The New Itinerancy: Digital Pedagogy and the Adjunct
Instructor in the Modern AcademyAndrew BretzWilfrid Laurier Universityabretz@wlu.ca
Department of English and Film Studies, Contract Faculty
Alliance of Digital Humanities OrganizationsAssociation for Computers and the Humanities000304011302 October 2017article
This is the source
DHQ classification scheme; full list available at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/taxonomy.xmlKeywords supplied by author; no controlled vocabularydigital pedagogyFlipped classroomadjunct instructiondigital toolsCreated file
In the Fall of 2015, I was hired as contract academic staff at Wilfrid Laurier
University’s Department of English and Film Studies to teach the foundation
course EN245
The English Literary Tradition (Beginnings to
1660) for the first time as a course with a heavy DH component. My
paper is a case study investigating the challenges of creating and delivering a
partially online course in a university environment where the majority of
teaching is done by sessional instructors whose labour is systemically
marginalized by administration. Sessional instructors (or educational
entrepreneurs) have even more limited resources (in terms of
time, access to technical support, and access to administration) than tenure
track faculty; however, open-access educational tools aren’t serving merely to
level the playing field, but reshape it altogether as technical support and
access to administrative support cease to matter in the delivery of an
educational product. Today, many of the tools that are sufficient for the
creation of a successful online or partially online course, whether generalist -
iTunesU, Zotero, YouTube - or specialist - Google NGram, the University of
Victoria`s Map of Early Modern London, Internet Shakespeare Editions - are
freely available to instructors.
Such freely available tools problematize the relationship between the instructor
and the university insofar as universities tend to use proprietary systems (e.g.
Desire2Learn) for everything, including data management, presentation,
communication, and gradebook integration with the registrar’s office.
Universities, in insisting on using these universal proprietary systems for
every aspect of course delivery, exacerbate the disenfranchisement of sessional
instructors, as access to the support required to become experts in these tools
is limited and taken on at the instructor’s cost. A sessional instructor can
create an entire course using freely available online tools, at minimal cost and
reaching a tremendously large and diverse audience, yet cannot then market that
course to any university that has a similar course as an educational product. At
the present moment, the sessional instructor and the course are both subject to
the curriculum of an individual university and department, despite the fact that
courses with a heavy DH component tend towards portability, interoperability,
and modularity that renders such boundaries largely incoherent. Though there are
attempts to provide funding for courses that will bridge interuniversity
boundaries such as the $4.5 million put forward by the Ontario Ministry of
Training, Colleges and Universities as a part of the eCampus Ontario initiative,
such funding models largely exclude the sessional instructor, who cannot apply
for funding as an educational entrepreneur. My paper will
tell the story of how I tried to navigate a university system that tried to keep
me from using free tools, while at the same time promoting my course as a part
of the eCampus Ontario initiative.
Andrew Bretz offers a look at adjunct instructing and course organization in
DH.
The New Medievalism
At present in the western academy, sessional and adjunct instructors are not
protected from government or private assaults on free speech through
institutional mechanisms such as tenure, but neither are they beholden to an
individual university’s digital architecture or position regarding copyright.
Adjuncts are unprotected yet mobile, and the present scenario we have today in
Canada and across the western world echoes the labour model of the medieval
university. Then, the majority of academic labour was undertaken by an itinerant
class of scholars who would wander from place to place, seeking short term
employment, stigmatized for their lack of permanent patronage. Today, across
North America and around the world, the labour model of the higher education
sector is reliant upon sessional instructors or adjuncts Please note, for
the purposes of this paper, sessional and
adjunct instructors will be used as interchangeable
terms for any part-time, contract based pedagogical work. to shoulder
an increasingly large portion of undergraduate teaching load (See Figures 1 and
2). Though there are clearly differences for individual national
cases, the basic trends across Europe, Australia, and North America have
followed the American model over the past twenty years, which is why
American data is sourced in this instance. Many of the examples in this
study are drawn from the Canadian case, as the primary case study was taught
at a Canadian university. Universities in Canada and elsewhere have made it
notoriously difficult to gather specific data on numbers of non-full-time
instructors as well as their position within the institutions and the use of online learning technologies,
making research in this field particularly subject to local conditions, yet
still responsive to international trends. As Monks, CAUT and others point
out, the general trends across Canada, Europe, Australia and Asia regarding
both the employment of sessional instructors and the use of online learning
are clearly tracking the American case. Monks notes that, in 1975, only 30.2 percent of
faculty were employed part time; by 2005 [...] part-time faculty
represented approximately 48 percent of all faculty members in the
United States. Whereas the systemic inequalities attendant upon the increasing reliance
upon adjunct instructors has been widely discussed in the academy, most of these
analyses tend to look at part-time contract work in the absence of the digital
turn in the academy . At the same time as universities have
become increasingly reliant on sessional labour, administrators are pressuring
instructors to integrate technology into their lesson plans as a way of
increasing pedagogical efficiency and remaining on the apparent cutting edge of
research . What I would like to suggest in
this article is that the move towards integrating digital humanities into the
pedagogical mainstream of university education, combined with the increasing
reliance on sessional and adjunct instruction, is having the unintended result
of creating a new kind of wandering academic and changing the way that
undergraduate education will be undertaken in the future. Rather than the
laborious journeys described by medieval and early modern scholars who went from
ducal court to royal court to university and back seeking patronage, we now face
a class of online itinerants who can move their course material from one
university to another, without regard to geography, local conditions, or
(paradoxically) administrative interference. The use of digital tools has opened
up an entirely new world of humanities education, but it has also resulted in a
turning back of the clock almost 1000 years.
