If students self-regulate their learning with the support of educational technologies (Gašević, Dawson and Siemens, 2015), one might ask what kind of role teachers will play in such autonomous settings. Will teachers neither be the sages on the stage nor the guides on the side? To answer this question, it might help to shift our focus away from the role of each student towards the role of relationships in education. As Selwyn (2016) already noted, learning is not an entirely independent, student-centred process.
3.1 – Students’ perception of tutors and peers
Namin Shin (2002) relativises the notion of autonomy as learning ‘alone’ and describes it as a concept of control, which gives students power over their decision-making within educational relationships. In her dissertation, Shin investigated the relationship between distance students’ learning and their perceptions of the presence of teachers, peer students and educational institutions. She described this perception of presence in virtual environments as “the degree to which a distance learner senses the availability of, and connectedness with, each partner” (Shin 2001, p1) and defined it as “Transactional Presence”.
Shin described the concepts of availability and connectedness as:
Availability means that what is needed or desired is obtainable upon request, involving the responsiveness of interpersonal relationships. The notion of ‘availability’ is derived from the thought that teachers, peer students, and institutions basically function as resources for students in an education setting, whether in face-to-face or in distance education.
‘Connectedness’ refers to the belief or feeling that a reciprocal relationship exists between two or more parties, involving an individual’s subjective judgment on the extent of the engagement with which he/she is concerned. (2002, p. 123)
Higher education, whether on campus or at a distance, is not simply a question of transmitting knowledge and skills; it is also about building relationships that engage students in dialogue and contribute to their holistic development or ‘shapes their mind and character’ as Trow (1973) named it.
3.2 – The tutor’s dilemma
Educational relationships exist between students and their tutors, peers and other academic staff. While the pool of peers tends to increase, the student-staff ratio has worsened in recent years, and personal relationships with tutors are under pressure in mass higher education.
Peers can step in as less formal and more approachable resources and provide the “been there/done that” (McBride et al., 2017, p. 307) that personal faculty tutors might not be able to provide. Besides, tutoring is not only beneficial to the receiving ends but also contributes to the development of the more knowledgeable peers by involving them in reflective knowledge building (Roscoe and Chi, 2008).
Student-tutor relationships, on the other hand, mostly exist between people with very different power over each other and are meant to provide students with:
“Information about higher education processes, procedures and expectations; academic feedback and development; personal welfare support; referral to further information and support; a relationship with the institution and a sense of belonging.“ (Thomas 2006, p. 22)
Unfortunately, many students never or seldom approach their assigned personal tutor because they feel guilty for taking up tutor time, or because more independent learning causes a general lack of contact opportunities (Stephen, O’Connell and Hall, 2008). These issues seem even more pressing in digital education, where relationships are often volatile, and general contact that reveals personal details is sparse. Stephen, O’Connell and Hall (2008) identified accessibility and approachability of tutors as one obstacle to personal relationships. Furthermore, they pointed out that some students preferred to approach other academic staff because they liked them more or they seemed to care about them genuinely.
3.3 – Playground: ideas for the future
Based on these issues, I suggest that digital education should provide an environment that nurtures the student’s sense of connectedness and search for ways to improve the availability and approachability of human agents as resources in mass higher education. Following you can find a few ideas and suggestions to address these challenges:
3.3.1 – Choosing your tutor
Let’s first focus on the underlying issues of trust and sympathy indicated by Stephen, O’Connell and Hall (2008). I argue that a student’s need for personal tutoring is likely to change over time; from someone who is patient and socially supportive, to someone who challenges their thinking and nurtures their profile. Thus, students should choose a personal tutor for each semester or year. This would allow them to build relationships with people they genuinely like, trust, or regard as intellectually stimulating, or as a role model.
The student-tutor relationship and the encouraging role of the tutor can be supported by a personal development plan (Quinton and Smallbone, 2010) containing the student’s assignments, feedbacks, and grades. A personal development plan can provide students and their different tutors with a holistic view of their development over time. The plan can be used by students and tutors to reflect upon and discuss recent achievements and serves as a starting point to encourage students to pursue their goals or take action to close identified gaps.
