How flexible do we need to be?

This week’s post for the Designing for flexible learning course focuses on the question

• Do we need more flexible learning, or is all this choice a bad idea?

I’m inspired by this post about choosing to ‘simplify things‘.

There was a great video[1] that we have used in our “Decision Making and Choice” lecture that suggested that too much choice is bad. Barry Schwartz is a psychologist and suggests that “Too many choices undermine happiness.” While this is probably more than we generally offer in ‘flexible learning’, I’m becoming conscious of the impact of choice in learning on students. I’m often asked “But what do I have to do to pass?” In some ways, these students are asking me to take away their choice, to take away the option of failure, to make the decision of what to do. And while I’d love to do that, I know that they need to move beyond their current understanding of whatever it is they’re doing. That’s the whole point of an education, methinks.

So, getting back to the question, I think too much choice is bad. I believe that we may need to provide choice, but only limited choice. Yes, you can study at a distance, you can opt out of coming to class, but you do miss out on things[2]. I try to provide some flexibility, but it’s fairly limited, particularly with the first year students who are only just coming into the academic way.

At my previous uni, there was much much more in the way of flexibility. All course material was presented in either printed version or CD with a complete version often offered online. Students could choose to use what they needed, when they needed it. This was great for motivated students, students who had already chosen to become engage. But for the marginal students, it almost offered a way out of engagement. It almost perpetuated the ‘please tell me what to do‘ mentality.

On the other hand, for some of the lecturers offering more flexible opportunities, it offered them a way out of engaging with students. All of those flexible courses had an email discussion list[3]. Now the beauty of the email lists was that students could ask questions at any time of day, any day of the week (and they did). But, only for the lists where there was more than just a suggestion that the lists would be helpful. The most notable failure of these lists was a course where the it was stated that the list was a ‘self-help group‘. This list was the least used of any of the four that I studied. At the other end of the spectrum was the list that was framed as a ‘way to get answers to your problems‘ and that ‘tutors would be available to answer those questions‘. This list became a repository of answers to common questions and many students engaged very deeply with the concepts of the course (in stark contrast to the ‘self-help group‘). Some of the respondents to my survey were on both lists and contrasted them well. Those who only had the ‘self-help group‘ as a measure of these lists thought they were useless and ‘a waste of time‘.

How does this relate to choice? Well, with the lecturer choosing to leave it unattended, expecting students to help themselves, there was little flexibility in the learning process. There were really no options in getting help (too little choice?). In the other course, where the tutors were checking and responding regularly, there was a choice. Students could choose to ask questions, they could wait to see if someone else asked, or they could study along at their own pace and search the list for answers[4]. It truly was a flexible learning environment even though there was the same set up, the same technologies, the same environment for both lists.

So, it’s our choices, as teachers, as lecturers, as facilitators of learning, that provides the flexibility, not necessarily the options that we give students.

To go back to the video I referenced and to quote Barry Schwarz: Is this good news or bad news?

His answer – Yes! I’m inclined to agree with him.

1. TED: Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice, http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93 [↩]
2. Point to note here is that my current place of work does not offer much in the way of distance learning, but we are headed toward blended learning, in some ways going away from the idea of flexible learning. It was a failed experiment for us [↩]
3. This was the basis of my PhD research – investigating how students actually engaged in these options. [↩]
4. This is where the whole idea of vicarious conversations comes from [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 10:15 am and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.