The bells are tolling for the demise of the university classroom — at least its physical manifestation.
Administrative barbarians find it unseemly that an academic could turn up, in person, to teach students who, likewise, turn up in person, to engage in the acquiring of knowledge.
The acuity of this state of affairs has been notable in Australia.
The University of Adelaide this month announced that students will no longer turn up to classes in 2026 in the new amalgamated behemoth, combining it and University of South Australia.
The University of Adelaide tried to do the same thing in 2015. For years, the university managers have hated the physical classroom.
As is always the case with these pronouncements, the justification is a fictional body of evidence.
“Universities,” claimed a spokesman for Adelaide University, “have been increasingly responding to student needs for a flexible delivery over the years, and the shift away from face-to-face lectures is not new”.
Who are these absentee students? What is the sample size? There was no answer.
Then came the elaborate ground cover masking the undemocratic nature of the decision.
Joanne Cys, the domain lead for curriculum at Adelaide University, seemed under the impression that staff had been “comprehensively engaged” in developing the new curriculum.
“This collaboration is ongoing … with more than 1500 staff set to develop the content for Adelaide University’s courses and programs between now and 2026.”
The culling of lectures is part of the “Adelaide Attainment Model”, a slimming program that will lead to the introduction of trimesters by 2028.
It satisfies a “modular” fetish — the world of learning envisaged as starved catwalk models moving across the stage rather than well-fed samples of learning buried in books.
Modules can be undertaken in the form of online courses, which offer fleeting flexibility. This is education, thinned and skinned.
To give a sense of this, the Adelaide document is full of anaemic terms.
“These activities will deliver an equivalent learning volume to traditional lectures and will form a common baseline for digital learning across courses, providing a consistent experience for students.”
The claims to consistency are certainly accurate, in so far as such an experience will be numbingly mediocre.
The document expresses the view that such “asynchronous activities will be self-paced and self-directed, utilising high-quality digital resources that students can engage with anytime and anywhere”.
Even within, some devotees are expressing concern. “The best assurance we have is there can still be practicals, tutorials or workshops, yet we cannot really teach content in these,” suggested one lecturer to In Daily.
Activities might involve quizzes, readings and “short videos” as substitutes for lectures. “This mode of teaching is almost impossible for STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics], health and medicine degrees.”
Every contrarian will find a cowardly sycophant justifying such decay as the heralding of progress. “We sort of already do what is suggested anyway,” claimed one unnamed academic, also quoted by In Daily.
Students already see “recordings” to begin with and only then do they go into “face-to-face sessions that are more interactive”.
It might be worth asking the obvious point here: why have the recordings in the first place to excuse your reason to teach?
The move towards abolishing such teaching suggests that the rotting foundations were already offering much for this change.
Funded, slothful ignoramuses were already advancing the idea for some years that the classroom be “flipped”, a way of teaching that ignores the rigours of instruction and disciplined learning in favour of convenient schedules best done at home.
The flipped classroom became the precursor for extinguishing coherent, disciplined learning, linked to space, people and experiences.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided an accelerant for money-pinching administrative bureaucrats to experiment with eliminating student-teacher classes without providing the experience that supposedly accompanies it.
Savings were there to be made; student welfare to be manipulated. The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is merely the next step in retiring, forever, the human in the classroom, a process that, disturbingly enough, will seek to retire the student as well.
In a sharp piece, scientist Geoff Davies describes the ball wreckers of university teaching as “managerial digital infidels” who treat education as a matter of harvesting knowledge, a body comprising “a big collection of pieces, factoids that can be served in small bowls for the student to consume”.
A bleak, apocalyptic interpretation is offered.
“Thus, the neoliberal mindset of isolated, asocial individuals competing through a series of fragmented transactions is carried down to its ultimate subversion of the very knowledge on which our culture and civilisation are built.”
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]