Policy and Entrepreneurship
Late in 2015, the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities in Ontario
released the report “Focus on Outcomes, Centre on Students: Perspectives on Evolving Ontario’s
University Funding Model”. The report was spearheaded by former Deputy Minister
for Advanced Education and Skills Development Suzanne Herbert and was developed
in consultation with groups such as the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance,
Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, representatives of
individual universities, and others . As the report
analyzed university funding models, it was deeply invested in the rhetoric of
commercial value of the educational experience — Employment readiness and value for money
were among key concerns raised by consultation participants [such as
students]— and long term sustainability of the university sector. The report also
suggested the importance of student experience, understood primarily through the
blending of technological skills with traditional academic skills, as a means of
gearing students for a competitive job market. This focus on the transferability
of skills from inside to outside the academy is in keeping with recent research
that suggests that universities have an obligation to develop student competency
in technological and workplace based skills . Employers hire students based upon
the assumption they have learned the newest form of technology in
school, thus saving money on getting students trained to use
technology. In the report, sessional or adjunct instructors are called “educational
entrepreneurs”; the report encourages “entrepreneurial learning [&]
research”; quality of education was measured in terms of a customer satisfaction or
value-for-money perspective. Online course delivery (though not exclusively online course delivery)
was considered a flexible and attractive alternative to inefficient traditional
classroom settings that tend to undermine the “consumer” orientation of many
students . Notably absent, however, are key
recommendations from scholarly research on the integration of technology in the
classroom that call for supplemental pay for instructors who have fully
integrated technology into the classroom or the development of training sessions
for instructors who seek to follow the guidance of the report . In simultaneously encouraging the
integration of technology into the classroom and putting the onus for
technological competence on the educational entrepreneur (viz. the instructor),
the report absolves universities of the responsibility for paying for the skills
they wish to disseminate to their students. The report, however, should be
thought of metonymically, as it encapsulates a number of policy positions that
are becoming increasingly popular among university administrators and students
across Canada and around the world.
Student attitudes towards the online delivery of courses are notoriously
difficult to gauge and thus they have
proven to be relatively unsound foundations upon which to build policy decisions
regarding education. There are few studies available that look directly at
student attitudes towards sessional/adjunct labour or to attitudes towards
digital delivery of courses and there are no studies that look at the confluence
between the two issues. When student leaders have been directly asked to
participate in policy making projects, such as the AUCC report,
The Revitalization of Undergraduate Education in
Canada, they provided specific recommendations to expand learning
methods including interactive and
participatory methods, not only across courses but within
courses, suggesting that increased blended delivery of courses would be welcome.
Indeed, online learning policy statements such as the Ministry report tend to
resonate with and echo student-centred modes of engagement that posit the
student as a kind of consumer, wherein the value that the student sees in their
education can be measured, defined and manipulated in the context of an
objective, logical-positivist world-view .
This view would suggest that by universities increasing digital resources and
participatory methods of pedagogy such as blended learning courses (which
students are already requesting), students should respond by increased
perceptions of educational value and interest in measurable, deliverable ways.
Despite this, one of the few studies available on Canadian student attitudes
toward online learning shows a far more contradictory and confused response to
the increase in online resources and traditional forms of online engagement such
as discussion boards. In the report The State of E-Learning
in Canadian Universities, 2011: If Students are Digital Natives, Why Don’t
they Like E-Learning? the authors conclude, If students do not — as the
foregoing pages have demonstrated — think very much of blended learning,
why do they want more electronic resources? [...] the best explanation
seems to have to do with convenience. Students prefer physical texts,
but they’d like to have the option of having an e-resource to read it
wherever and whenever they need.
Students in the study repeatedly suggested more availability of online resources,
in particular electronic versions of course readings, lecture notes and audio or
video versions of lectures, yet they resisted interactive forums and discussion
boards with instructors and fellow students and live streams of lectures . Despite the articulated student desire
for more resources to be made available electronically, students in the study
who were in largely online courses were less likely to agree with the statement
I find courses with more online resources generally more interesting than
courses with fewer online resources than similar students who were in
courses with fewer online resources .
Though students want the convenience of the online material, providing more
resources results in the course being less interesting and in students being more likely to
skip classes . Perhaps one of the most
illuminating aspects of the study for the sessional instructor is that students
note that entirely in-person delivery is best for evaluating the quality of
instructors. 67.3% of students found that an instructor’s quality is best gauged
face to face, while only 4.5% believed entirely or partially online courses
allow students to assess an instructor’s quality . This last point is particularly noteworthy for sessional
instructors as it acts as a disincentive for sessionals to engage with online
learning and pedagogy, which then puts them at odds with the policy of
increasing student engagement through increasing online learning
opportunities.
The policy suggestion made by the Ministry report and by similar papers tabled by
think tanks and government bodies across the world is a call for increased efficiency and
deliverable success. As Milliken and Barnes note, this appeal is itself nothing
new. John Amos Cornelius, a 16th
Century scholar, spoke of the need for a methodology whereby
teachers teach less but learners learn more.
