There is an article that is getting shared on social media that I disagree with. It is an opinion piece in Times Higher Education entitled “Academics aren’t content creators and it’s regressive to make them so.”
The article is written by Dr. David C. Kellermann, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, UNSW Sydney.
In the article, Kellermann laments what he calls “the digitization of the university experience.” Prior to that transformation, Kellermann states, “students sat next to one another, made friends, copied notes if they had been sick, [and] spoke to their professor after class.”
Then, however, “Suddenly academics became video editors – mostly bad ones – and our students turned to YouTube, because on YouTube you can get a better explanation of the same thing (for free I might add). Universities turned from communities of learning and collaboration into B-grade content providers. This is the death march of higher education. Universities are not content providers. Somewhere along this unplanned journey we lost our way.”
Such comments will clearly resonate with many people in academia today, particularly now that they have spent the past year struggling to deal with a digitization of higher education that was suddenly thrust upon them by the COVID-19 pandemic.
I can also imagine many readers agreeing with Kellermann that the true mission of universities is to create “communities of learning,” and I sympathize with their frustration at how difficult that is to do online.
At the same time, I doubt that many readers will make the effort to look up the author and realize that prior to the pandemic Kellermann was already touting the effectiveness of “Question Bot” (or “Qbot” for short) for creating “communities of learning.”
See the video below for details.
That’s right “Qbot,” a bot that helps answer student questions in Microsoft Teams so that a professor can teach a class of say 500 students and automate the answering of student questions. . .
Hmmm. . . Wait, let me get this straight. Using a bot that automatically answers student questions is good, but creating a video of “content” is bad. . . How exactly does that make sense?
Kellermann states that “A video made by a professor for only their class is akin to the single-copy, handwritten book disseminated to just one room of people. It is regression, not progress.”
Ok, but why restrict the video to one’s class? Why not share it publicly on YouTube? How exactly would that be “regression”?
I’m not sure, but when Kellermann makes statements like “Creation is done when we have our researcher hats on, not our teaching hats,” we can perhaps start to get a sense of where he is coming from.
One thing that I’ve found from 20+ years in academia is that behind the morally-upright rhetoric of academics is often a more practical reality of self-interest.
This recent defense of teaching online through Zoom by Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen is an eloquent case in point. And when everything went online at the beginning of the pandemic I wrote about my predictions for how upright rhetoric and self-interest would merge in negative ways for the future of higher education.
In Kellermann’s opinion piece, “content creation” and “editing videos” are presented as vacuous activities that stand in contrast to “engaging with students.”
What he doesn’t mention is that “content creation” and “editing videos” require a hell of a lot of work (and learning), whereas the beauty of “engaging with students” through Qbot is that the application eliminates the need for such effort.
Another thing I’ve learned from 20+ years in academia is the kind of moral outrage that we find in an opinion piece like Kellermann’s is often a response to something specific.
For decades now Australian universities have been hell-bent on corporatizing higher education, and by now academics there have been subject to a long list of demeaning demands.
This recent interview (and the earlier essay that this interview references) with Judith Brett, Professor Emeritus of Politics at La Trobe University, provides many of the gory details of Australian higher education’s destructive decline.
I would have found it much more helpful if Kellermann could have made the context of his argument more explicit, because
1) it is probably quite specific to Australia (and that is important to know because Australia serves as a kind of warning sign for what may be coming to higher education in other places) and,
2) because in arguing from the level of general ideas about education he has put forth a dichotomy between “educators” and “content creators” that is not only false but detrimental to the future of education.
Kellermann argues that academics don’t need to “create content” because “There is an oversupply and overload of content at our fingertips today.” Perhaps that is the case for engineering, but for the field I work in – Asian history – nothing could be further from the truth.
I recently taught for the first time in several years such major topics as the Meiji Restoration and the 1911 Revolution in China. Years ago, when I taught those topics there was nothing decent on YouTube that one could use without putting students (and me!!) to sleep instantaneously.
In 2021, that’s still the case (for not just these two topics but for countless other topics in Asian history as well), and perhaps not surprisingly, interest in subjects like History has been in decline throughout this period.
But if we follow Kellermann’s argument, then we shouldn’t bother with creating any “content” because “We, as teachers in modern university settings, can think of ourselves as community figureheads and team leaders,” and such “community figureheads” do much more important work (like creating learning communities with Qbot) than “editing videos.”
Good point. Even better – Let’s just get someone to create an app that will automatically create videos on demand about whatever Asian history topic we want by excerpting passages from John Green’s “Crash Course” videos so that we can keep focusing on creating “communities of learning.” After all, it would be regressive for us to have to change what we do and create any content for the digital age.
