Subject, object, and outcome
The subject in this activity system were UCT academics whose object was to use more online teaching methods (blended learning) to ensure completion of their course curricula and exams for the year (the outcome), despite disruptive student protests. This was an activity system in which all UCT academics were involved one way or the other, though for the purposes of this analysis, it will only refer to the ones who were interviewed here.
Though academics always seek to complete their course curricula and exams in a given year, this particular activity system emerged in the context of the student protests which threatened to impede that desired outcome. Thus the object discussed here – of using blended learning techniques to complete the curriculum – assumed far greater urgency and controversy than it normally would have because it was deployed to circumvent the desires of many of the protestors, and possibly some of the academics themselves.
For most academics interviewed, blended learning was generally considered a legitimate pedagogical supplement to their traditional face-to-face activities. Though most preferred face-to-face teaching (which they argued befits a residential university), many had already incorporated some blended learning into their courses. Thus when the formal directive was given by the management, one academic said that, “my course is sufficiently blended that moving to online wasn’t a big step for me or for the students” (Respondent 6). Another suggested that this was likely the case for most staff: “In a sense UCT is a blended learning institution now because we have [the learning management system (LMS)] and we record our lectures, we do that standardly. We make announcements, we provide resources online and so there is a blended learning” (Respondent 11).
However, while many academics had already been engaging in blended learning – to save students money, because students liked it, and because it added pedagogical diversity and richness to their teaching – they had never done so for the sake of overcoming disruptions caused by student protests. This immediately politicized blended learning, opening new reasons to engage with it, or not.
With classes disrupted or cancelled, academics had to face the possibility that they wouldn’t be able to complete their coursework curricula before the end of the term, which would have knock-on effects into the next year. Blended learning offered a (controversial) way for academics to deliver the curricula to their students in a timely manner.
For a number of academics, the call for blended learning provided just the tool needed for overcoming the disruptions. As Respondent 2 stated, “on the whole we managed to achieve all the course outcomes that we needed to do in the online space”. Another said that “it was generally quite positive, the students were happy that we tried to push through the shutdown in terms of supplying lectures” (Respondent 9).
Indications are that, most students did engage with the blended learning interventions towards the end of each year, suggesting that while many supported the protest for free education, they did not necessarily want their own educational careers to stall for a lack of participation in sanctioned online lectures and exams. (This is similar to the wishes expressed by the students at UCT’s most comparable South African university, the University of Witwatersrand, where 77% of students voted for the resumption of classes after a lengthy campus shutdown.
13) Thus we must be careful not to conflate the term “protestors” with “students”, as these were both diverse configurations socio-economically, politically, and in terms of their strategic sensibilities.
In the cases where the curricula were delivered on time, academics wanted to make sure that students had the necessary materials for exam preparation. This would have normally been delivered in the classroom or laboratory, but, as Respondent 10 stated, “because the students didn’t want to come onto campus, we have told them that we will put something up on [the LMS] as an exam preparation”. This was the typical approach, to upload materials onto the platform with notes on how students should engage with them for the sake of exam prep. As Respondent 16 related, “because we didn’t have the face-to-face lectures, I think there was a lot of emphasis on preparing them for the exam through [the LMS] and giving tips and saying, ‘read this and don’t read that,’ or, you know, ‘focus on this content and you can leave this out’, or ‘this is examinable and this isn’t’”.
While blended learning offered greater utility for academics who may have not used it before, or were seeking strategies for overcoming curriculum delivery challenges, for many others it was not necessary. Since the protests occurred towards the end of 2016 and then 2017, some teaching for different courses had already been completed just prior to the disruptions. But academics also learned from the 2016 experience, thus they anticipated disruptions and planned for it in 2017, as Respondent 4 relayed, “as much as I detest the word ‘frontloading’, there was a careful engagement with the material on the course to ensure that students were able to engage with the material earlier on”, so that students wouldn’t require any face-to-face engagement after a certain date.