Two centuries later, in 1780, Adam Smith stated that the discipline of
colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit
of the students, but for the ease of the masters. Both views would
indicate that current complaints have noble pedigrees.The result of these most recent calls for deliverable results for
instructors has been that universities have increasingly downloaded
responsibility for technological competence onto faculty and non-faculty
instructors. The problem is one of funding. Most institutions across North
America are incorporating educational
technology tools, such as SMART Boards, starboards, iPads, collaboration
tools, WebCT, and so forth, into classrooms in order to improve the
quality of education for learners; and educators are expected to fully
integrate those tools as soon as the technology becomes available. Most
institutions have limited funding available only to train full-time
faculty on how to integrate technology into their classroom. This set of policies that are being developed and implemented across
North America, though they make universities more efficient by asking more of
faculty while providing them with fewer resources in which to achieve intended
educational targets, when put into discussion with the permanent rise of the
sessional instructor and the movement towards online course delivery, has a
number of unintended consequences. To explore those unintended consequences, I
want to focus my discussion on the creation and implementation of my recent
blended learning class at Wilfrid Laurier University, English 245
The English Literary Tradition, Beginnings to
1660.
Devising the Course
In the fall semester of 2015, I was hired as contract academic staff at Wilfrid
Laurier University’s Department of English and Film Studies to teach the
half-credit foundation course EN245. This was the first time I taught the course
and the first time that the course had ever been offered in a blended learning
format. The course is a junior undergraduate canonical literary history course,
covering the breadth of literature from Beowulf to Milton, though there is some
room for experimentation regarding the interpretation of the canon as taught to
undergraduates. For instance, I taught Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, who wrote the
first post-classical drama in Europe, even though she is criminally understudied
in junior undergraduate survey courses. Every English student at Wilfrid Laurier
is obliged to take EN245 and its companion course EN246 (1660 to Today) as part
of their degree requirements, which in practice means that the class is usually
one of the most well-populated in the department, with students who are
motivated to succeed.
For the first time in the history of the course, I chose to offer EN245 as a
blended-learning, flipped classroom, where all of the lecture
material was available online and the classroom meetings would be
devoted to exercises and discussions of the texts and the
lectures. The hosting of materials online, accessible
in part through a gated course management system, is in keeping with blended
best practices, such as those outlined by Michael Munger . I say lectures because the
material that I created for the students to consider was multimodal. I created
text for them to read and consider, audio lectures for them to listen to, as
well as video material that I created using CyberLink PowerDirector, a fairly
common video editing software suite. By obligation, all of the material was
hosted on the WLU MyLearningSpace website, which is a Desire2Learn based content delivery
system. Video lecture material was (and is) hosted on YouTube for ease of access. Major assignments such as a final paper
were workshopped during in class tutorial sessions, while minor assignments,
which included the creation of a timeline using Knight Lab’s free timeline creation
website, were created as digital entities. The flipped classroom,
blended-learning style of course delivery has repeatedly been shown to have
positive results in terms of student retention and long term recall, however, it
also normally requires an intense period of preparatory work in consultation
with educational and media experts in order to develop the course in accordance
with best practices. Lecture material must be written, rewritten, and edited;
film must be shot, reshot, and edited; audio must be recorded, again and again;
each phase of the process should (ideally) be thought through in terms of the
deliverable educational goals. In many ways, the amount of cooperative effort
that ought to go into such a flipped classroom course should be primarily done
before the course has even begun and should be effectively invisible to
students. Such a model of course creation, however, is primarily geared towards
tenured or tenure-track instructors who have the time to prepare courses in
cooperation with multiple institutions within the home university. Such a period
of preparation and careful consideration is not possible for sessional
instructors and was not available in the case of EN245.
Sessionals are often unable to access the digital infrastructure of the
university outside of the term of their contract. Marie Vander Kloet, speaking
at the workshop leading to the AUCC report on
Revitalizing
Undergraduate Education in Canada posed the problem of sessional
access to digital infrastructure succinctly, I can’t access the library system at
the university until the first day of my contract, which is typically
six days before I start teaching. So I can’t set up my own course
website. I can’t figure out what I could potentially put online. I can’t
activate my e-mail address … I know there are huge financial constraints
in terms of why there are so many contract faculty [...] but there are
material conditions around those contracts which severely impact how
it’s possible for us to teach. Sessional instructors face restrictions and lack of access to resources
(in terms of time, access to technical support, professional development,
communities of practice, and access to administration) in comparison to our
tenure-track colleagues that can be seen as both a blessing and a curse. Even
where technical support is available for sessional faculty, it may not be
feasible for sessional instructors to seek out such support. This is in keeping
with Ocak’s study, which indicated that 17.26% of faculty felt they had no
support from the institution . In my case,
university administration and the Office of Open Learning were basically unaware
of what I was doing until halfway through the course. This was partially because
of the time constraints that are a regular part of the teaching conditions of
adjunct instructors. That is, I was awarded EN245 in mid-July 2015 with a start
date of the first week of September 2015. Thus, if I had followed the intensely
cooperative model of blended learning, flipped classroom delivery outlined
above, I would have had only six or seven weeks in which to create an entire
course and coordinate with at least three or four different institutional
bodies. However little time that may be, I also had another time commitment
between mid-July and early August. Between those dates I was teaching an
intensive, all day, three week seminar on Shakespeare’s Text at the Stratford
Festival, which meant that the amount of actual time I had to prepare to deliver
a semester of material for a flipped classroom was approximately three weeks. To
arrange for meetings with the Office of Open Learning, who would then arrange
for further meetings with on-staff videographers and recording technicians, as
well as developing an oversight committee for content delivery was simply not
feasible if the course was to be delivered on time and on budget. As an
educational entrepreneur, I had to act on my own, using those limited resources
that were available to me, or face the possibility of breaking my contract with
WLU. This gave me an incredible amount of freedom in terms of course creation,
but it also cut me off from access to monies and resources that would have
facilitated even some of the more basic elements of the course.
