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Metaphors can be dangerous things. A piece in Inside Higher Education this week suggested that instructional designers are ‘the sherpas of online learning teams’. Wow. Really? Sherpas are an indigenous people and not just the individual guides and mountaineers who have helped largely entitled, rich, white male climbers play out their world domination fantasies while…
Some of you may remember that I started my previous blog with an open letter to Alison Johns, CEO of Advance HE, in response to an event her organisation had just run in London about universities and the fourth industrial revolution. Who were the experts that Advance HE had put forward to predict the brave…
Out of the blue there has been a deluge of writing about online learning since universities and colleges all over the world suddenly had to close their campuses due to Covid-19 and attempt to provide some continuity for their students using entirely digital means. For the vast majority of institutions, this has been the first…
Back when I was an academic I often joked about writing an article called ‘Where is the humanity in the humanities?’. Some of the behaviour of fellow humanities scholars towards their peers, and particularly students, made me wince. Junior academics were dismissed, ignored and even deliberately made to feel embarrassed (especially at conferences) while students…
