Responding to the challenges of e-learning - 2005

I should begin by apologizing, in a conference devoted to electronic learning, about the very unsophisticated nature of my offering. I see from the contents of the Conference Holder that everyone else delivering a paper has prepared a Power Point Presentation, the text of which has been made available already. Not being very competent in this field, I am able only to speak - a task made even more complicated by my having to do this in the first session after lunch, which is when the temptation to sleep is greatest.

I thought it best therefore to be discursive and anecdotal, to try to entertain you to hold your attention. In the course of this I hope I will be able to make a couple of points that I think particularly important in the current context if we are to maximize usage of the vast resources that are now at your disposal.

So let me start with a couple of anecdotes that indicate the level of the challenges with which you as Librarians, and we as Academics engaged in teaching, have to deal. Some years back, talking to a graduate who had done English as a subject, I inquired about the capacity of his students to understand the set of textbooks prescribed for Secondary School English. He taught in a small school in Dehiattakandiya, so I was quite impressed when he told me that comprehension was quite easy up to the Grade 9 book, but there were some difficulties with 10 and 11. When I conveyed my admiration, he clarified the position. He had been talking about his own capabilities, not those of his students.

The second anecdote is much simpler, but deals with the same set of texts. When I asked some students, at university, whether they could read a passage from one of those texts, the answer was that they could read, but they could not understand. Unfortunately, that distinction does not seem to have made any impression on many of those engaged in our profession. We now have fairly large budgets for university libraries, and we feel obliged to use them up, as part of that strange phenomenon in government spending where using up allocations becomes an end in itself, regardless of the outcome of that spending. So we find ever more sophisticated books being bought, which the vast majority of our students cannot read.

AS I nave seen at our university, as many of you have confirmed to me from your own experience, libraries at universities are used to a great extent now by students to read their lecture notes, not the books that cram the shelves. One of you indeed told me that there are lecturers who insist that sets of their lecture notes should be kept available in the library for students to read - the idea that they might refer to original sources, or alternative viewpoints, is no longer considered essential for academic progress. And the result, as we are all too sadly finding, is that each generation knows less instead of more than its predecessor, fulfilling the fears of Her Excellency the President, as expressed at our Convocation in 1998, that we are frogs digging deeper and deeper into our well.

What can we do about this? It is even more serious now that sources of information are multiplying so rapidly. Unless we give our students access to these they will be left behind, a fate that is increasingly disastrous in an increasingly globalized world. So far, and I believe from the material I have seen that this has been the thrust of your discussions thus far, we have made what might be termed physical access our priority. I notice for instance that the IRQUE Project, designed to Improve the Relevance and Quality of University Education, but unfortunately implemented by our University Grants Commission which does not quite understand what the words in the acronym mean, has designated the number of books per student as a benchmark of quality. Finding out how many books are borrowed per student let alone how many use books actively, is not something they seem to have thought especially important.

So massive amounts of money are being provided, to universities and to suppliers, and doubtless to others too involved in the business, to multiply the number of computers at university, and to increase connectivity. The UGC has instituted a Project, with a highly paid Consultant, to develop internet access - the result was that, for an introductory course in Current Affairs, the team turned up at Sabaragamuwa with pages and pages on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that they had downloaded for our benefit. What use all this was I don't suppose they had bothered to consider, since it could doubtless be turned into a statistic that would feature on yet another Power Point Presentation.

I would suggest indeed that Internet material is even more dangerous than books, if not properly digested, because it can be so readily plagiarized. Earlier, when passages were lifted without understanding from books, there were mistakes in the copying which gave the game away. Incorporating electronic material with a modicum of care will not rouse suspicion, in a context in which we are not careful enough in checking on learning. To give you yet another anecdote, I found a few months back a candidate for promotion proudly bringing along a Masters Thesis, from Colombo University, which it turned out on questioning he did not understand. When I brought this to the attention of the Vice-Chancellor, who I should admiringly say reacted with a promptitude I had thought no longer possible in our system, it turned out that there had been no viva requirement for theses for such Masters Degree. I am happy to say that following that query, vivas have now been introduced in such situations.

But leaving aside the question of combating plagiarism, we should address most seriously the question of how we could develop the reading habit amongst our students. Of course we need to start young, and for this purpose we are trying, in revising the Secondary School curriculum, and materials to implement it, to introduce simple reference exercises in as many subjects as possible. For again, while much money has been spent in recent years on projects to develop libraries, not much care has been exercised on how the money has been spent. Training Colleges for instance were supplied with multiple copies of multiple volume Encyclopaedias of Hinduism. When I brought this to the attention of the World Bank official who was supposed to monitor this project, he said rather lamely that he could not understand how this had escaped his attention. I m afraid he is not alone in not really exercising with regard to government money which is everybody's money and therefore nobody's the care we would exercise if the funds expended were our own.

It is for this reason that I believe we need in the universities to set up Library Quality Circles - not the Library Committees that simply authorize expenditure, but Circles that establish partnerships between librarians and staff and students to ensure the acquisition of books that will serve to develop the reading habit. For this there must be a healthy proportion of books written in simple English that will promote reading; and there must be commitment on the part of lecturers to prescribe short portions of books with a particular focus that will ensure that students have to make their acquaintance.

This is not easy given that so many books are written for native speakers, and therefore use language and syntax that are not readily accessible we can at least start by drawing attention to material such as one volumn enclopaedias, which first year students can access, and then moving on to introductory textbooks of which increasing numbers are now being produced in the subcontinent in relatively easy English.

In this regard I should mention, since it is not well enough known in the University system, an initiative of Her Excellency, in line with her concern about developing the reading habit. Funding was made available from the Presidents Fund, through the UGC, to encourage academics to produce simplified textbooks that would then be published commercially by established publishers. Such texts were to be targeted at first year undergraduates and also Advanced Level students who might want to read in simple English material that they hoped to study in depth later at university.

The scheme did not just subsidize material, because given the Sri Lankan context we would all have ended up recommending each others work for such subsidies. Rather the final decision as to the acceptability of a manuscript would be made by an experienced publisher who would have to commit to producing (and therefore distributing) more copies of the book than the subsidy covered. Thus students would have low cost material, and our academics would not only have their books published by a highly reputed agent, they would also have sales and royalties on a scale unlikely if they followed the usual practice of publishing on their own, or through a publisher they funded, who would have no incentive to distribute the book actively.

The first book in the series, a medical text on Radionucleides by two young lecturers from Ruhuna University, has just come out, and it will I hope be launched shortly by Her Excellency. Meanwhile I hope that you will encourage those members of the academic staff who share your love of books, and your concern that they be used more widely, to participate in this project by preparing manuscripts that will suit the language levels of their students.

The aim of course is that, by embarking upon reading as an essential part of any academic programme, students will go on to read more widely, to select suitable material on their own through Internet Access, to take advantage of the large collections you and your predecessors have built up over the years. The world, as we have noted here, is open to us even more widely than before as a result of recent technological advances. However we have to make an active effort to ensure that our students can use these opportunities. I do hope that you will take the lead in this respect, to ensure that academics involved in teaching enter into a partnership with you to ensure that their students benefit as they did in the past from the vast world of books, electronic and in print.