One of the key elements of the course that students responded to positively were
the video components, which were available on YouTube. For each “lecture,”
approximately 20-30 minutes worth of somewhat dense video material was made
available online. The practices for online lectures created by MIT, Yale, and Oxford
tends to be to record a professor delivering a lecture. The advantage to this is
that the professor’s face and body do not need to be copyright protected and the
material shared in the classroom that might be copyright protected (images or
film clips) can be edited out or held behind a gated entry point for the course.
The talking head, however, is a woefully ineffective way of using the visual
medium to the best of its abilities or providing a record of the teaching
abilities of professors who are some of the best teachers in the world. The Open University presents a far
more instructional model for anyone wishing to create online videos. For
instance: “The History of the EU
with David Mitchell”; “Freedom of Religion - Rights Enshrined”; or “Behind the Scenes with Monica Grady - In the Night Sky:
Stars” The Open University’s model of creation, however, is
based on the cooperative model whereby experts from multiple fields
(videography, animation, acting, editing, academic subject) come together to
create a single educational instrument.
As time constraints prevented me from using the cooperative model that has been
so successful for The Open University, I created all of the educational
instruments for my course by myself. Rather than develop a video style that
would be unique to the course, or which would reveal my limited graphic design
capabilities, I developed the video style for my course using the documentaries
of Ken Burns as a template, extensively using still images and panning camera
shots. Not being a filmmaker, I had to learn on the spot such techniques as
editing, design, pacing, sound mixing, etc. The following is an example of a
video lecture where I tried to use the medium to the best of my ability in the
period allowed. This is from my lectures on The Second Shepherds’ Play: 10.13 - Social Order in the Second
Shepherds’ Play. These videos For a complete list of videos
created for EN245, please see the appendix. have been viewed
literally thousands of times from locations on almost every continent in the few
months they have been available online. Indeed, one video on Lady Mary Wroth is
directed viewing in a course on British Literature in
Brazil while the video on Liturgical Drama in the early middle ages is a course
text at Berkeley Divinity School in California. Private emails.
The advantages of YouTube are precisely the wide audience and the flexibility of
production. Throughout the course I tried to bring in as many open-access
educational tools as I could, partially because, as I just described, I had to
work without access to the resources available through the administration, and
partially because I felt that students may respond more positively to open
access tools like Google Drive, Timeline by Knight Lab, and WordPress than they
would to D2L. My hypothesis was confirmed. From private interviews with students
I conducted after the class was over, one of the primary reasons why students
responded well to the video material was that it was available on YouTube.
Private Interview. Logging into the Wilfrid Laurier University’s D2L
system was a disincentive compared to going to YouTube, which students described
as more native to their experience of the world. In using free tools and
software like YouTube, EN245 was building student
experience — a recommendation of reports like the AUCC report on
Revitalizing Undergraduate Education in Canada
cited above — upon students’ understanding of the digital world; providing
difference (or content) within an architecture of familiarity.
EN245 highlighted many of the problems faced by adjunct instructors who seek to
implement best practices of pedagogy and digital pedagogy. The model of
corporate creation that would be ideal in the development of a new online or
partially online course is largely out of reach for sessional and adjunct
instructors. The proprietary tools and software, as well as the skills of
university based full time assistants such as videographers and teaching support
services, are effectively cut off from the instructor who has a mandate to
produce a course almost overnight. At the same time as instructors are being
isolated from administrative support to create online material, policy
documents, like the one issued by the Ontario Ministry of Advanced Education and
Skills Development, encourage educational entrepreneurship and the creation of
online or partially online material to develop student
experience. A sessional instructor can take the challenge on
alone, as I did, but this poses an interesting question that I will develop in
the next section, namely Who holds copyright over the material
produced for the course? Whereas wholly online courses are
usually governed by contracts that state which party (university or instructor)
has copyright and responsibility for the material, courses like the one I just
outlined are exercises in guerilla pedagogy and the ownership of copyright is
not wholly clear.
Copyright, Adjuncts, and Intellectual Property Policy
In 2008, Douglas Kranch in
The Quarterly Review of Distance
Education described the case of Harvard Law School’s Arthur Miller.
Miller created an online course (ironically, on civil procedure and intellectual
property rights) for an institution other than his home, Harvard Law School,
arguing that there was no difference in publishing his course in another
university’s online environment than the book publishing deals he had been
negotiating for many years. While Kranch notes that although there are several precedents in the
United States for universities or employers to hold copyright or patent rights
for research done by members of that institution, one of the only instances of
case law regarding a professor’s property rights over his course notes actually
found in favour of the professor. In that case, a professor Williams developed
material at UCLA and then moved universities. UCLA went on to publish Williams’
materials, arguing that Williams’ notes were work for hire
so that UCLA held the rights to the notes. The Supreme Court of California found for Williams, arguing that If UCLA owned the copyright, it
could prevent Williams from using the notes he created at the next post
and, by extension, would similarly block all faculty from using their
instructional material at any but the institutions at which they had
created them; and second, that UCLA had exerted little supervisory
control over Williams. This legal decision became the basis for the teacher exception to the
work for hire provisions of copyright protection under American law. There
has been no analogous test case in Canada, nor can I find a similar
statement of clear copyright protection for course notes in Australia or in
the European Union. The case is here cited for its exceptionality and for
the fact that the matter still does not seem to be settled, even in the
United States. Such a victory for individual intellectual property
rights has not been without dissenting voices however and it is the position of
The Association of American Universities that the university should own the
intellectual property that is created at the university by faculty,
research staff, and scientists with the substantial aid of its
facilities or financial support. Please note that although Kranch describes a case in California,
the point is that there is frustratingly little case law to guide
intellectual property at all in jurisdictions across North America.