3.3.2 – Connecting tutors and tutees
If students can freely choose their tutors, and cultivate relationships with different tutors for different aspects, for different time periods, technology can be used to connect and match tutors and tutees in digital education. I suggest linking the personal development plan to a tutor database that intelligently uses available data on expertise, interests, publications and project work of staff and students to indicate suitable tutors or peers. Universities can promote peer tutoring by introducing a system that rewards students, for example with credits, if they successfully engage in tutoring activities.
Technology itself cannot build relationships, but contrary to Trow (2005), I debate that it can indeed be used to design an environment that nurtures personal relationships by connecting tutors and tutees at a time where they can genuinely nurture each other’s perspectives and profiles.
3.3.3 – Improving availability of resources
Now let’s focus on the notions of availability and approachability in the light of a worsened staff-student ratio in mass higher education. How can we use digital technologies to increase the availability of tutors and peers and do justice to the many questions that arise while students engage in knowledge construction?
A teacherbot can accommodate the students’ need for immediate feedback by playfully engaging them in what a student called “ambush-teaching” (Bayne, 2015, p. 463) and answering to the questions resulting from inquiry learning with hints that guide students towards the construction of possible answers. A bot has the advantages of unlimited patience and availability, and once a student has reached the point where a critical discussion is required to validate the findings, teachers and peers can join in. If the conversation is available to peers and tutors, as it was the case in Bayne’s experiment on Twitter, peers and tutors can follow the discussion and join in at an earlier stage. Students might not develop a relationship with a bot, but they acknowledged the bot as a resource in Bayne’s (2015) experiment, and the bot can step in as a first level support that exculpates the teachers from answering every single question by assisting students in their inquiry.
Ashok Goel from Georgia Tech presents another very intersting example of how chat bots can be used to scale personal edcuation and motivate students in classes with up to 350 students:
3.4 – Field trip
Find out more about the teacherbot experiment mentioned in Bayne (2015): www.teacherbot.ed.ac.uk: Choose a Live Bot from their website and try to engage with it.
While playing with bots is funny, you will notice that they often deliver quite odd answers that are out of context. It seems unlikely that such simple bots can effectively be used to engage students in critical discussions and challenge their thinking. And yet, Bayne’s (2005) experiment demonstrated that it could motivate students to pursue their inquiries.
3.4.1 – Meet Sofia
Let’s go a step further and meet Sofia, a humanoid with a much more sophisticated artificial intelligence than a teacherbot.
Sofia’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not yet able to truly understand the meaning of a sentence. This has been showcased when her inventor asked her in an interview if she will destroy the world and Sofia responded with “Ok, I will destroy the world”. She did not understand the significance of the question and probably misinterpreted it as a request.
It is still unclear if and when Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be able to understand the meaning of a sentence (Tegmark, 2017) and to what extent such systems will join human-level discussions in education. What concerns me, is not the technology itself, but the fact that such technology can easily obscure its algorithmic identity in virtual environments and trick users by appearing to be a human agent. This might profoundly affect current concepts of trust, agency and connectedness in digital environments and digital education.
Policymakers and governments should carefully observe these developments and take action to ensure that machines remain identifiable in virtual environments. On the other hand, in digital education, such obscured intelligent teacherbots have already been used to assist students as shown in the example from Ashok Goel.
3.5 – ACTIVITY
- Moving artificial intelligence into virtual environments for learning might profoundly affect the explored concepts of agency, trust, availability and connectedness in educational relationships. What implication might this have for your own professional practice in digital education?
- What advice would you give higher educational institutions who want to play an active role in shaping the future of learning in higher education?
3.6 – Useful resources
- Stimulus paper, The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education
Quinlan, K.M., 2011. Developing the whole student: leading higher education initiatives that integrate mind and heart. London.
Page 7: The concept of ‘developing the whole student’.
Pages 9-12: Introduction to holistic student development and transformative learning theory - Summary report, Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Thomas, L., 2012. Building Student Engagement And Belonging In Higher Education At A Time Of Change. A Summary Of Findings And Recommendations From The What Works? Student Retention & Success Programme. London.
Page 6-7: What works? …. Nurturing a culture of belonging
