Am I a ‘teacher’? Apparently not.

I’ve been thinking about teaching more than usual (for a retiring academic!), having recently returned from one of my weeks doing face-to-face teaching at a US liberal arts college, Gustavus Adolphus College. Because I’m now returning to the main classes I co-teach, I’m getting to know the students and they’re becoming more relaxed in my company as I not only teach, but also learn with them. Meeting in other contexts in the arts, social, religious and activist events across campus reinforces our relationship (I’m thinking flute recital/Africa Night/chapel/Women’s Action Coalition here). I’m also extending the reach of my material through the student body, as I teach more and more one-off classes in other people’s modules. It’s exhausting (lots of new classes to prepare, and lots of reading from the other co-teachers to absorb) and it’s fun (I love working across intellectual disciplines).

People in the US often ask me what I taught at The Open University. I take a deep breath, and then explain that, for a ‘central academic – someone who writes and monitors the courses – ‘teaching’ there means something other than face-to-face interaction with a group of students. The numbers on each module are far, far greater than in any class you’ll meet face-to-face. The week before last, I was teaching the ‘Myth and Meaning’ class at Gustavus Adolphus: about 150 students, so they are divided into two groups and those are taught one after the other, which means remembering if you’ve told the second group this already or if that was the previous group! At The Open University, there are no lectures, partly because this is distance learning and the students are dispersed geographically. Numbers on the module may be many hundreds, or even go into the thousands. But there are also no recorded lectures, because that isn’t considered a good way to help students to learn. Instead, students work their way through the printed or online materials which I helped to produce, and they do this with the assistance of an Associate Lecturer (responsible for a small group within the module cohort) and of their fellow students. When all modules included an optional face-to-face element, students in my subjects would typically meet with their Associate Lecturer for a two-hour tutorial once a fortnight. Now, for some modules, contact may only be online, but backed up by phone and email.

I was therefore surprised to find that the current Vice-Chancellor denies that what central academics at The Open University do is ‘teaching’. All that seems to count for him is teaching in residential schools and, as there aren’t many left, that means that most central academics haven’t ‘taught’ for years. [update two years on: this Vice-Chancellor is no longer in post and things are far more sensible in 2020…]

To anyone who works, or has worked, at The Open University, these are surprising claims. Let’s unpack them.

Residential schools have largely been abandoned; for example, the Art History one, perhaps the final one in Humanities, went in 2015. Elsewhere in the university, those few still in existence now have online alternatives. So, in my six years at The Open University I was never able to volunteer to work at one. Not my fault! There weren’t any in my subject areas! Why did they go? Not because central academics wanted to get away with anything, but because of cost.

The management’s workload model, which governed how my year was divided up, included compulsory days for working at those residential schools which, by then, no longer existed; so we were allowed to substitute other direct face-to-face contact with students. I met my workload requirement by travelling out to various day schools to give lectures to the students. The days out were enjoyable, not least because students who had never been to lectures before didn’t know the rules about waiting until the end and would sometimes interrupt with questions or comments, so as a teacher I had to be very agile (a favourite Open University word these days)! The workload model section on teaching, however, included time writing and monitoring courses. These activities were most definitely ‘teaching’ too.

That brings me to the more fundamental suggestion here that writing teaching materials isn’t teaching. What is ‘teaching’? When I read the statement that I hadn’t been ‘teaching’ I wondered if I’d missed something. So I googled ‘define teaching’. One site that came up was infed, which offered me:

Teaching is the process of attending to people’s needs, experiences and feelings, and making specific interventions to help them learn particular things.

Interventions commonly take the form of questioning, listening, giving information, explaining some phenomenon, demonstrating a skill or process, testing understanding and capacity, and facilitating learning activities (such as note taking, discussion, assignment writing, simulations and practice).

During my six years at The Open University, I most definitely ‘taught’ in all these ways. I taught by writing courses through which students learned not only about the subject, but about how to study it. These courses included lots of questions for the student to reflect on as they worked their way through the teaching materials. I taught by engaging with students on the online forums. I taught by writing and overseeing the essay and exam questions by which we assessed their learning. I taught by monitoring the feedback given to the students to make sure it was supportive and fair.

I think I’m a good teacher; I reflected on some of the times when I think it worked particularly well here. When I read the definition of the ‘excellent teacher’ on Penn State’s website, it would be fair to say that, by the end of my career, I was meeting most of the points listed there about subject expertise, pedagogical expertise, communication skills, student-centred mentoring and systematic assessing. I do enjoy direct contact with students and this year in my visiting professor role I’m doing more hours of lecturing per week than I did in a year at The Open University. But what was most interesting to me about my time at The Open University was precisely that it enabled me to work on transferring all those skills from a typical face-to-face context to the very different situation of distance learning. If you never meet the student, how do you encourage her to think and empower her to go further? How do you incorporate different levels of prior learning and different learning styles? How do you transmit your enthusiasm and make the student into an active and critical learner? I learned how to do this in a distance learning context from excellent academic and administrative colleagues in my subject, in my Faculty and in the wider community of Associate Lecturers, who not only work with the students once the course is up and running but who also liaise with central academics in designing courses. At The Open University, as elsewhere, academics are encouraged to apply for membership of the Higher Education Academy, which is ‘committed to world-class teaching in higher education’, and the HEA certainly think that what central academics do counts as ‘teaching’!

So: I don’t think I ‘got away’ with anything at The Open University. It was never an escape from teaching, but a chance to move as far as you can in UK Higher Education in order to explore a totally different way of teaching for a mass market. So, am I a teacher? I suppose it depends who you ask!