When it comes time to create a learning experience, most learning designers start their process with understanding needs and goals. Ideally, a designer talks to some target users or learners and stakeholders to build empathy and definitions of success.
But when we asked the two well-dressed, Classics professors seated across from our team to talk about their learners’ needs and pains today, they delved into quite another serious concern altogether.
There was mounting, irrefutable pressure from the University for professors to digitize every idea and insight on Ancient Greek and Roman literature – a lifetime of their scholarship – into bite-sized, scalable chunks.
Traditionally, their insights – earned from countless nights of reading and rereading lines of classical poetry – were organically bestowed in dialogue with students. Now their source for publications and intellectual property was to be mass-produced. Their sentiments were not wrong. I could see how packing up insights and handing them over those rights to the University was yet another blow to the institution of the humanities.
Additionally, online engagement is usually grounded in a course’s direct application to daily life. The theory is if you can make material matter to adult learners’ day-to-day goals, they will be more intrinsically motivated to learn and succeed in class. They may even have fun doing it. This was another sticking point with the Greek and Roman Literature seminar in an online format. As Sven Birkherts states in the Gutenberg Elegies:
“Knowledge…in the humanities is not a straightforward matter of access of conquest…The data – the texts themselves – matter inasmuch as they help deepen and extend the narrative (about) what the human world used to be like, about how the world came to be as it is, and about what we have been – and are – like as psychological or spiritual creatures.”
–Sven Birkherts
Though tenured and reasonably secure in their respective fields, how would the two well presented professors convert an undergraduate, on-campus seminar to relay material to 100% online working professionals in their different personal contexts? The future of the professors’ satisfaction scores rested in the hands of adult learners they may never meet in person. I felt for them.
After day 1, I wasn’t sure how we were going to get to scoping learners’ needs.
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Still, twenty students – nurses, busy moms, career-transitioning journalists and analysts – were waiting for the wisdom of ancients with the convenience of remote learning. It was an opportunity for those who did not have the college experience they wanted at 17-year-olds.
So I excavated old rubrics, asked more about the traditional class structure, and started the design process.
The professors talked through high level objectives. Students can distinguish amongst genres of literature: epic, history, tragedy, comedy and philosophy. The students had to describe worlds of authors such as Homer and Socrates. The reading list included Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy Oresteia, Herodotus and Livy’s Greek The Histories and Rise of Rome respectively. Professors warned us like they do their students: much of this material is unfamiliar, even uncomfortably challenging.
Traditionally, the in-class students:
(1) did their homework of reading and rereading paperback books capturing initial aha’s in the margins
(2) then in the classroom, the professors identified key examples of verses in required texts that merit closer interpretation and aptly employed the Socratic method to draw out students’ reactions to timeless moral dilemmas and intimate dramas
(3) students dialogue in class with text in hand, annotating and underlining additional revelation and fashioned their own perspectives on themes similar to those underlying political and personal dilemmas today
(4) finally, students formalized their independent views on the class discussion in a 1-2 page paper that distinguished summary from analysis and also met the course objective of academic writing free from lexical error
To me, success for an asynchronous experience meant that each adult learner walk away knowing how to critically examine and unpack a difficult passage and uncover something new about their own life, society, and place in the universe. More simply put: these adult could slow down enough to savor a sentence like they were seventeen again.
I felt the anxiety of digital curmudgeons who doubted this was possible in an Information Age with word processing, unlimited scrolling, and quick-sought summaries. As Birkherts opined:
“The [physical] page is flat, opaque. The screen is of interdeterminate depth – the world floats on the surface like a leaf on a river. Phenomenologically, the word is less absolute.”
But by the same token, the computers “destabilizing the authority of the printed word…are returning us…to the process orientation that characterized oral cultures.” (Birkerts, 156)
Therein lied some hope. By slowing down the process of reading electronically, we could slow down the process of listening. If we could slow down the process of listening and relistening, we may achieve the learner goal of seeking some wisdom from ancients for today.
By slowing down the process of reading electronically, we could slow down the process of listening. If we could slow down the process of listening and relistening, we may achieve the learner goal of seeking some wisdom from ancients for today.
The professors and I saw eye-to-eye. They warmed up to the notion of listening to learn. The students would still have to write papers, but in the interim, they could submit voice notes to each other and the professors to process the texts externally.
I started to think to myself: Could the aural learning culture of voice notes and digital learning be anything like that of the Ancients discussing in public squares and universities?
We recorded each professor close reading passages. I added visual annotations on the texts using Final Cut Pro, as a student might do in her own physical copy. Students could similarly mock-up their own hard copies, or try annotating their online texts although such features differed from device to device.
In a final assignment, students constructed HTML timelines of an author’s life. They mirrored the professor’s own close readings and recorded close readings of their own.
Could our team of learning designers ever have fully alleviated the professors’ mid-career angst at relinquishing these sound bytes to the university? Probably not in those circumstances. But given the satisfaction results of students by the end of the semester, we did spark a more familiar transition to learning humanities online.