Online learning and the unbundling and rebundling of attention
The early days of the web were something of a golden age for content creators. There were a few years, prior to the maturing of social media into what became known as Web 2.0, when the Internet still sometimes felt like a channel with glorious possibilities for broadcasting new kinds of content to new kinds of audiences. Or rather, it certainly felt like that from inside a big broadcast organisation like the BBC.
I remember working with a team of musicians, an actor, illustrator and animator to put together a long-form Flash-based project to support children in learning about music in and out of school. At the same time, I was project managing a content-rich website on the history of reggae to mark the 40th anniversary of Jamaica’s independence and a website designed to offer a thorough grounding for parents to support their children’s musical education. All around me, colleagues were developing similarly authorial content.
Offstage, though, some increasingly loud voices were calling out some uncomfortable truths. They were telling us that the Internet was much, much more than just a fat pipe for delivering well-crafted multimedia experiences to a grateful public. Reminding us that it was, in fact, a network. That it was made of its users, their needs, their interests, their views, their words and their content. The audience was becoming more discerning, more demanding, more vocal, more creative. Fickle users would turn to Google to connect them with exponentially increasing efficiency to exactly what they were interested in. Meanwhile, we barely had time to register the possibilities of ‘user-generated content’ before the phrase became a relic, or perhaps a truism, swept away by the monumental realities of Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook.
The enterprise of creating long-form content online began to seem self-indulgent, quixotic. If, in the public mind, the BBC was a programme maker, then the proper role of its website was surely to act as a database of its programmes, providing metadata, and later whole programmes, in a form that answered the needs and interests of its audience. To provide a framework for the social life of a broadcast, perhaps, offering meaningful metadata about programmes to enable users to annotate using the whole web and its tools as their canvas. We could go further, as I later did, and get a view of the BBC’s music output through the prism of artists. But ultimately, the noble path for a web editor felt less to do with content creation and more to do with metadata, clever linking, segmentation and APIs.
This approach was fun in a whole different way. But the process of commissioning and creating long-form content satisfied an urge that didn’t quietly retire in the face of this trouble, but instead lingered and pestered. Audiences, too, reacted in sometimes surprising ways to the wonderland of media fragmentation, flocking to a new generation of TV drama series with narrative arcs of unprecendeted complexity spanning dozens of episodes such as The Sopranos and Mad Men, or even comedies like 30 Rock. Digital commissioners began to ask themselves whether we should expect greater things of our audiences’ attention spans, with the New York Times’ Snowfall feature in 2012 setting a trend in web content that would be mirrored in the UK with The Guardian’s Long Read, for example.
And 2012 was also The Year of the MOOC, when the university course came to the web in a big new way, as the Massive Open Online Course. Our own Open University responded to this phenomenon by commissioning a platform of its own, and Unthinkable was at the centre of the project to create what became FutureLearn. In doing so, we worked together with our partner universities to craft a new genre of long-form web content, one with a very specific and explicit aim of supporting a set of proven pedagogies to enable people to learn together online, and required deep engagement of several hours a week over a period of weeks. In some ways it felt as though a cycle had completed, and that some long-term pull of action and reaction had brought us back to a new golden age of content creation.
The disruption of higher education has picked up speed with the development of the major MOOC platforms, and we don’t know where it will end. Change continues apace, and while we certainly see a strong future in the MOOC as a genre, it clearly is not the final and unchangeable destination of higher education online. In a slightly chilling piece titled Uber-U is Already Here, teachonline.ca recently speculated on a possible future that swings right back towards short-form fragmentation. If, instead of being embedded into a single platform and narrative as they are in the world of the MOOC, learning outcomes are abstracted out to become a web-level standard currency of competencies and assessment rubrics, then the “teaching module” can fly free of its wider narrative framework, commoditised and offered by an ecosystem of academic content providers and tutors selling piece-work on a competitive market. This is a world that “assumes learning is both modular and stackable” — it takes the “unbundling” of the university that the Open University’s then Vice Chancellor, Martin Bean, celebrated at the launch of FutureLearn, and raises it by a power of three.
There’s no doubt that institutional inertia will hold the pace of such change back. From the student’s point of view, living in such a fragmented world will surely have advantages and disadvantages like any of the ambiguous empowerments of modern global capitalism, but they are the subject of another article. For now, I’m taking a moment to reflect on the impact on those of us in the back room, shaping content experiences. While it lasts, I’m going celebrate and savour a moment that lets us design content, experiences and relationships with very long attention spans.
This article has been cross-posted from Unthinkable’s website.