That comparative experience from 2016 also taught some academics that blended learning doesn’t work for them. Respondent 7 stated that, “after last year when the blended learning didn’t really work in our estimation, there wasn’t much of an appetite to do much of it this year”. Part of the reason for this was that it changed the type of accountability protocols between the academics and the students. Respondent 2 believed that, “because there were no formal lectures, they [students] were all just on holiday and it does worry me that that is how a lot of students see that, just because ‘there is no lectures, [so] we don’t have to do anything’”.
In addition, some academics questioned the very object of the activity system, the use of blended learning. Even though most of them engaged in blended learning at some level during the protests, virtually all of them thought it was inferior pedagogically to a face-to-face mode of learning. At best, it was a second option, not the ideal. They gave a host of reasons detailing their ambivalence.
First, they believed that students learn better through personal engagement with each other and with the lecturer. As Respondent 3 explained, “I remain firmly of the view that [blended learning] is very much the second best. You can see in the way that students respond, in the way they pick up knowledge, in the interaction and debate and all the kind of things, and say what you like, you cannot replicate that on an online system”.
Some were more cynical, complaining that a lot of online tools were gimmicks. As Respondent 3 said, “everyone I have spoken to says, ‘Ah, this chat room is a wonderful tool’. It is a damned waste of time, I have never seen such inane exchanges!” He continued, blasting online learning with a rhetorical question: “Would you be prepared to go to a doctor that had done online education?!”
Second, they suggested that online learning creates a different set of accountability protocols that are less effective than face-to-face. As Respondent 8 stated, “I don’t think blended learning is very good for undergrads. I think undergrad students need the discipline around coming to lectures and that interaction and also the social activities that happens in the classroom”.
Third, they claimed that the students themselves don’t like blended learning as much. “They didn’t like the computer screens all the time. And they definitely do prefer face-to-face” (Respondent 15). Indeed, “they want community, you know” (Respondent 9). And, in any case, “students cannot watch a 45-minute lecture. They can’t sit at home on their beds and watch that lecture from beginning to end and find it sufficiently stimulating” (Respondent 2).
Fourth, academics argued that many students require the kind of personal attention and feedback that could help them overcome their challenges: “People here are very aware that our students need personal attention and need a lot of tutoring, a lot of attention to writing skills and so, a lot of remedial work even on the first or second year basis of coming out of a school system. So online teaching in itself I think is viewed maybe not very enthusiastically, with scepticism given our context and given the type of work that we teach” (Respondent 7).
Fifth, some academics noted declining engagement and performance, suggesting that it, as a mode of teaching, was not optimal. Respondent 11 said, “My sense is that there was pretty low engagement with those online resources, which is why we didn’t try and repeat the same approach because it was quite intensive from our point of view”. Indeed, as Respondent 2 averred, “I think generally we have seen possibly slightly declining performance across our courses when we have moved urgently into the blended space because students have lost out on a lot of that kind of contact that we always have”.
Summing up these critical responses, Respondent 6 noted with concern, “I think we potentially are losing some graduate attributes …. I worry that we have lost a bit of that ‘graduateness’ in this mad scramble to fit content into online spaces and make it happen”.
However, while most of the interviewees felt that “blended learning is a bit of a Band-Aid being stuck over a much bigger problem” (Respondent 7), a few saw its virtue in terms of adding to pedagogical diversity. As Respondent 16 said, “The main advantage with the blended learning approach is that it adds a real richness and diversity to your course content that I think makes it really come alive for students …. You can give them what they would have gotten in the face-to-face space but you can also make it such a more multi-dimensional experience with things like photographs or video or audio … [giving] more value for money”.
But aside from a couple of blended learning enthusiasts, the majority tried to find that middle point between scepticism and optimism. “I think for the students it’s good to expose the different kinds of learning, but I think it definitely must be in balance, so with the face-to-face and then this as a different way of doing things, but in balance” (Respondent 15).
However, if there were concerns about the pedagogical utility of blended learning, there was also a question of whether that was what academics were actually doing. Many suggested that most staff were just “putting stuff online” rather than engaging in a pedagogically rigorous activity worthy of the name, such as Respondent 6 who said, “Let’s call that an online presence before it is even blended learning, just normal teaching we do that”. Or, as Respondent 7 put it more matter-of-factly, “I think that people just felt they could just upload notes and that is what I think what most people did”.
