Ray Land
Coventry University, UK

Paradigms lost: online learning in the age of 'excellence'

Online learning finds itself in a contradictory position as the University has undergone a shift in function since the end of the Cold War and the rise of economic globalisation. Readings (1996) speaks of the 'University in ruins' as it comes no longer to serve the needs of the nation-state. In this view Kantian and Humboldtian notions of the University of Culture have given way to a 'posthistorical' University of Excellence, 'a bureaucratic system whose internal regulation is entirely self-interested without regard to wider ideological imperatives' (40). The modernist university with its discourse of national culture is now replaced by the pursuit of 'excellence' through competition, performance indicators and 'professionalisation'. It no longer has to 'safeguard and propagate national culture, because the nation state is no longer the major site at which capital reproduces itself' (13). Readings speaks of a process of 'de-referentialisation' in which the discourse of excellence is merely empty, 'a non-referential unit of value entirely internal to the system'. It brackets off all questions of reference or function in order to create an internal market. Hence what gets taught or produced as knowledge matters less and less. The idea of the University loses content as it reconstitutes itself along the lines of corporate capitalism, adopting the managerialist practices of the latter, emphasising commodification, consumption and flexible working practices.

If we accept this view, then the new technologies of cyberspace (and the educational developers who are their advocates) can be seen, on the one hand, as deeply implicated, indeed complicitous, in these discourses of 'performativity' (Lyotard 1984:47), unproblematised 'flexibility' and excellence. They represent the essential media of the 'knowledge economy' and new academic capitalism, the means by which universities access global, technology-based markets by providing more flexible delivery (Clegg and Steel 2002). In doing this VLE technologies with their compartmentalisation, tracking and surveillance can be seen to draw academics out of their traditional discipline-based terrain, rendering their practice more visible, and hence more manageable, in the generic administrative spaces of the University. These bounded and visible spaces become not just tools of commodification (linked as they usually are to modularisation) but a contested terrain, the locus belli between administrators and academics leading to the disruption of older modernist academic practices in which the research/teaching nexus was seen as essentially discipline-based and indissoluble. In the University of Excellence the dialectic of teaching and research becomes subsumed under administration, and technology plays an increasing role in this.

On the other hand, the same attributes of these new technologies can, paradoxically, be viewed as sites of resistance to and opportunities for subversion of the same discourses of excellence and corporate management. Readings argues that within the ruins of the university we can still function as a 'community of dissensus' creating a network of obligations. Delantey (2001), rejecting Readings' perspective as exaggerated, points to a new function and identity of the University in the age of information as the best-placed node of 'interconnectivity' between technological and cultural knowledges. This paper will explore the possibilities and potential of education in cyberspace for both complicity in, and resistance to, the new discourses of corporatism.

References

Clegg, S. and Steel, J. (2002) 'Flexibility as Myth? New Technologies and Post-Fordism in Higher Education', Proceedings of the Networked Learning Conference, Lancaster and Sheffield Universities.

Delantey, G. (2001) Challenging Knowledge: The University in the Knowledge Society. Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press.

Lyotard, J-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Readings, B. (1996) The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.