This week in our New Interactive Environments course we were asked to think of an activity that could be redesigned to be more efficient and reasonable.
For me, the first thing I can think of that needs a major overhaul is e-learning in general. And by e-learning I mean absolutely all of the operations that are carried out electronically at the university - be it administrative operations, like enrolling for courses and applying for stipends, taking e-courses in their respective e-environments, or even online student socialization in general. I would propose to put them all together with the help of a central electronic environment.
I sometimes wonder why these things haven't been integrated a long time ago. After all, these operations do not seem to serve any other purpose than to facilitate the activity of our studies - the motivation behind them is the same. So it's often frustrating to deal with a heavily scattered body of functionalities that, ultimately, serve the same purpose.
We recently got a new information system at TLU, which seems like a real blessing after its terrible predecessor. However, at the heart of it, it's still looks and handles like a decade-old environment. I realize that the visual side of things is often governed by stricter usability guideline requirements for public institutions, nor do I care that much about that, but, to me, an environment where you can't, for example, generate a Google Calendar automatically based on the courses you registered to, is a bit behind the times. The same goes for any other platform that you are already using for managing your e-mails and documents, which could really be integrated into the process to make it more seamless. Not having the university information system integrated into your real digital life forces you to spend a lot of resources on doing redundant tasks which can really be obliterated given the right technology.
What's more, I have used at least 5 or 6 different stand-alone Moodle-type learning environments in my time as a student - all essentially offering the same basic functionality in their own uniquely flawed way. Add to that the countless blogs, wikis, intranets and web directories that courses utilize and you have a right mess on your hands, because you can't keep track of them all. If you want any sort of archive of your studies, you have to build your own database.
And that is only one example of a huge waste of resources which could be avoided simply by having a central environment where all of the course materials, assignments, projects and feedback can be hosted and aggregated in the first place. It's not like different courses use some sort of special instruments for their studies - the things that you usually need are blogging tools, wikis, discussion boards, live conferencing tools, file sharing tools and a system for messaging and socializing. Add to that adequate features for integrating content from external sources and you should pretty much be golden.
There are more applications, of course, that should be added to this central environment, but the point is that most probably only a finite number of tools is needed and it is absolutely viable to have the mother of all e-learning environments where you can log-in and perform absolutely all of your school-related operations.
From an Activity Theory standpoint it almost seems that we have one activity of "studying", and you can identify the subject, object, the tools, the rules, the community and the division of labour, but the interaction between all those elements is suffering on the count of not having the right tools. There seems to be a lot of redundancy in the instruments and in the communication between the subject and the community.
So I think it is definitely possible to re-instrumentalize and re-organize the activity of studying in TLU with the help of emerging technology. I would first propose making an all-encompassing study of organizational efficiency both from the perspective of the administration of the university and from the perspective of students, of what sort of electronic platforms are needed for schoolwork and how students and lecturers are building their own systems for communicating vital information related to academic work. After all this has been mapped out, I would suggest investing in creating a single environment through which all curriculum planning and management can be carried out on the university side and every conceivable electronic operation can be carried out by students.
If you get the study right, if you engage in intelligent dialogue with all the parties involved and you find the right people to design the environment, I think you would save money in the long run, it would make everything much more efficient and it would also add to the quality of education.
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