Thus, while many thought it was disingenuous to conflate their online activities with what they considered to be “real” blended learning, they understood why this was the case, given the unique circumstances. As Respondent 4 explained, “to try and nuance that message [of blended learning] in a time of crisis is impossible, OK. You can’t nuance it, you can’t. So what you got to do is you got to use a term which people understand or can latch on to, can run with, that means close enough to what is happening without actually describing in reality what it is, because people won’t accept the reality of what it is”. In this sense, “blended learning” was a convenient shorthand for describing the variety of online activities undertaken in response to the protests.
What this reveals is that, even before we have discussed how tools, rules, community stakeholders and the division of labour mediate action in this activity system, we see that there was nothing straightforward for academics in the decision to engage with blended learning in order to complete the academic year.
Academics’ activity regarding blended learning was mediated by a number “artefacts”, namely symbolic, technological and political tools. The symbolic tools are primarily the English language, which is the language of instruction at UCT (and a second or third language for many students and faculty members). It also includes computer-related coding languages such as HTML and CSS. These tools were not unique to this activity system, however, as they would be standard symbolic tools in most UCT-related activity systems.
The more obvious set of tools mediating activity in the context of online blended learning was technological, referring to the programs, platforms, apps, hardware, software and digital affordances used to carry out blended learning. These included UCT’s online learning platform, third-party provider sites, social media and connectivity apps, online collaboration platforms, presentation software, digital teaching formats (such as lecture recordings, narrated slides, podcasts), as well as formal traditional institutional infrastructure (chalkboards, laboratories, lecture halls) and technical infrastructure (broadband, WiFi). Some of these would be relevant across multiple activity systems, but they played a key mediating role in this one as they were essential in the deployment of blended learning.
The most commonly used site to handle blended learning was the LMS, a UCT platform that allows for a multitude of digital files to be uploaded on it for student engagement. It also has forums and chatrooms that can be used, though most academics used it for hosting lecture recordings, lecture notes, podcasts, additional materials, past exam papers and narrated slides.
The other set of tools that mediated action were political ones. These were the disruptions of teaching and learning activities at the university by protestors, which included blockades at university entrances, the closing down of lectures in progress, the repeated setting off of fire alarms, and, in some instances, the destruction of equipment. These took place even before official institutional closures.
For those who managed to complete their teaching before the disruptions, its impact was minimal. Some of this was achieved due to the normal rhythms of the course, but in other cases because of frontloading – “we shifted everything to the first three quarters” (Respondent 8) – in anticipation of the disruptions.
But for the majority who were still teaching and conducting exams, it had serious curriculum repercussions. Sometimes academics could not teach key concepts which required they then change the tests. As Respondent 9 shared, “We couldn’t teach that [particular concept], that was what we lost 2016. So we had to then also change the exam. It was a disaster”. Others had to push materials from the end of one year to the beginning of the next, when an additional teaching period was inserted before the next academic year began.
The most memorable impact that the protests had on the academics interviewed was their sense of morale. As Respondent 2 shared, by the end of the year, “I was just about in tears, I was so exhausted …. I think because we had been so determined that there would be no sacrifice, everyone has just had to work so hard …. It is tough when, you know, in the middle of a residential thing, suddenly to be doing everything online”. Virtually every interviewee stated one way or another that academics were “completely and utterly demotivated” by the protests and the efforts they had to make to adjust their teaching.
Another strategy deployed by the institutional management was the use of private security particularly to protect exam venues, which it was noted added to the “high stress environment” (Respondent 12). In general, the academics interviewed were critical of the management’s response to the shut downs. They believed the executive did not realize how damaging it was to teaching quality, and to the mental and emotional wellbeing of the staff and students. As Respondent 11 shared, “In the weeks where there have been disruptions, I think that the university is a complete mess and our students are being failed in a massive way and frankly I don’t think that the university executive understands how bad it is at all. I think they have no clue, because I think if they had a clue, they would have found ways to stop these disruptions”.
