in which material and exercises are repeated from one year to the next.
This is precisely the reason why I’m not so happy about its applications to teaching Literature, as all self-respecting Lit teachers change the set texts as often as we reasonably can (even teaching Wuthering Heights for the twelfth time in a row is boring). What is, then, the point of developing, say, a quiz you’re only going to use once? (Um, maybe sell it? In the process of looking for materials for my Moodle class, I found out there’s an internet teachers’ market for PowerPoint presentations –and then we complain that students are lazy…)
Before you think I’m a technophobic Taliban (would I be writing a blog?) let me explain that I have been teaching an ‘Introduction to English Literature’ (compulsory for Humanities and Catalan) at the online Universitat Oberta de Catalunya since 1998. That’s already quite a long time but I haven’t really seen much change as regards how we teach Literature.
Essentially, students at the UOC read (and they do it well, being mature students mostly educated in the far more serious pre-1994 pre-LOGSE system), consider the questions in the exercises and write; I read their exercises, mark them and provide feedback. They DO learn. Do the Forum and the Debate compensate for what happens in a conventional classroom? No, I don’t think so, it’s quite impossible. Yet, my online students do in many cases, not to say most cases, better than their UAB equivalents. Why? I have already said: they have been trained/educated in another system and are far more autonomous readers and learners.
At the UAB we are being asked to use Moodle, which is a platform for online learning (or e-learning), as a complement to our ‘traditional’ classroom-based teaching. I am not sure this is fair, probably because I also teach online. I find Campus Virtual and Moodle VERY useful, don’t get me wrong, to keep the class up-dated, send messages, place materials in their hands. However, when last year I used the Forums, as I do at UOC, the result was mixed: positive peer interaction, yes, but both the students and myself felt we were doing too much. Don’t we have classroom time for debate? Why should we use Forums? (And what else can we do for Literature in e-learning, I wonder?)
In a way, virtual interaction works well for shy students and has become more and more necessary because classroom time seems to have shrunk. I don’t mean that we teach fewer hours (with Bologna and the new BA degree we actually teach more, which mystifies me). What I mean is that as students’ autonomy as readers and learners has not been encouraged by ESO (our secondary education seems to have destroyed all vestiges of that), classroom hours are needed for pretty basic stuff, such as making sure students follow the plot of the novels they read. More and more is pushed onto the virtual classroom and, therefore, home, but not as Bologna intends.
The idea is that the new generation, being used to the internet, will approach the traditional teaching of Literature with more eagerness if new technologies are used. My impression is that this is not the case, at least in a conventional, presential environment. Reading online has nothing to do with reading books and I, personally, prefer students to read books. The virtual classroom takes time off that and, anyway, no one can STUDY using a computer. We still need paper and pencil (yes, some eBook readers already allow users to underline and makes notes, that’s also valid).
I’ll get ready, then, to Moodle myself up hoping I won’t muddle my teaching even more. In the meantime, teachers who have never even bothered to prepare a photocopy pack will continue as usual… offline.