Nobody Has Ever Watched Them Teach

The platform goes down in week seven, on a Wednesday, at about twenty past two, which is roughly ninety minutes after three hundred and forty second-year physiology students were told that the quiz closing Friday could only be taken inside it.

It does not go down in the honest way, with an error page and an apology. It goes down in the modern way, which is that it stays up and stops working. The video player loads, plays four seconds, and stalls. The quiz submits and returns a blank confirmation with no record against the student's name. The discussion board accepts a post and shows it to nobody. On a phone, which is how two-thirds of the cohort do everything, the left-hand menu covers the content and cannot be dismissed. Every one of these failures is small enough to be plausibly the student's fault, and that is the cruellest part of the design, because for the first two days the emails that arrive in the lecturer's inbox all begin with an apology from a nineteen-year-old who thinks she is doing it wrong.

By Thursday the lecturer has forty-one of those emails. By Friday she has a hundred and six, a spreadsheet she built herself to track who has been locked out of what, and a text message from a student on placement in Whanganui who has driven to a McDonald's car park for the wifi and still cannot get the module to open.

The people who designed it

The platform was not chosen by anyone who teaches. It was chosen eighteen months earlier, at the end of a procurement process, on the recommendation of a Learning Experience Design unit that came into existence the previous year and now employs fourteen people.

Their titles are worth writing out, because nobody ever says them aloud in full and the effect is cumulative: Senior Learning Designer, Instructional Designer, Digital Learning Designer, Learning Technologist, Learning Experience Architect, Educational Media Producer, Digital Assessment Specialist, Manager Learning Design Practice, and a Head of Learning Design who reports to a Director who reports to a Deputy Vice-Chancellor whose portfolio contains the word Experience. Inside the unit they refer to academics as SMEs, subject matter experts, a term borrowed from corporate training, where it describes the person you extract the content from before the real work begins.

Now for the arithmetic that the unit's own documentation never performs. Between the fourteen of them there is not one teaching evaluation. Not a bad one. None. There is no student feedback report with any of their names on it, because no student has ever been enrolled in anything they taught, because they have never taught. There is no peer review of teaching in any of their files, no colleague who has sat at the back of their class and written two pages about what happened in the second half, no record of a moment when a plan met a room and lost. Their promotion cases contain project milestones. Their evidence of impact is a completion rate for a module they built about how to build modules.

The institution requires a great deal of this evidence from everybody else. A lecturer applying for confirmation must supply three years of evaluations, two peer reviews, a teaching philosophy, and a portfolio with examples of how she responded to feedback. The people who now tell her how to teach supplied a CV and an interview. The standard applies downwards only, which is the most reliable indicator anywhere in a university of where the power sits.

The students they have met

The unit is not indifferent to students. The unit is passionate about students. Students appear on every page of its strategy, in the phrase the learner journey, and in a photograph of four young people in a breakout space who are not students at this university and are not students at all.

The students the unit has actually met, it has met in focus groups, and the focus groups were convened by a consultancy. Eight participants, recruited by email, paid in a forty-dollar voucher, held at four in the afternoon in a room on the ground floor of the library, moderated by a person from Auckland who flew down that morning. The eight were asked what they wanted from their digital learning experience, and being nineteen and polite and holding a voucher, they said things like flexibility, and everything in one place, and being able to catch up when I'm working. Those three phrases became a requirements matrix. The requirements matrix became a shortlist. The shortlist became a fifteen-year licence and a platform that cannot render a diagram of the nephron.

Nobody from the unit has sat in the back of a nine o'clock lecture. Nobody from the unit has held a two-hour lab where a student's hands shake because it is the first time she has held a pipette and her mother rang at midnight from Suva. Nobody from the unit has had the experience, which every teacher has had a hundred times, of watching a whole room's face change at once and having to decide in three seconds whether to keep going or stop and start again from somewhere further back. That reading of a room is the entire craft. It cannot be specified, it does not appear in a requirements matrix, and the people building the requirements matrix do not know it exists, so they have built a system that removes the room.

The ticket

The lecturer logs a ticket on Thursday morning. It is assigned a number with eight digits and a priority of Medium. Medium, she learns from a colleague, is where tickets go to acclimatise.

On Friday she receives a reply asking her to confirm the browser, the operating system, and whether she has tried clearing the cache, addressed to her by the wrong first name, signed by a service desk in a different time zone that the university moved to in the same year it stopped having a person in the building who knew how the thing worked. She replies that it is happening to three hundred and forty students across every browser in existence. The ticket is escalated, which means a second number.

On Monday the vendor is engaged. The vendor's position, delivered in a call at seven in the morning to accommodate the vendor, is that the platform is performing to specification and that the issue is likely local. The word likely does the work of the entire call. On Wednesday, week eight, the Learning Technologist sends an all-staff email with the subject line Known issue — update, in which the sentence we appreciate your patience during this period is doing the same work as likely, and which suggests, as an interim measure, that teaching staff consider adapting their delivery.

There it is. Buried in the fourth paragraph of an email nobody will keep: the failure has been handed back to the person it was taken from. The system could not do the job, so the job returns to the teacher, quietly, with no resource attached and no acknowledgement that anything has been returned.

Eight o'clock

So she does what teachers do, which is the thing the entire apparatus depends on and has never once budgeted for.

She opens Zoom, because Zoom works, and she runs the week seven material live on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at eight, because that is after the shift-workers finish and after the parents have got the kids down, and she does it again the following week, and the week after that, until the platform is fixed in week eleven by the removal of a feature that the procurement documents had listed as a benefit.

Eight o'clock, in her kitchen, with the dishwasher running. Sixty or seventy of them each time, cameras off, one or two with a baby on the shoulder. She re-draws the countercurrent multiplier on a piece of A4 held up to the laptop camera because the annotation tool has also stopped working, and somebody types ohhhh in the chat, and that ohhhh is the only evidence produced anywhere in this entire eighteen-month project that learning has occurred. She stays on afterwards for questions. On the Thursday she is still there at nine-forty, talking a student through a diagram he has been staring at for three days, and when he finally gets it he says thanks Miss, which he has never said before and will be embarrassed about later.

None of this exists institutionally. There is no field for it. Her workload model allocates her contact hours by timetabled slot, and these slots are not timetabled, so they are not hours. The extra teaching is not in her PDR. It is not in the paper's costings. It is not visible to anyone above her except as the absence of a complaint, and the absence of a complaint is read upstairs as the absence of a problem.

The reporting line

In week thirteen the Learning Experience Design unit presents to Academic Board. Slide nine, replete with typos, is titled Emerging practice, and it reports strong engagement with synchronous online delivery in second-year science, with attendance at optional evening sessions running well above the sector benchmark. The Head of Learning Design describes this as an encouraging signal about learner appetite for flexible modes, and recommends that the model be scaled.

What is being scaled is a woman in her kitchen at nine-forty at night, unpaid, fixing by hand a thing that fourteen salaried people broke on her behalf. That is the model. It has been observed, admired, given a name, and proposed as the future, and its actual mechanism — a teacher who will not let students drown, and who can therefore be relied upon indefinitely — is the one input that never appears in the diagram.

A member of Academic Board asks whether the evening sessions are resourced. There is a pause of the length that means no, and then an answer of the length that means no, and the Board moves to item eleven.

The lecturer is not there. She is downstairs in the teaching lab, where a student who failed the quiz twice through no fault of her own is asking, with some heat and entirely correctly, why nobody fixed it. And the lecturer, who has been up since five and who knows precisely who did not fix it and why, says what teachers say, which is: I know. Let's start from the beginning. Sit down, I'll draw it for you.