 Good morning everyone. I feel like I should sing, but I'm not going to sing. I'm going to be talking about blended learning and student protests. And I'm just going to start with two quotes. One of which is that the student protests were described as a meeting of new emerging antagonisms with old resolved ones. These are the student protests in South Africa and Donna Herrera reminding us that technology is not neutral. And I'm going to be talking about how academics in one research intensive university made sense of the role of blended learning during campus shutdowns in 2015 to 2017. In a little bit of context, the South African student enrollments have doubled. Up until 2016, the demographics have changed. The student bodies become much more heterogeneous. But participation and success rates are highly skewed and black students still do much more badly in throughputs in South African higher education. So exclusion takes multiple forms, partly through funding and student debt and the reduction of state funding, but also through the cultures of the universities, especially the traditional research intensive universities. It's impossible to describe the protests in South Africa between 2015 and 2017 in one slide. This was my hardest slide to put together. Any South African who's watching me is going to disagree with my summary. But briefly, there had been protests before 2015 and there are still protests today. But during the roads must fall and fees must fall era, the entire system had protests with universities shut down for days and weeks. There were exam disruptions, delays and postponements. And the logic came to an end when the president of the time announced free education for the poor. There was a huge amount of damage, physical damage to the system up to about 45 million euros. And the protests were about fees falling, outsourcing and transforming the culture of the university. There have been some commentators trying to talk about this. Even the commentators in the books that are being written are highly contested. So let me just clarify that this is an extremely controversial, highly contested era and one that's very difficult to make sense of. But I'm going to give you a little bit of an account from some of the academics. And what happened at the University of Cape Town is that at the end of 2016, which was the second year of the protests at the university, there was an announcement that teaching and learning would resume because the university had been closed through a variety of approaches, including blended learning. This was the first time that academics had heard about it, and it was the first time that the Centre for Teaching and Learning had heard about it when it was announced on the vice chancellor's announcement. So we did a study with four universities who were involved in student protests in different ways. And at the University of Cape Town, we interviewed 16 academics, and they were people who had come to departmental sessions that were run during that protest shutdown period about if you're thinking of using blended learning during the shutdowns, are you interested? So that's how we managed to get those people. It was really difficult because people were very busy and under pressure. And we've actually written about this, drawing on a range of literatures, critical pedagogy, digital colonialism, a little bit about protests and social media, and then some literature on blended learning and challenging circumstances which is less useful because it tends to be about earthquakes or floods where there's much more agreement about the need for blended learning. We used activity theory to map out the account of using blended learning because as I was explaining, it's a really messy and conflicted space, and activity theory gave us a way of mapping the story as told to us by academics, which we found very helpful. And I'm sure many of you are familiar with activity theory. It's really about the subject, which in this case were the academics, and the object which in this case was blended learning towards an outcome which in this case was completing the curriculum for the year and writing exams, which had been under threat because of the shutdowns. And the tools that we used were that we found in these cases were both the protests and political actions and learning technological tools. These were also mediated by the rules of the game, the community this was all happening in and the division of labour. And that is a very detailed summary of what we found that I'm going to run through and which I'll come back to. So in terms of the subject, as I mentioned, these are the academics and all academics were implicated in this decision. So everyone was basically told, encouraged, suggested that they should use blended learning as a way of continuing teaching, but not all of them agreed with this. So whether they agreed, took it on, or didn't take it on, everyone was implicated. And for some people, this was nothing new. So some people said, well, it's already a blended institution. This isn't a big deal. And some of them said, one of them said, my course is sufficiently blended, so moving online is not a big deal. So if you think of a residential university that's in the process of becoming more blended like so many traditional face to face universities, those people are more likely to be at the front end of trying new technologies. But for all of them, it was very emotional and emotive. And some of them were angry, they would say blended learning is a bit of a band aid being stuck over a much more serious problem. In the second and third year, they would say, well, we tried it last year and really there's no appetite for it this year because we had three years of closures. And by the third year, people were actually planning their interventions. And then some people said, I was just so exhausted, we'd be so determined, there'd be no sacrifice. It's tough when you're in the middle of a residential thing and you suddenly have to do everything online. So there was a lot of anxiety and emotion attached to it. And then of course, some people were quite angry about this, where they said, look, blended learning is a deliberate activity and it's not what we're doing. It's got nothing to do with panic throwing things online. It's got nothing to do with what happened at the end of the year. It's a complete disservice to anyone who actually is engaged in blended learning. It's an abomination, okay, to suggest that what we did was blended learning. So that was on the other side of the spectrum. As I mentioned, the mediating tools was the technology itself and people use technology in a whole range of ways. One of the things that people who were already involved in lecture recording did is they carried on lecturing to empty lecture theaters and put the lecture recorded lecture up online for their students. The most common thing really was using the learning management system to put up notes and PowerPoint presentations and so on. But people also used WhatsApp chat groups, voice notes, a number of them made short clips themselves using their phones and some made screencasts. So there was a whole range of users and some people who'd never used technology before came up with various solutions. But while this was happening, all of this wasn't being mediated by the protests and the students who made teaching impossible in a range of ways. And bearing in mind, the student body is not a homogenous group. So you might have student protests, you might have students not protesting. Very, very mixed. But the protests, you ask how is it possible to close down a university? Well, in the one case, as you can see on the image there, if you block the entrance roads, that's a drone image of the blocked entrance road, you can't get onto campus. And then the other way is through disrupting lectures. As in this case where protestors would simply make it impossible for lectures to continue. And then also fire alarms going