#cocurriculum

We can’t seem to help creating students’ lives. Look across the literature on elearning and digital disruption and you walk away thinking that universities are populated with nocturnal creatures who have the parasitic tendencies and standards of cleanliness of the bachelor vampire flatmates in What we do in the Shadows.

Digital multitasking is the new drunk. Technology-enhanced learning is vapid. New media hoarding is now a thing. Writing is deep. Each of these findings might be valid individually, but as to whether they support the comprehensive conclusion Manfred Spitzer draws that ‘digital media pose serious risks and side effects in educational settings’ is another thing altogether.

It’s easy to join the dots and to profile cohorts, noting that the individual studies tend to take place with a relatively small groups under controlled conditions.

That’s not to say that you are OK to drive while texting. But drawing conjoined conclusions from individual studies is quite different to working with young people around the clock and over an extended period of time, and understanding that activities inside and outside of the classroom matter. The asymmetry of curriculum and co-curriculum is something that deserves scrutiny.

The university at which I work has a strong residential footprint. When you have over 5000 students in residence, you have the privilege of seeing how the co-curriculum and teaching down time shape education. These are powerful, underestimated spaces that increasingly demand our attention. Not because we have to begrudgingly admit that we have quasi parental responsibility for someone around the clock, but because they can be key drivers of educational and employment success.

The work of Shelley Kinash, Linda Crane, Madeleine-Marie Judd, Cecily Knight and David Dowling on graduate employability is particularly thought-provoking on this front. Their interviews with just under 150 students, staff and employers intimate that there is a dissonance in valuations of curriculum, co-curriculum and internships that might be holding back our efforts in graduate employability. In crude terms, their research found that staff see curriculum; students see internships; and employers see the co-curriculum as the places which set job applicants apart.

These are salutary findings, particularly when you consider the opportunity of low income students to participate in all the enrichment activities—leadership positions, volunteering, sport or cultural activities—that might give them a boost in seeking employment.

But the co-curriculum and teaching downtime also give us hints on how students actually like to spend their time, what information formats they pay attention to, and how digital dependencies are a part of our world.

Like all other universities, we keep data on wireless access, and in our case, that covers both campus and residential use. The data is utterly unsurprising: residential usage picks up where campus usage drops off, and our peaks are 11am–5pm, and 9pm–1am. Here are two sample graphs, for the curious.

So far, to be expected. Students are wired, and not having wireless, or a strong enough wireless signal is tantamount to the apocalypse. Moreover, while they appear to have some nocturnal tendencies, our wireless usage evens out pretty well across twenty hours of the day. If you want to get a student’s attention, don’t send them something between 5 and 9am. Moreover, midnight teaching might become the hit of our new millennium.

Things get really interesting when you drill down to accession patterns outside of the 9am–6pm teaching peaks. Relax, nothing in the graph below is likely to offend your sensibilities, unless you loathe social media and watch moving images via an object that is increasingly alien to young people: television.

Three things stand out in this data. First, broad accession data is a great vanity check. Analytics reports like those produced by Google—and which we tend to like to use in service functions such as marketing—only focus on people who look at your nominated sites. They don’t put that browsing in perspective, by showing you all the sites which have higher accession rates. It’s important to be reminded that your university website—and the learning management site it houses—come in at 17/23 and accounts for 2.1 Tebibytes (TiB; 1 tebibyte = 240 bytes) per month versus 114.9 TiB for googlevideo and 30.2 TiB for Netflix. Outside of teaching hours, students aren’t poring over our official learning management system. Moreover, the appearance of the Chinese services platforms Baidu and qq reminds us that ours is not a monolingual digital world.

Second, it highlights the dependency of digital providers on intermediary media management services offered by companies like Akamai. Akamai is used by everyone from Facebook to Twitter and YouTube to Buzzfeed to minimise startup time, rebuffering delays and load failure. In fact, there are few media platforms which incorporate moving images which do not use Akamai.

Just as the existence of Akamai might come as a surprise to you, dependency on intermediary services is also a feature of elearning. Nearly all Australian universities use the same learning management system hosting service, for example. These hidden dependencies in distribution highlight that services failure is probably the greatest risk in elearning, not the distracted mind of an adolescent.

Third—and most importantly—it highlights how images drives connection outside of formal teaching time. Text has not disappeared, but image consumption has broken out of fixed television provision to mobile consumption. As TechCrunch highlighted last year, this is the age of the app, not television. You didn’t need me to tell you that, of course, but if you consider the text heavy nature of our formal curriculum—evident in the use of the learning management system as a text repository—then you realise how out of kilter we might be with the people we teach.

You might riposte that this is all entertainment, not education. Plato having banished the imitative arts long ago is not grounds for continuing to maintain that education and entertainment are incompatible. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where university staff and students see education as fun?