Different universities will, likewise, claim different amounts of copyright
control over materials created for online use depending upon policies local to
institutions, faculties, and even departments, yet such claims are often
negotiated through the context of a legally binding contract between instructor
and institution . Courses like EN245,
however, render such statements and policies of university ownership all the
more problematic as the course was created entirely without university support,
substantial aid, facilities, or material. The course was blended and flipped,
not wholly online. It was partially hosted on YouTube, a publicly available
platform, as the proprietary software of the institution was seen as alien to
students’ experiences. Copyright for originally created videos uploaded to
YouTube is held by the creator (YouTube), yet copyright for a video created
by a professor used in a classroom setting can be governed by the
university’s local policies. This was one of the reasons why I created the
videos and uploaded them to YouTube and only then linked to them from the
course website. Indeed, whereas university administrations may argue
some claim to ownership over course notes if the institution provided necessary,
material support, the advent of free online tools are increasingly rendering
such support wholly unnecessary.
Today, many of the tools that are sufficient for the creation of a successful
online or partially online course are freely available, while many of the
courses that teach instructors how to use those tools for pedagogical purposes
are either hidden behind institutional walls or enrollment can cost hundreds of
dollars. For example, the Digital Pedagogy Lab, while providing content that has
been praised by the Chronicle of Higher Education, has courses on teaching with Twitter
that cost US$400, (though a discount for contingent faculty is available).
Whether those tools are generalist — iTunesU, Zotero, YouTube — or specialist —
Google NGram, the Map of Early Modern London, Internet Shakespeare Editions —
these tools problematize the relationship between the instructor and the
university insofar as universities tend to use proprietary systems (e.g.
Desire2Learn) for everything, including data management, presentation,
communication, and gradebook integration with the registrar’s office.
Universities, in insisting on using these proprietary systems for every aspect
of course delivery from gradebook integration to content presentation, provide
adjunct or sessional instructors with a central set of educational technology
tools (thereby providing the material support that some might argue is the way
around the teacher exception to the work for hire provisions of copyright law).
These university mandated tools can be used again and again, thereby, in theory,
reducing the struggle adjuncts face in choosing what tools to use, which is a
common complaint among adjunct instructors.
Such limitations on choice as presented by the use of proprietary systems by
universities do not act as “walled gardens” or “safe havens” in a landscape
dominated by monopolistic social and traditional media corporations. It is
certainly true that some free tools, as opposed to the proprietary systems, are
extensions of large media corporations, such as Google, Apple, and Facebook,
whose commoditization of information is cause for suspicion. Nevertheless, many
universities are already working with these same corporations on exclusive
contracts to deliver email and other services. Thus, the distinction between
freely available tools and proprietary systems is beginning to blur. Even in
cases where the software systems used by universities are industry specific to
the academy rather than an outgrowth of large media corporations, the university
cannot be seen as a kind of walled garden. Corporations like Blackboard, 2U,
D2L, and TurnItIn, are either publicly traded companies or companies owned by
venture capital partnerships . Issues of privacy aside, these technologies
integrate the university into a corporate ecosystem that extends well beyond the
walls of the academy. Further, universities’ training and support for these
technologies can only be offered economically to those who can be reasonably
expected to use the technology again in the future; that is, tenure track and
longer term faculty, as outlined above.
On the one hand, tenure track and longer term professors who wish to implement a
course with a heavy digital component are strongly encouraged to work within the
confines of the university’s own digital infrastructure to protect and justify
the university’s investment in that infrastructure and to tie the course
material to that university. This means heavily relying upon administration to
provide support, but such support also comes with a clear demarcation of the
rights and responsibilities of intellectual property. A university may house a
digital document created by a professor, but unless otherwise stated by written
policy of the institution or a contract between the institution and the
instructor, the university does not necessarily own that material. The digital
document may, in some ways, represent the university publicly and, as such, the
university may wish to have some say in the delivery of content or the content
itself. This last issue is a particular problem for any course that is remotely
politically “controversial” such as gender/race studies, environmental studies,
or even evolution, especially in a higher education funding environment where,
in Canada for instance we are still recovering from the ideologically bound
funding models of the Harper Conservative government . Similarly in the United States at the time of writing there seems
to be some government support to defund agencies like the National Endowment
for the Humanities. Tenure track and longer term professors who
reject this support are still incentivized to work with and learn the
proprietary knowledge mobilization and administration systems because they will
encounter these programs next semester and the one after that. A circumscribed
digital infrastructure, such as a university that uses D2L encourages at least
familiarity with D2L among its faculty. Moreover, as tenure track and longer
term professors have an ongoing relationship with the university in question,
the rules they establish with the university regarding intellectual property can
be revised on an ongoing basis. Both parties have institutionalized obligations
to each other and to the digital content that can be revised through mechanisms
within the institution.
