No Brideshead Revisited, no summer of love in the empty quadrangle: challenges to scholarship in the on-line age

No Brideshead Revisited, no summer of love in the empty quadrangle: challenges to scholarship in the on-line age

As scholars we value the belief that we are part of a pedagogical project that challenges and critiques contemporary society, and that replicates itself with new generations of critics. We celebrate the arrival of the online era, with its multiple opportunities for facilitation of research, and the engagement and enrichment of the student experience. But has the new media gone too far in replacing the actual with the virtual, and what implications has the adoption of the online model of pedagogy on the on-campus student experience? The positive of online university is that it enriches and democratises, and allows disadvantaged and lower SES students to study in their own time and place, whether in Bangalow or Beijing. The authors consider the evolution of the online mode to
become the increasingly dominant discourse at the Wiki-University of the future, supplanting the physical campus in its central position in the student experience.
Increasingly compelled to respond to marketplace concerns, the corporate university presents a new learning experience that displaces students from the physical campus and allows them to embark on a fragmented part-time education where the learning experience can be compartmentalised, sidelined or marginalised to accommodate other pressing Gen Y concerns. The student narrative has changed and become diluted and depoliticised, and is in danger of reflecting instrumental values of credentialism with reduced scope for wider cultural learning. Representing different disciplinary perspectives, the authors of this paper chart the evolution of the on-campus student experience. They argue that while virtual education facilitates access to learning, if mismanaged the removal of the actual student from the spaces of the campus has the potential to create an empty credentialing virtual institution where actual students will be incidental not essential, with vastly altered learning experiences.

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