off continually, which makes it impossible to teach. The other thing that was a mediating factor was that there was security on campus and that was extremely controversial. Most people were very unhappy about security being on campus. So that kind of management intervention had also led to the final exams in the third year being held in a central marquee on the rugby field under a great surveillance, which also made things very tense. So in terms of the rules, what happened is that the primary formal pedagogical rule is for educators to teach face to face. And this new rule that was introduced very suddenly was greeted with resentment and ambivalence. And people said things like it was like a gun against your head. Or I just felt it was forced on us. There were a number of stakeholders involved. Every single stakeholder within the university community really. And we saw a division of labour between academics who were producing online content, the students who were either receiving or producing it because they also put their own content online. The tutors who played a very important role and the professional staff. So in some cases the tutors had a pens down campaign. They refused to participate. They said it was undermining the protest action. And the Centre for Teaching and Learning found itself in a very tricky situation where as a unit that provides teaching and learning support to the university, however people felt about it, they were actually producing guides on how to do this. And academics said without those professional staff they would have been lost. And people also tried to take into account issues of access and divides. So the central contradiction from an activity theory point of view was that the student protesters were demanding that the academics stop teaching. But the institutional imperative was for the curriculum to be finished and exams to be written. And there was enormous ambivalence about it. People were saying well you have to do what you feel comfortable doing. And at the same time this is not a normal situation. There was a great concern about divides and exclusion. Some people said this is about an exclusionary culture anyway. And the use of blended learning is making things more exclusionary. And others were really concerned about access and cost. And the cost of data for example. And the final thing that people spoke about and which is continued to this day is that blended learning has now developed really negative connotations. So any kind of online and blended learning project there is a danger that in academics minds it's associated with this kind of rough and ready introduction during student protests. So to go back to the image you can see that this was an extremely complex, rapidly changing, very volatile and fragmented set of activities during which the blended learning was introduced. And it really leaves us with the last questions which is what do academics do when they caught in this moral web of choices, compromises, strategies and imperatives about the use of technology? Was the use of technology a betrayal of the fight for free, decolonised education which many academics supported? What was the responsibility of the university to the vast student majority who wanted to finish the curriculum in fact had to finish the curriculum? Was the use of blended learning an appropriate response? And was the use of technology as blended learning even blended learning at all? So I'm throwing these questions out. I wonder what you would have done in the same circumstances given your roles in these kinds of fields as learning technologists and education developers. That's the situation that teachers and learning professionals found themselves in during this era. Thank you. Thank you very much Laura. Are there any questions or comments from the audience here? Thanks Laura. I don't know if this is a question but there's just so many things running through my head and in many ways I can't actually imagine being in that situation. So thank you for sharing that. I think it's really important to us. Just in terms of moving forward, I suppose what you've really highlighted is the danger of technology being imposed. So how do you think or what are the ways that you know of that staff and students are maybe trying to use technology or blended learning or things now in a more positive way? Or is it now just is there always going to be that kind of battle between this was imposed on us so we're not going to do it? I'm just wondering how people are moving forward. They're moving forward in lots of positive ways actually. We have a project that's around blended learning and online education. We have bids and in the bids we actually say this is not blended learning as it was used during the protest era. This is actually intended to improve student learning etc etc and we've got some fabulous projects. We've got a project at the moment on decolonizing African science through a blended format but one has to always deal with that discourse and that set of preconceptions. So I don't think it's closed the door but that's the context in which it's come to exist. And ironically there's been some positive spin-offs that there were some people who had never touched technology who did so during that period and who are now using it which is a really strange silver lining. Thank you very much and I guess that answers the question there a little bit about what is happening now in terms of blended learning. So just another question there Laura. How did you deal with equality issues for students who didn't have access to appropriate equipment? I probably went too fast but we actually developed a guide that looked specifically at issues of inequality and access. The university also provided free tablets and a laptop computer so that students could actually come and get them if they didn't have any. We also gave academics very very short questionnaire so that they could assess the conditions in which they worked. We made a list of all the free wi-fi spots in Cape Town which we shared so we developed a whole range of strategies to try and deal with that and we also tried to keep the university laboratories open which was not always possible. Thank you and I think probably our last question just for this for this section. So was the blended learning that did take place successful in terms of the results? You know the problem with something like this is you can't assess overall you get little flavors and stories and so in some cases yes I think in some cases having access to those lecture recordings and so on was helpful to students. We have also interviewed students as well which we're going to be writing up. The main problem was that the culture in which it happened was so problematic but I think some of those interventions especially things like WhatsApp groups and so on where people kept talking to each other was helpful in some cases in some circumstances to some people. That's great. I think we just actually have got one more question in there and we'll just have time for if you don't mind Lauren. Any lessons for the situation where disruption is caused by staff industrial action? That's not something I have experience of but I would imagine that the circumstances might be different although you do have the the tension between the academics and the senior decision makers and so in this case most academics even the ones who supported the intentions of the protests did want the academic year to finish so although they were resentful about being having the decision imposed on them they weren't actually against the intention of the decision. I think if it's going to be academics who are disagreeing with senior management it's going to be quite different and there the pressure might come from students. That's great thank you very much Lauren that was really insightful thank you very much for presenting and a bit round of applause please for Lauren. 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