On the other hand, sessional instructors who wish to implement a course with a
heavy digital component can choose to work within a given university’s digital
infrastructure yet we are disincentivized to do so on a number of different
levels.
Access to the support required to become experts in these tools is limited
and taken on at the instructor’s cost; and,Ownership of intellectual property created outside of institutional
software structures and administrative support is more likely to lay with
the instructor.
Professional development opportunities are restricted university by university
and, although computer literacy is a fairly common skill, effectively
translating that skill into the creation of an active learning environment
requires training . Whereas to become an expert in the use
of D2L one must first have access to a D2L course and, by then, it is already
too late because the course has to be put up. On the other hand, one can spend
the hours needed to become an expert on how to use YouTube or even the Map of
Early Modern London because of their accessibility, on your own time and in some
cases these tools further your research. Sessional instructors are
disincentivized to learn proprietary software systems because one semester we
could be working at one university that uses one system, and another semester we
could be working at another university with another content delivery system. Far
easier to use freely available tools that students feel comfortable with and fit
into their own experience of media than to learn new integrated systems over and
over and over again at new universities and never be paid for that labour. More
importantly, however, there is less fear that the course notes and materials
created through freeware and freely accessible systems will be claimed by the
university as their intellectual property. The one fear is that, with the
proliferation of digital course materials, students will cease to be as
interested in the course, skip more, and have less of a basis upon which to
judge the effectiveness of the instructor .
In effect, the closed digital architecture of universities, combined with the
increasing reliance on sessional instructors to deliver course material, is
further reinforcing the divide between tenure-track and non-TT faculty. As
problematic as that effect may be, with its attendant class divide between the
two tiers of faculty, this is not intended to be a paper crying
Vanitas vanitatum. It is an important point; it is
further developing a painfully unjust system within the academy; but this paper
is trying to use inductive reasoning to illuminate the ways in which policy
governs the academy based on one particular experience. What I can observe is
that digital or partially digital courses created out of freely available tools
where the content of the course is based on canonical texts or, as the Ministry
of Education puts it, fundamentals … these courses are
incredibly portable. If the course is conservative in its approach to the canon
(whether that be the canon of English literature or the fundamentals of
algebra), the course can be put on in Calgary or Qatar, it doesn’t matter. This
isn’t itself surprising as it was the original insight behind the development of
MOOCs. I would like to suggest, however, what if the course notes and materials
are not tied to a university? What if the course is tied to the instructor, who
is unshackled from the digital infrastructure of any given university?
Sessional instructors, in a case such as the one I have described, own their
material in a way that tenure-track colleagues do not. We own our materials in a
way that those who teach through MOOCs, EdX, Coursera or other large capitalist
experiments in education do not, as they are governed by contracts that echo the
terms of proprietary university contracts outlined above. We are not protected
by tenure from administrative over-reach, but we are not tied to an individual
administration’s digital infrastructure either. We can (and do) move from
university to university, selling our course as an educational product; a
product that has a proven track record at other universities; a product that has
clearly defined goals and deliverables; a single product that is cheaper than
maintaining a tenure-track professor, a videographer, an audio technician, an
office filled with experts in online learning.
Of course, this doesn’t happen right now. A sessional instructor can create an
entire course using freely available online tools, at minimal cost and reaching
a tremendously large and diverse audience, yet cannot then market that course to
any given university as an educational product. It’s just not done because the
model of academic intellectual property for course delivery is predicated on the
relationship between the static tenure track or longer term professor and the
university, rather than the portable adjunct and multiple universities offering
similar courses. At the present moment, the sessional instructor and the course
are both subject to the curriculum of an individual university and department,
despite the fact that core canon courses tend towards portability,
interoperability, and modularity that renders such boundaries largely
incoherent. Though there are attempts to provide funding for courses that will
bridge interuniversity boundaries such as the $4.5 million put forward by the
Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities as a part of the eCampus
Ontario initiative, such funding models largely exclude the sessional
instructor, who cannot apply for funding as an “educational entrepreneur.” I
tried to apply for funding to develop this course further, using the portable
model I have suggested, but I was told that I had to work within the confines of
a university administration to develop a proposal. I approached WLU, yet what
they proposed instead was a course delivered concurrently at multiple
universities (where I would be paid the same amount as if I was at the one)
delivered entirely through the digital infrastructure that could be shared among
those universities, which rather misses the point.
I worry that DH tends to get caught up in the discussion of new tools, new
gadgets, new theories, while there tends not to be the same concern for the
policy that flows out of and controls the implementation of these new tools. I
always tell my students when approaching a new text to ask yourself Cui
bono? (Who benefits?) because the answer is usually not what it seems
to be on the surface. Though for the past twenty years the digital revolution in
humanities studies has become increasingly entrenched in the academy with the
creation of journals, conferences and a number of tenure track and long term
professorships, the rise of free digital tools combined with the concretization
of the sessional instructor as a permanent caste within the academy,
recontextualizes the efficiency of pedagogical labour onto the sessional
instructor. If, as the rhetoric of entrepreneurship suggests, public policy in
higher education is moving towards a logical-positivist model based on
deliverables and efficiency, then I wonder if we are not actually liable to be
turning the clock back to the medieval system of itinerant scholars. This is not
necessarily a bad thing. Let’s not forget, Erasmus, Vives, Aquinas, Scotus,
Abelard, and many others great scholars were itinerants or went through a period
of employment induced mobility. The difference today is that whereas Abelard had
to be in the same room as you to teach you, geography no longer matters in the
same way to us. We, the itinerant scholars of today, can put together a course
on relatively conservative canonical material, and sell it to the highest bidder
as an educational product guaranteed to get certain results. By disentangling
the course from the digital architecture of a single university, student
experience and student education can be standardized across multiple
universities in a way that simply is not possible in a system that privileges
the institutional power of the university itself.
