January 23 and 24, 2017 I had the opportunity to join a meeting of the project group ‘The Connected Academy’. Attending were David Theo Goldberg and Claudia Caro Sullivan from the University of California, Jonathan Worth and Ahmed Kharrufa (last one by Skype) from Newcastle University, and Judith Garms and Joyce Lagerweij from the World Press Photo Foundation (WPFF). They came to ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, The Netherlands, on invitation by Nishant Shah, dean of the Graduate School ArtEZ, to work on a new digital learning environment for educational purpose. I was very interested in their methods of using the digital possibilities within education, because when I started my working career at Utrecht University I helped developing the first history course that was supported by a digital platform, then – it was 1998 – built in WebCT. Soon I was to see that this platform was not at all comparable with the environment that the project group was planning to build.
The Connected Academy set out to offer offline courses, supported online with digitized lectures and digital interviews. Although given in a classroom, learners make comments – annotations – online using Twitter. At the same time, it is an online course, to be taken wherever one wants, whenever one wants, with the advantages of seeing all the annotations made by other learners earlier. But the “extra” is in the class, that meets physically and which discusses the material both offline and online. The class has the online participants, who follow the course at the same time, as the wider community to get comments from or to have discussions with. And sometimes the person interviewed for the online material adds his or her reaction on the annotations of the participants. This is made possible by using hash tags, and the twitter account of the interviewed person, in the twitter annotations.
A business model for free online courses
Building a portal that brings all of this together is one of the challenges Tom Bartindale and Patrick Olivier of the Open Lab of Newcastle University are confronted with. For this part they joined our meeting by Skype. But the Open Lab has done this before, for Jonathan Worth’s course on photography at Newcastle University. In 2009 he started a class on “What is necessary for the photographer in the 21st century?” He placed that question also on the Internet and had his students posting and blogging. His class grew from 9 students in 2009 to 35.000 in three years.[1]
The product to sell is the class in the room – that still consists of no more than 20 students; that class has become the most expensive class of Newcastle University. That’s the business model of digital learning. Or at least a business model, as there might be more. Although it’s not easy to earn money if everything you develop or create is reproduced online for free, as Worth discovered in his business as a professional photographer. In a collaboration with artist Coro Doctorow he created downloadable work they would sell offline as well. And it did sell. It did sell well. The virtual work supported the selling of the original photographs.
Talents of the team
Worth was awarded the Reclaim Learning Price of MIT for his Newcastle class. He met Claudia Caro Sullivan and they worked together on a photography course in which learners could participate online, as well as offline. As the course would be given by librarians, they also created a librarian course: how to teach the librarian. Nishant Shah was in one of Worth’s Open Classes at MIT and he asked Worth, “Can I push the delete button afterwards?” How to address this ownership issue when stuff is online available for everybody?
David Campbell of the World Press Photo Foundation had a blog with the same question as Worth had: “What is necessary for the photographer in the 21st century?”. That’s how Jonathan met the World Press Photo Foundation. They got together and discussed how can we make such a course available for everybody; how can we deliver something at scale? These people decided to work on this together, to bring together their own goals to come up with a pedagogy structure for this idea.
Worth always worked in a room, he textualized all the knowledge that came in and he contextualized that information. The next step would be to participate meaningful outside of the room. David Theo Goldberg thinks one needs small networks for this, and works from a small group of around 10 people to larger groups to have a meaningful, manageable and sustainable course and to maintain the interest of the students. In the meeting the partners brainstormed on what kind of organizations can and want to participate and host classes for their community. A museum is mentioned, as is the Goethe Institute. This would require a teacher training. However that is no problem since Worth has now 20 teachers for his Phonar Class doing what he did, all worked out in a number of guidelines.
Produce critical story tellers
Back to the goals of the World Press Photo Foundation, because it will be their class we start on first. Theirs will be the pilot of the Connected Academy. It will be a course on storytelling. The WPPF aims to look beyond their usual partners, the ones that work a lot with visual journalism, and target groups who use storytelling in photography as a form of therapy, or professionally (NGO ’s e.g.), or just for fun. The WPPF wants free courses for those who are not professional photographers but consumers of photography or amateur photographers. Also the WPPF wants to make people aware of the WPPF function and of what they do. The WPPF wants to be seen as leader in this field. With this course it will link partners and learn the wishes and needs of these new target groups.
In the meeting the partners discussed the issue of a critical reading capacity and the critical legacy of the virtual. For example data verification was mentioned as an important issue: see the image as a digital object, what does it mean that a photo is actually a data stream? WPPF organized technical courses, but not critical courses. And soon the partners concluded: the WPPF wants to produce critical story tellers. And these will not necessarily be professional photographers only. That will be our narrative, the story of this course. And the course is born!
More on the process of designing this course in part 2.
[1] For more information on this educational concept see e.g. this interview with Jonathan Worth: http://www.statedmag.com/articles/interview-jonathan-worth-photographer-and-open-source-online.html/#