The activity system is mediated by a number of complementary and competing formal rules, informal norms and extraneous non-formal demands. As a residential university, the primary formal pedagogical rule is for educators to teach in a face-to-face manner. However, as discussed above, during the protests, when this teaching style was purposely disrupted, the Vice-Chancellor issued a directive to the university telling educators to start using online blended learning strategies to get around the disruptions. As a formal rule, this was something that all educators had to respond to at some level.
We have already seen how academics responded to the general situation, with many having already incorporated blended learning into their teaching while others added more where they could. A few, as well, declined to engage with it at all (as we will see below). In other universities, the VC’s directive might have led to a massive reorganization of institutional activities, but at UCT, academics did not interpret it as a hard “rule”, but a signal of intention from the management that it is more serious about blended learning (now that traditional learning has been disrupted). Academics took note of the directive but only as but one of many other competing factors.
The key reasons for this are, first, UCT has what has been described as a “collegial” institutional culture (Czerniewicz & Brown,
2009; Trotter, et al.,
2014) where academics enjoy a great deal of autonomy regarding teaching decisions. They typically do not respond positively to executive mandates (which might be more acceptable at universities with “managerial” institutional cultures). If a change in direction is required, they prefer lengthy periods of consultation because they value their autonomy. That is why a number of academics voiced their displeasure with the approach, with Respondent 16 saying, “it just felt like it was something forced on us”. Respondent 7 went even further, stating, “everybody would be keen to explore those [blended learning strategies] if it wasn’t with a sort of gun against your head”.
Second, academics’ actions at UCT are also mediated by the informal norms of their departmental and disciplinary peers regarding online learning. In some departments and/or disciplines, blended learning is common (thus the directive added little pressure or burden). But in others, such as those that rely on laboratory time for optimal learning, the directive was more difficult to instantiate. In fact, some felt such a campus-wide directive was insensitive to the specific norms guiding their teaching practices, and even the broader national context, as Respondent 7 argued: “you cannot just transplant these methods, pedagogies from elsewhere to South Africa because we are a very different context, so it is definitely not a one-size-fits-all type of approach”.
The reception to such guidelines from the departmental level was received with more enthusiasm because these had been developed with greater input from faculty members themselves. As Respondent 1 said, her department advised academics to “make your plans. It might be as early as next week that we have to move online. We will not stop teaching …. If we stop face-to-face teaching, you will continue with some sort of online plan. We must finish, we cannot delay the end”.
Another reason why academics felt free to question the executive-level directive was that, in their opinion, they weren’t really being asked to do “blended learning” anyway, but rather just “throwing things into the wind” online. Respondent 4 complained:
Blended learning is a deliberate activity where the activities in the class and in the course are structured in such a way to make use of the various opportunities of time in the way that is most constructive for the students, OK. It has got nothing to do with panic throwing things online. It has got nothing to do with what happened at the end of this year. That is a complete disservice to anybody who actually engages in blended learning. It is an abomination, OK, to suggest that what we did was blended learning.
Thus the directive opened up a pedagogical debate as to the merits of calling their activities blended learning or not. Many felt, like Respondent 3, that there was “no academic reason for it”, that they were just placing their normal teaching materials online for students to access, which, for them, is not actual blended learning.
Lastly, the protestors issued a non-formal demand of their own, that all teaching should come to a halt. There should be no classroom teaching and no online blended learning. As Respondent 12 viewed it, “you can see on social media, the protesters hate the idea of blended learning and, in their opinion, this place should be a ghost town, we should all go home”. Though this went against the formal directive of the VC, academics had to weigh the consequences of going against the protestors' demands, and also decide where they stood on these contradictory “rules”.
Many academics were sympathetic to the demands of the protestors for free decolonial quality education, and there was particular concern regarding the financial burden for poor students; yet they (like many students) still thought it important to complete the coursework in the normal timeframe so that exams could take place by the end of the year, allowing students to graduate and move on with their lives. The fact that most academics did continue teaching, often with online or blended learning techniques,
14 suggests that they considered protestors’ demand for no instruction as less influential than their own professional norms. While the responses of students to the protests is a matter for a separate paper, it must be noted that there was no consensus amongst the larger student body regarding the closure of teaching, with many silent or actively against the shutdown. Academics were therefore responding to different student groupings and constituencies themselves.