I come at this problem as someone who both is and is not what Allington,
Brouilette and Golumbia called a builder and maker, [an] adept
at the management and visualization of data, and [one able] conceive of
the study of literature as now fundamentally about the promotion of new
technologies. As technologies and archives become increasingly available, scholars
like me, wandering from job to job, will become increasingly a part of the
university landscape. This decentralization of pedagogy, enabled through free
tools and the ubiquity of internet access, has fundamental repercussions for the
structure of the academy in terms of tenure and non-tenure academics, but also
has effects that reach out into the educational experience of undergraduates
around the world. Canonical disciplinary boundaries or
fundamentals can be reinforced around the world in ways
that would be unthinkable only a few generations ago, as multiple universities
on multiple continents can all hire the same instructor to deliver the same
fundamental material. I do not mean to suggest that
this re-entrenching of the canon and derogation of the independence of the
university should be a goal for educational policy makers. Rather, I wish to
note that the present conditions of the educational marketplace favouring the
use of sessionals, combined with the rise of free pedagogical tools, student
desire for more digital resources, and the logical-positivism that informs
government policy decisions may have certain unintended results that will
reshape the way universities operate in the coming decade.
I have a course on English literature from the beginnings to 1660. It is an
educational product I’m willing to lease. Who wants to open the bidding?
Appendix
Please note, the numbering system refers to the day of the class, such that
“10.04 Corpus Christi https://youtu.be/Q7ZaIiySFN4” refers to the 10th day of class, 4th
part of the lecture, which was on Corpus Christi.
2.02 Paganism https://youtu.be/JuFNG3MspuQ2.03 Conversion to Christianity https://youtu.be/CUvivMXQ6Qc2.04 The Unification of England https://youtu.be/JY4lmGQmUvU2.07 Bede the Venerable https://youtu.be/BTUWq4nFFLk2.08 The Life of a Monk https://youtu.be/dqY9xZh1fWA2.13 Typology https://youtu.be/zB_BuPsRqrc2.16 The Conversion of the Northumbrians https://youtu.be/MkjMqvbAHe44.07 Gender in Beowulf https://youtu.be/KipKhuV791w4.11 Women as Hostesses https://youtu.be/mujgiqWx-1A4.12 - FreoÞuwebbe https://youtu.be/2DICNKvM9g44.14 Grendel’s Mother and Irony https://youtu.be/geQBdn9cJQs4.16 Inversion of Heorot https://youtu.be/djrhAAhjgVg4.17 Sexuality and the Battle with Grendel’s Mother https://youtu.be/tzigf0HaB984.18 Hands and Grasping https://youtu.be/njDCT3EIk5g6.02 Drama from Rome to the Church Fathers https://youtu.be/kRM5E-bDYAQ6.06 Quem Quaeritis and Liturgical Drama https://youtu.be/XUOiI_E_L_86.12 Style and Dramaturgy https://youtu.be/MAi6cdodltI6.15 Audience https://youtu.be/_tRxJQkcses6.16 Sexuality and Abraham https://youtu.be/drg-JNKSMrI6.17 The Lewd and the Erotic https://youtu.be/e898rMjrGKM6.18 The Erotic Body and Salvation https://youtu.be/XZbbnd-Otbs6.11 - Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim https://youtu.be/d55XYOPmOio8.16 The Knight’s Choice https://youtu.be/0cAKRmmM1V88.03 Chaucer Life https://youtu.be/q6Vyg4VkLmc8.06 Cecilia Chaumpaigne https://youtu.be/JwKaKOQHNpQ8.10 Description of the Wife of Bath https://youtu.be/czreX2JArV08.11 The Wife of Bath and Sexuality https://youtu.be/cSpC0VdG6EQ8.13 The Knight’s Quest https://youtu.be/YjkRuoyPVaA8.14 Alisoun’s Husbands https://youtu.be/QK_tgkOa1u08.15 Paradox in the Wife of Bath’s Tale https://youtu.be/8Dr9kcEc5gs8.19 Gentleness and Action in the World https://youtu.be/gImG7QaKD8g10.02 What is a Mystery Cycle? https://youtu.be/WuwKilu2n2I10.03 Why Processional? https://youtu.be/Kb7DtplTksw10.04 Corpus Christi https://youtu.be/Q7ZaIiySFN410.06 Guilds https://youtu.be/YDnBsfXSf3U10.07 Amateurism https://youtu.be/5JBNZsUl6t010.13 Social Order in The Second Shepherds’ Play https://youtu.be/yJv6bz7yito10.14 Bodies in The Second Shepherds’ Play https://youtu.be/DyoOVCeTMh810.16 Genre and the Carnivalesque https://youtu.be/1BvTbrx9dEw10.15 Carnival https://youtu.be/xE7K6v5LtcQ10.18 The Grotesque Body https://youtu.be/_u5gyc55x0o12.04 Everyman and Death https://youtu.be/GeFv5jX-1So12.05 Everyman and Fellowship https://youtu.be/PngD51efYOY12.06 Everyman, Kindred and Cousin https://youtu.be/CrwsSoYMQn812.09 Everyman and Confession https://youtu.be/FXiL7e9-4cw12.11 Knowledge and Five Wits https://youtu.be/Q1G4DtReOhk12.14 Salvation and Epilogue https://youtu.be/H9eEZWxfjjo12.15 Performance of Everyman https://youtu.be/QDylMuJNmDk12.17 What “The Renaissance” Means https://youtu.be/FrKe3g6L8QU14.03 Ten Tips for Reading Shakespeare https://youtu.be/80AiqahJ2-s14.04 Early Modern Theatre Outline https://youtu.be/L2N2AgYx30w14.05 Twelfth Night and Shakespeare’s Career https://youtu.be/2ePHP2uQBvQ14.06 Shakespeare’s Bawdy https://youtu.be/Py9Qhf5buJI14.07 Galen and Sexual Difference https://youtu.be/yKtzlkzyEZE14.08 Discovery of the Clitoris https://youtu.be/dcVxjxH3-AM14.09 Antitheatricalism and the Representation of Sexual Difference https://youtu.be/pP9XRkpIlQ014.10 Malvolio and Antitheatricalism https://youtu.be/my7Ie0ciTTk14.11 The Natural Order of Desire https://youtu.be/WcYvTFg05lM14.12 Clothing Makes the Man https://youtu.be/dTrCGmwxhUA14.14 Duelling and Masculinity https://youtu.be/PdFsjTXULlE14.15 Sodomy and Same Sex Desire https://youtu.be/HnWAkoWj9HM16.02 Malvolio on Stage https://youtu.be/B8B9amSulP416.03 Madness and Discipline https://youtu.be/r1jk_bhESyE16.04 Comedy and Madness https://youtu.be/J0a41CTJzBI16.05 Performing Anxiety https://youtu.be/q6DRVHjNXaU16.06 Expectations of Realism https://youtu.be/VDR9OAh-hAw18.02 Turn of the Century Protestantism https://youtu.be/oXicY5FIzMg18.03 Lanyer and Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum https://youtu.be/Ts3_9SG96Vk18.04 Description of Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum https://youtu.be/wAY0jtqHdZc18.05 To The Virtuous Reader Feminine Theology https://youtu.be/r0MEja9QCcs18.06 The Invocation https://youtu.be/FtxmFDOAdzo18.07 Eve’s Apology I https://youtu.be/B1wh2Y0K64Y18.08 Eve’s Apology II https://youtu.be/3GhQtZpJWf818.10 Introduction to George Herbert https://youtu.be/9ylIJV_BmVs18.11 The Metaphysical Poets and the Plain Style https://youtu.be/CE27aFdIjI818.12 Physical Space and Psychic Space https://youtu.be/lsriBlt0E-c18.13 Herbert’s Form https://youtu.be/WmVd6iUKHJ418.14 Moderate Calvinism https://youtu.be/7QYAklm21v018.15 Love (3) https://youtu.be/Vh6ZKq7cPmk20.02 Terminology https://youtu.be/J2Uy9TZV0L020.03 The Golden Mean https://youtu.be/Hoiu3xbUkDg20.04 Octave and Sestet https://youtu.be/D4NV8n08pes20.05 Petrarch https://youtu.be/O6w7aMIGvlw20.07 The Sonnet Comes to England https://youtu.be/hvCRulf9-ro20.08 Sir Philip Sidney https://youtu.be/fWzltuai5Tw20.09 Astrophil and Stella https://youtu.be/XSvrjHXbyOk20.11 Thematics of Astrophil and Stella https://youtu.be/jasmnbsUTro20.12 The Impact of Sidney https://youtu.be/d0i0KSDMZ1c20.13 Shakespeare’s Sonnets https://youtu.be/iLCjP3qlJ-U20.14 Sequencing the (Un)sequenced? Sonnets to the Young Man https://youtu.be/NqEcUaV0qhY20.15 The Dark Lady Sonnets https://youtu.be/MphbisJZAy422.02 Jacobean Metaphor https://youtu.be/eupX9O-LzZs22.03 The New World https://youtu.be/jxdBOYDE2YU22.04 The Old World https://youtu.be/ALSJH10263Y22.05 The Conceit https://youtu.be/MrIaQRzSDCM22.06 John Donne https://youtu.be/WhvbzSqIwuM22.07 Holy Sonnets https://youtu.be/ujJvkz1uns822.08 Holy War https://youtu.be/_CWC9s8qRPI22.10 Lady Mary Wroth and the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania https://youtu.be/_U2fIXQ5whc22.14 Inheritance and Gender https://youtu.be/YVhaFqkzEuc24.01 Introduction to the Final Lesson https://youtu.be/clLM_SeSMIM24.02 The Civil Wars https://youtu.be/inzINksicFw24.03 Cavalier and Roundhead https://youtu.be/QpwcGYODVvM24.04 Writing and the Civil War https://youtu.be/sWlbL4uYx4U24.05 Katherine Philips https://youtu.be/XXPj2lcs2Xk24.09 John Milton https://youtu.be/EASjW4TW75424.14 1660 https://youtu.be/6YToNDgVbjs24.15 Conclusions https://youtu.be/12PKSsKC6Zc
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